Introduction

Greetings to my friends and family (well those who wish to admit to the blood connection that is) may your laptops be jam free, your signal strong and your broadband smooth and true.....

When I first moved up, deep into the hills of Mid Wales, I began a postal News Letter Extraordinare. Its aim was to keep friends and family, now many miles away, informed of our progress as the children and I decorated, landscaped, partied and settled into our new life style. It ran for about three years before time and work got the better of me and the updates petered out.

The children have now left home, I have moved 6 miles down the road, work is still a bit full on (Llanbrynmair School Cook plus School Cashier(weekday mornings) Leisure Centre Cook (most afternoons except Wednesdays), Fresh and Local Stall builder and treasurer before and after school Wednesdays), Barmaid at the Wynstay Hotel, Llanbrynmair (after leisure-centre work on Saturdays) and recently elected Treasurer of the Choir (Tuesdays)!!) but in this age of digital communication, I have at last succumbed to the materialistic infatuation with high tec gadgets and now own a wonderful little contraption called a netbook- 10” x 6” of shiny black digital wonderment.

On this beautiful little thing, that fits into my bag with ease –( have you seen the size of fashion bags these days – no wonder everyone is off work with bad backs!! sorry, side tracked there a bit ) -I can now jot down my thoughts and recount my day as I did when paper and pens were all the rage -those of us who remember chalk boards will also remember how communication was done via pen and paper attached to a stamp – usually at Christmas!!

I have not yet succumbed to having an Internet connection at home – not through principle, I must confess, but because in Wales there are an awful lot of hills and satellite signal around here simply does not exist – making a phone call from the Wynstay Hotel (where I work on a Saturday evening) half a mile down the road, consists of standing out in the car park waving your phone around shouting “can you hear me NOW!”

'Broadband via the phone line' 'I have been told by the toddlers on work experience in the multi media outlets, is the way to do it. I have no phone line I tell them - how do receive satellite TV then they ask? I don't have a TV! They look at me as if I am an alien and wander off to serve someone more 'normal'.

But being a woman of a certain age and having been around here for the past ten years I am no longer seen as a stranger – though it will be another fifty years before I can apply for the term 'local' and my younger friends in town have kindly passed on their access codes to their wireless thingy-whatnots which enables me to sit outside their houses, in my nice warm car, whenever I wish and have a quick browse with out disturbing them or hindering their love lives as one of them put it!">

There is also the library but I can only get to that on a Wednesday (between school and putting down the stall) and the last time I was there I left my didgy pen stick in their PC! By the time I realised, two days later, it had gone! Valuable lesson – Never stick your thingy in someone else's whatnot and expect it to be OK after two days!!

And so we return to the reason I am writing this Blog!! I now have the time(ish) and the means to send to you, my friends and family, updates on what is happening in the depths of Wales – the weird and wonderful things that seem only to happen to me!! or is is that only I can see the quirky and wonderful side of the mundane and commit it to – I was going to say 'paper' but I shall rephrase it to 'screen'.

I value your feed back and any news from your part of the world......

I hope you enjoy the stories …..............they are all true..............and so we begin with 'Hair Changes'