This weekend was a busy front on our socialising calendar!  On Friday it was a family meal for my Grand Father in Laws birthday and then on Saturday it was off to Liverpool for a belated Wedding party.  It was nice to spend time with family and friends.

On Friday night we had a lovely meal at the Rufford Arms restaurant which is located between Tarleton and Burscough on the A59.  I started off with a delicious black pudding and bacon dish that was served with a peppercorn sauce and then I had roast pork with sweet apples and jus for main course.  I managed (just - as I was very full) some vanilla ice cream for desert, all washed down with a couple of pints of the black stuff.  It was a nice evening and a time for family to catch up with what was going on in each others lives, which is this day and age is rare.

Then onto Saturday night and it was off to the Liverpool Marina for the wedding party.  The Liverpool Marina has been extensively redeveloped over the last 5 - 6 years or so and is now, one has to say, a millionaires playground.  I recall standing in the entrance of the Liverpool Marina Bar and Grill (the venue for the evening) looking at all the boats for sale, each averaging around £150,000.  The party was great with perhaps the stand out feature being the chocolate fountain.  I have never actually seen one in the flesh as to speak but it looked great.  Being a bloke I spent around 20 fruitless minutes trying to work out how it worked.  I am still none the wiser.

So the weekend draws to a close and it is back to work on Monday morning after getting over the disappointment of Lewis Hamiltons fantastic win in F1 being taken away from him and me having to iron some shirts for work!

P.S. Appologies from the photo - it was a long way away and I couldn’t keep the camera still at 12x zoom in the busy dance hall!

Today was the 20 week scan of Baby Wilkinson and it was the time to find out the sex of the baby. Helen has been convinved ever since the start of the pregnancy that it was a girl but I thought it was a boy. In fact I think most said that it was boy. Most, including myself were right - its’s a boy.

At first he was not for showing his sex but after a few prods and pokes from the ultrasound women he soon moved around to show us that he was a boy. The thing is, is that we were fine with girls names, in fact we had about 3 we both liked and would choose from. Boys however is a different matter, we have yet to come up with some solid ideas. We will have to get our thinking caps on!

Today it was painting time again. I was painting the shed while Helen was painting the bedroom. I hate painting and to top it off, I am not very good at it either.

The garden is now very very nearly finished. In fact next week I am going to install the electrics in the shed and do some general tidying including adding some guttering to collect the rainwater in the water butt off the shed roof and then I think that it is. What started in February will be finished in August. Not bad going don’t you think!

I want to spend a few minutes on this blog talking about commenting. This is something that this blog has always provided, yet for some reason, people don’t seem to want to comment. You might say that there are no comments because there are not that many viewers. This I know is not true though because this blog has over 350 unique page views per month and over 1000 hits. So why comment?

Blogging is all about communicating and creating networks of people. You may well read this blog and find some posts completely useless. You may read some and have some sort of opinion, or find the information usefull. Well if this is you then why not comment? I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on the things that I write.

Any comments that are posted on this site are always available for every visitor to see. Even if you do not agree with what I am saying then please feel free to comment. I will never delete a comment just because it doesn’t agree with what I am saying. We all have our opinion and it is useually worth knowing about. That said I do have some rules about commenting in order to protect the community (see below).

If you are worried about security then please don’t. All that is required to leave a comment on this blog is your name and your email address. You can also leave your website link to, so that others can take a look at your site, although this is optional. Your email address is never shown to any other user on the site, only your name and comment appears for others to see.

There are some other things on this blog that you may find useful when commenting. The first of these is the “Notify me of followup comments via email address”. What this does, when you tick the box, is that it will email you when someone else posts a comment on the same post, so that you can keep up to date with the conversation. The other thing that is really cool is that you can get yourself a Gravatar from gravatar.com. You may have noticed that by the side of some peoples comments there is a little photo of them and signing up for a Gravatarr and uploading a photo with them, will mean that when you post a comment on this (and any other blog were you use the same email address) blog your picture will appear next to it. My Gravatar is the right!

So all you 350 unique visitors to this blog each month, get commenting and lets hear what you have got to say about the topics that are covered.

Rules for Commenting

• Do not post anything abusive or threatening to me or others
• Do not use the commenting feature to promote or sell items for sale by you
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• Always keep comments relevant to a particular post
• Links are fine in comments - just keep them relevant to the post in hand

This is just a test