Quick catch up

This will be the last post here for a long time.  I've clearly not kept this blog up to date, but that's a good sign as I've been enjoying life living and working in West Yorkshire.
The different class rooms worked out ok, and the team are pretty awesome! Hopefully I'll stay here for a while as they seem happy with me, but I'm no longer scared about moving schools.

Hopefully I'll take from this experience that's it is better to try new things than stick with the same thing all the time.

Moving on

So I've left my old job. I'm not really sure what I think about it at the moment. I'm sure that when I start at my new school I'll have many moments were I wonder if I did the right thing. I just need to remind myself that there was a reason why I wanted to leave my old job and it wasn't all fun, games, bbqs and articulate.
Although there was an end of term do, I actually had a better night the week before after prom. There was less pressure and a nicer atmosphere. The leaving do had too many people wanting different venues/ ideas about what should happen.
I did visit my new school last week and did get a couple of surprises they've expanded the dept up to 18 staff but only 10 classrooms. Apart from my PGCE year I've never not had my own classroom and the thought of it slightly scares me. Each class will be in the same room I just turn up when they do! The leadership of the dept is changing as well. People have moved on to new places (like me), promotions and family. Hopefully us all being new will mean we are all working together and no one will be saying we don't do it like that here.
Come September I'm sure I'll have lots to say about the new job.

Nothing to report

So I've not posted for a while! Mainly because I've got nothing to report :( the house sale looks to be progressing well and we should be moving out 2 weeks today. We've been round a few houses and put an  offer in on one but it was declined. We don't really want to increase our offer as the house needs quite a bit of work doing to it. I think they bought just before the property market crashed and are trying to get their money back.
The other half is living in West Yorkshire now, so has been put in charge of looking at any potential houses we might find. The  new development we had looked at still  hasn't been released which is annoying us as we're still hoping we can afford one of those.
Whilst home alone I've been exercising to counteract all the hot chocolates and cake I ate last year to cheer myself up during a health issue. I'm sure at some point I'll talk about that here but I'll save it for then. The other half didn't think I'd be able to cook for myself without him, but I've been fine. This may backfire on me though and I'll have to take my share of the cooking rota! I've also been doing a little bit of packing and I've got rid of a pair of shoes. ...... I did promise there would be more, but I need every pair.

Life hasn't all been about moving since I last blogged we've had a weekend in York seeing Tim vine,visiting the aeroplane museum, a food festival, I had a girlie weekend in Scarborough with one of my bfs watching boyzone. In fact I'm going there this weekend to see Elaine paige as an early birthday treat. The highlight of the past 2 months was a department bbq my nqt mentor hosted. Most of the dept turned up, but 100% of the main ones came. The weather was amazing and I had the best time. Hopefully I'll manage to stay tear free but I doubt it!

Excitement!

Yay!!! We've accepted an offer on the house! Slightly less then we wanted, but we've sold it! On the plus side I won't have to move into a hotel or a friend's house!
I'm amazed because my husband had been on a major bender the night before, been sick several times, slept in the spare room and looked awful! Being the good wife that I am I left work early on Friday to run the hoover round, met my friends for tea and waited for the husband to join us.  At around 10 pm I realised that wasn't going to happen, so I went back home and finished off the cleaning.  He rolled home at midnight in a sorry state, so after setting up the spare room for him I went to bed.
I woke up 2hrs before the viewing to sort him out, lit candles everywhere to counteract his overnight activities and sent him to clean the bathroom! He was going to leave the house and find a bench to sit on until the viewing was over, but, they arrived early!!!
Thankfully they liked the house enough to put an offer in, it was 10 grand under the asking price, but they increased it a bit and agreed to not exchanging until after the start of the summer holidays.  We've not included anything that's in the house so that may increase the selling price, or my dad's got a lot of diy lined up reusing it all!

Anyway that's the latest on the move, just got to find a house to move into!

Deep day out

As I'm writing this I can't stop singing east17 and deep, but i don't think it would be a good idea to sing that song at the deep around children. ......
Last weekend the weather was awful so we decided to have a day out.  We were supposed to be going to Knaresborough but it was so windy we found an indoor activity instead. The deep opened in hull about 15 years ago and I went not long after opening day with my mum and niece1. She was more interested in the lights in the floor then the fish! Over the years I've visited a couple of times but not for a few years. Now that we're planning on leaving the area we thought we'd revisit for 1 last time, especially to see the new penguin section. The good news is that 1 visit will actually give you a years access to the deep, excellent value if you have a family and there's going to be a lot going on in the area on the run up to #2017 city of culture. Hopefully I'll be sharing more about #2017 as we get closer to it.
Back to our visit, as I mentioned we visited on a cold and windy day so it was quite busy and we had to queue a little to pay. However once we were in we didn't really have to queue to see anything. There are quite a lot of things to read to start with and the husband was reading those, I get bored quite quickly but there was quite a few activities and games to keep me quiet! We'd bought a guide book and it was quite useful when looking in the fish tanks, we used it to play I spy which I would recommend! I'm not super keen on fish but it kept me quiet and let the husband watch the fish.  He hates taking me to places like this unless I have some kind of quiz to do- I'm such a child!
There are lots of different tanks, but also different viewing points for each tank which helped with the I spy game. Eventually we came to the penguin section but I wasn't too impressed with it. Given the amount of media attention I thought it would be larger and have a bigger viewing area. We have seen penguins in several other places though, so we weren't as keen to watch them, but if you haven't seen them before I'm sure you would appreciate it more.
I didn't take loads of pictures as it's quite dark in there and I only had my phone.
One thing to add is that we didn't eat at the deep but at a burger restaurant called purple pig. It was really nice and hopefully I'll visit again before we leave.

House viewings

So the house finally went on the market and the Internet, as usual the timing was great, just before we went to centre Parcs for the weekend! The phone was ringing all weekend with people booking appointments. We ended up with 9 appointments over 3 days. It sounds really good but only 5 turned up, gggggrrrrrrrrrr!
Most of them don't tell you their not coming either and so you're sitting waiting for an hour. We didn't want to start anything either in case they came halfway through. We played a lot of phone games those 3 days!
All the people that turned up said they liked the house but so far no offers. We know we're down to 4 potential buyers as one couple have had an offer accepted on a different house.
We have another viewing this weekend so hopefully that'll go well, or at least we'll get some feedback on what's wrong with our house. I know i won't get the asking price and we're willing to throw in extras for sensible offers below the asking price.  I just want it sold!!!

Day of fun

I'm not mentioning house selling on this post because it's all annoying!
Anyway because of the above we decided to have a day out to the Yorkshire wildlife park in Doncaster. We've been before just after they rescued the lions from awful conditions in another zoo. If you don't know about this story then look it up it's a heart warming tale. When we went it was quite small but now they have expanded (and still are) and it's a fab day out.
When we entered we were told a camel had been born that day and was out in the paddock, I love animals so that was exciting!
Park map in hand we planned our route heading to the monkeys. They have 2 monkey enclosures that you can go in with the monkeys and the monkeys play around you. I won't go into loads of detail on all the animals you can see here, but as well as the lemurs, spider monkeys and lions, you can also see tigers,  leopards, giraffes, meerkats and lots more.
After the wildlife park we went to find some food, I'd already checked out a few places on trip advisor (girls best friend! ). On our way we saw a David Wilson development and decided to pop in to see if they had any show homes like the houses they'll be building near the in laws.
They did! So we've looked around it and depending on price and build time we may have found our house! We headed off for our lunch/ tea I'd share the name of the pub but we weren't massively impressed with it. It wasn't awful but I wouldn't go back either. It could have been a bad day because it's reviews were good.
Overall it was a glorious day, just what we needed! Hopefully this week I'll update you on the house going online, the family trip to centre parks and a day at the deep.