It occurred to me that we should have a thread to post nice things on, to balance out the Vent thread. A place to celebrate (or brag, gloat etc )

So, I hope others will make use of it, and I'd like to start the ball rolling, by announcing my pride and delight in my daughter, Sarah's 'A' Level results that she got this morning.

Mathematics - Grade A
Chemistry - Grade A
Psychology - Grade A
General Studies - Grade C (which they were all forced to do against their wishes)

I firmly believe that GCSE's are far easier to obtain than the 'O' Level exams that were taken in my time, BUT, from assisting Sarah with her revision, I can definitely say that these exams were extremely taxing. In fact, the chemistry stuff was a complete mystery to me, of which I actually understood nothing at all.

So WOOT, WOOT! Hurray for Sarah!!!

I'm looking forward to reading about good news others here are blessed with.

hows about this...


...the sun's out! and its a gorgeous day

I just found £1.40 in my copper jar!!



(That's where I keep my small change; policemen are kept in the wardrobe).

My daughter has bought tickets for her and I to go see Tony Benn – Will and Testament film.
Followed by a Q+A with Tony Benn, chaired by Mark Thomas.

feather wrote:
I am sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo jealous, feather. Could you get me an autograph?

Hope you enjoy it as much as I would.

Great idea for a thread Gilly...

Alright, something to celebrate *taps foot* *scratches head* OH, we're all still breathing and alive and well!

Congratulations to Gilly's Sarah on her excellent exam results!

I've been feeling a bit rubbish lately (as I posted in the vent room!) so it's good for me to try and see the positive - and the positive is that I have great people around me, both on and offline! Oh, and it's stopped raining for a nanosecond!

Woot woot!

Mandy

Well done Gilly's Sarah ........you must feel really proud really proud Gilly proud Gilly xx

dawnbreak wrote:
Thank you Dawn & Mandy - yes I am. She's worked really hard for it.

Gilly wrote:
Very well done to Sarah, especially as this year's students are bearing the brunt of attempts to start addressing the grade inflation problem. In short, it was slightly harder to achieve a grade A than this time last year.

The students of today have to make the best of the system they are given - and Sarah has done herself (and her mum!) proud. Good luck to her.

Is she going to go to uni or is she going to try to get a job without a degree? I don't envy the choices available to today's students, where they are expected to saddle themselves with unsustainable debt just to get what would have been considered an average job a decade or so ago.

Thank you Dreamweaver.

She didn't opt to go to uni, though she's thinking she might in 12 months time. Her dad's not keen on her going because of the debt issue, and the fact that she's not even guaranteed a good job at the end of it. I'll just support whatever decision she makes. It'll depend on whether anything with potential comes up for her this year. I wish we had the cash to give her then it wouldn't be such a burden.

Another problem is that she doesn't know what she wants to do. If she had a clear goal in mind, it would be easier to judge if a degree is necessary. In that aspect, I can empathise. I've not decided what I want to be when I grow up yet.

It's tough. there's not much out there.

In all honesty, Gilly, I would be advising any teenage son or daughter of mine (if I had one) to acquire the skills they need to start a new life abroad. So that would mean acquiring a key skill that will make them attractive to English-speaking countries that operate a points system for immigration and work permits - and pick up a couple of languages if they want to work elsewhere within the EU.

dreamweaver wrote:
I wish someone had sat me down and done this...not that I probably wouldn't have done the complete opposite though.

Anyway, this is a 'good' news thread, so sod off, DW.

I don't see how offering practical and helpful advice detracts from it being a good news thread, you touchy bugger.

dreamweaver wrote: Always with the negative waves!

I've finally started work on the garden I'm still in the clearing massive weeds stage at the moment, but I've cleared one border and it's now ready for a bit of a digging And we've got a new fence up, and I'm actually enjoying the graft
Soon I will plant things And it will look very nice indeed
I still want it kind of wild, it might have been overgrown big time, but it was teeming with life. The birds come to sit on our fence, families of Blackbirds, Wood Pidgeons with their youngens...they don't bother with the manicured gardens
I want to create a nice but natural place where garden spiders can build thir webs and birds still like to visit and that

irrepressible wrote:
Splendid! I'm looking forward to doing ours next year, because all our money & attention & money's on the house this year.
I've had it looking good before, but when my husband plonked a shed right outside the French doors some years back, claiming it was only temporary, I stopped gardening in protest. It's finally gone.

Those wild birds will still visit a tamer garden Irre - especially if you've got any trees. And you could plant flowers that attracict insects. I used to have some spectacular fox gloves that the bees adored. They were so happy, you could stick your head right amongst them while weeding the boarders, and they'd just buzz around you merrily.

Thanks Gilly, I'll keep foxgloves in mind It's a fairly big garden, for a coucil house at least It has huge potential.

I'd like a cherry blossom tree in the garden I'm not sure where to get one though A pink one, I like the white ones but the pink ones are more colourful

Cherry blossom's amazing, with it's frothy pink blossoms. The blossoms don't last long though, but the tree will still be pretty all year round. We have a big tree in our little front garden which I thought for years was a cherry blossom, but one year I noticed some tiny fruit on it which we didn't immediately recognise. So to everyone's horror, I bit into one, and said it tasted like a plum.

An internet search showed it to be an 'ornamental plum tree', which I'd never even heard of before.

You can get miniature cherry blossom trees too, if that fits your requirements. They have them in garden centres, or you could order them over the internet.

The most amazing flowers I've ever grown from seed were cup & saucer canterbury bells. They were about 5 foot tall, and were in different shades of pink, purple, lilacs & white. The flowers match the name & were like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The only thing is, they take up quite a bit of space, and are bienniel - so from planting the seeds, they developed foliage the first year, then flowered the next - then they were done. But they were out of this world fantastic!

www.google.co.uk/search?q=cup+and+saucer...sAQ&biw=1372&bih=815