Life lately...

Well hello there internet, its been a while! I've still been living an internet free existence, and I've resorted to spending my time in various coffee shops around Leeds, eating cake and catching up on important internet based things (mostly New Girl and GBBO...).

Since I've been without wifi for so long, some of the posts I'd have otherwise written seem a bit redundant now so instead I thought I'd do a bit of a whistlestop tour of my summer to bring all you nosy people out there up to speed with what I've been up to over the last month or so.

Harewood House

Mama and Papa T managed to squeeze a day trip to see little Kaz in a few weeks ago (anyone else's parents have a busier social calendar than them?). Considering I've lived in Leeds for 6 years with such a huge stately home and park practically down the road, I'd never taken a visit except when I did a Color Me Rad run there a few months back (but we were too busy throwing paint around to pay too much attention to the surroundings!). The weather was bloomin' beautiful and we spent hours and hours wandering about the grounds. I love a good family day trip, especially when we end it in one of my favourite pubs for tea.

Big Reunion

Its been three whole years since graduation now (although I still have difficulty coming to terms with how old that makes me...), and somehow it had been two years since the five faces above were last in a room together. We finally managed to pin everybody down to a weekend in August to meet up and catch up on the gossip from the many, many months that had flown by. We spent ages running around Asda picking up plentiful supplies of hummus, popcorn and any other picnic food we could get our hands on before heading off on a trip to Temple Newsam to see the animals at the farm. After eating our body weights in cocktail sausages, making a few furry friends and playing running around after a frisbee we headed back home to get ready before an evening of bowling and ping pong at Roxy Lanes and Roxy Ballroom. Normal bars just aren't enough for me anymore, unless there's some sort of drunken sport I can participate in I'm just not interested! 

Corfu

The big activity of the month was a well deserved summer holiday to Sidari in Corfu. We mostly spent the week eating unimaginable quantities of saganaki, drinking crazily cheap cocktails and gazing longingly at a God-like Greek waiter at one of the restaurants. All the stereotypes of a Greek holiday right there. My personal highlight of the trip was the waterpark as I have the holiday requirements of a 10 year old, the 25m freefall slide was one of the best/scariest things I've done before... mostly scary because my bikini top came undone somewhere along the way down the slide. The people at the bottom of the slide don't know how lucky they are that I had a sunburnt back and had put a t-shirt on to cover it up...

 Back home

The week after my holiday I had a few more cheeky days off work and headed home to see my parents. I did myself proud and managed my first solo mission on the motorway to anywhere further than Ikea (which is about 5 mins down the motorway from where I live...) all the way down the M62, through the centre of Liverpool and back to my Mum and Dad's house. I mostly just enjoyed being able to sing along to my driving playlist without fear of people spotting me at traffic lights! Whilst home I had a yummy meal out at Bill's, caught up with my friend about her wedding preparations and had a look at Liverpool from the top of the Cathedral before driving back to Leeds (and missing my junction on the motorway because I was too busy singing along to Biffy Clyro).

Leeds West Indian Carnival

My Bank Holiday Monday was spent in the rain, feeling grateful for my nice warm coat and many layers of clothes whilst watching lots of people in very minimal costumes parading down the streets of Leeds. The Leeds West Indian Carnival is one of the biggest in the country, and since I wasn't at Leeds Festival this year (sob) I was around to go and have a nosy with friend. The costumes were incredible, and despite the rain there was a brilliant atmosphere (which may have been partly due to the crazy amount of people I spied swigging vodka and rum straight from the bottle as they danced down the parade route!).

Alton Towers

My buddy and I took a trip to Alton Towers last week. I hadn't been for a few years and was bouncing around like a child (see, I really am a 10 year old...) the whole way there. Considering it was still the summer holidays, we didn't have to queue all that much, except for The Smiler where we spent 90 minutes queuing under the ride watching endless carts of people whizzing past us. By the time we'd got to the front of the queue my knees were knocking together and I was starting to question why I'd ever wanted to go on a ride with 14 loops in it, but I wasn't planning on letting an hour and a half's worth of queuing go to waste. And OHEMGEE it was so worth the wait. Well done Alton Towers, you did good with that one. 

Congratulations if you made it to the end of this mammoth post! Normal service shall hopefully resume on here once my wifi has been fixed.

So that you'd leave me alone in Leeds again

On Saturday, my buddy and I tried to have a little road trip to Ilkley lido to make the most of the rare outdoor swimming pool friendly weather we've been having. Alas, we got there to find out they'd stopped letting people in at 12.30 as it was so busy (it was 12.35 when we arrived...). Instead we went for a wander and an ice cream whilst we formed a back up plan to keep us entertained for the afternoon.

So we hopped back into Betty, my awesome new car, and drove to the fruit picking farm in Horsforth (with only a slight detour thanks to the satnav thinking that the farm was down a residential street in the middle of a housing estate...).  All that was left in the fields was raspberries as the strawberry season had just finished so we set off on our merry little way to the raspberry fields. The man at the stand told us that the raspberries were becoming harder to find but that there should still be plenty for us to fill our basket with. He was right, but we did have to keep disappearing into the depths of the bushes and branches to find anything worth picking- hard work when the weather was so crazily hot! We were very proud of ourselves when our dedication finally paid off and we wandered back to the man with a basket full of yummy looking berries. There's just something far more satisfying about picking your own fruit than pulling it off a shelf at the supermarket, and they definitely taste better too!

On Sunday, I realised I had a humongous box full of raspberries sat in my fridge as we'd not managed to make a real dent in them yesterday. Worried that they were going to quickly go past their best, I sarted plotting ways I could make something exciting and raspberry based.  I decided to experiment with ice lollies as it was far too warm to be slaving over a hot oven. With no recipe in front of me I tried to turn my lovingly picked fruit into tasty lollies. And actually, they seem to have worked pretty bloomin' well! And being the kind-hearted soul that I am, I'm going to share my secret recipe so that you have an excuse to go and pick your own fruit too!

Raspberry Lemonade Lollies

Ingredients:

250g raspberries

juice of one lemon

1-2 tsp honey

1tsp caster sugar

about 100ml lemonade

To make:

Weigh out your raspberries and mash them together until it forms a liquid. 

Seive the smushed up raspberries to separate the juice from the seeds (I then added some of the seeds to the bowl to make the lollies seem a bit more 'natural' without it being totally overrun with seeds but that's just personal preference).

Squeeze the lemon juice into the bowl of raspberry juice, add the sugar and honey and mix together well.

Pour the mixture into ice lolly moulds (I got mine super cheap in Primark!) so that they're about two-thirds full then top up each mould with lemonade.

Put in the freezer until frozen then sit out in the sunshine and enjoy :)

  

If anybody has any more summery ice lolly recipes then let me know- I'd love to try out more ideas!

Fallout- Catfish and The Bottlemen

Fever, why won't you explain?

On Friday, I had a cheeky little day off work which turned out to be brilliant luck as it was such a sunny day! I'd been planning on meeting Mama T in Manchester for the day to do a spot of holiday shopping (14 days to go!), but when we realised that the Liverpool Giants were starting their journey around the city on the Friday I decided to travel a little bit further so we got to see something a little different. 

The Giants have been to Liverpool before a few years ago, but I was away the last time so didn't have a chance to catch them. I'm really glad I got to see them in action this year as it was simply incredible! I'd have loved to see more over the weekend if I'd been at home for longer than just the day as it would have been great to see the whole World War 1 story unfold. The Giants are big Marionette puppets controlled by lots of pulleys and complicated mechanisms that make them walk, blink and even snore- even without getting a picture of the whole story it was really fascinating to see them in action and really lovely to see such big crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of them (although the crowds weren't so lovely when there was a 40 minute queue to get back into the train station at the end of the afternoon!).

Liverpool really has made a name for itself in terms of culture and arts events these days, its bloomin' lovely to see huge events like this taking over the whole city and bringing a great atmosphere along with it.

Fever- The Black Keys

I'm just trying to put the world to rights

Yesterday was a bloomin' beautiful day. For me it summed up what summer weekends are all about, wandering around, sitting in the sun drinking cider and spending quality time with friends. My lovely friend Coral bought me a voucher for Afternoon Tea at Harvey Nicks in Leeds for my birthday and we finally got around to using it (three months later!) this weekend and so we decided a day of fun around Leeds was in order to make the most of the celebration.

We started off the day in Roundhay, one of my all time favourite places in Leeds, for a nosey around the Farmer's Market, croissants in an awesome little deli and a wander around the park (complete with an ice cream too of course!). Roundhay is one of those places I've always turned to for a bit of city escapism since moving to Leeds as its easy peasy to get to from town (always a bonus back when we were poor students who didn't know anywhere else to get to via public transport!). It seemed as though half of Leeds had the same idea as us today as it was crazy busy, but its one of those places that's so vast that you barely notice the other people at all.

top: Topshop, skirt: Primark, sandals: Topshop, necklace: Primark

After a lazy afternoon we headed back into town for our trip to Harvey Nicks. We've eaten in the restaurant before and I love the atmosphere in there- its fancier than the sort of places I usually visit, there's no denying that, but its not snobby at all and the food is beauuutiful. Afternoon Tea was just lovely, we missed the explanations of what most of the cakes were as we were too busy admiring the pretty stand of treats in front of us, but wowee it tasted good! Plus they get extra points for letting me have a lemonade instead of a hot drink as I'm a peculiar sort of blogger who hates tea and coffee... 

Our final stop of the day after having a lazy wander around a few shops was to The Pour House in Granary Wharf for a cider in the sun. One of my favourite places to sit on lazy sunny days is a patch of grass right by the canal on the other side of the canal to this pub and I've spent many days gazing over there and vowing that I'll visit soon. It beats your average beer garden hands down as its a great place for watching people and the barges on the canal. I've already made plans to go back for food soon...

I love days like this (mostly because its largely revolved around food...). I feel like we packed an incredible amount of stuff into one afternoon but at the same time had the perfect relaxing day to unwind from the crazybusyahhh week I've had. Hope you've all had a good one too!

Eez eh- Kasabian

I want someone to be, and someone to drive around town

Whew, this feels strange. I've been stuck in the dark ages for the last few weeks as my faithful old laptop decided to throw a paddy and corrupt the entire hard-drive. I finally had to give in and buy myself a shiny new laptop this week and so after hours in PC world discussing the pros and cons of different models with the salesman (which ended in me just saying "look, I want this one because its purple") I'm back in the 21st century and back in blogland. Hooray.

This weekend, I had a lovely visit from one of my favourites. She brought her car down to Leeds so that we could do something other than spend the day in Topshop (aforementioned new laptop has ruled out shopping from my life until payday rolls around). We ended up in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park since it was a lovely, warm day. I'd been there once before with Mama and Papa T and really enjoyed having something interesting to look at other than a view as we wandered around so thought it'd be the perfect place to head to for a picnic and a bit of fresh air. 

Here's a few snaps of some of our favourite sculptures, we had a lot of fun pretending to be trendy art students trying to make ourselves seem knowledgeable and artsy to the people walking past.

We followed our trip to the Sculpture Park with a night out in Leeds which accidentally turned into an evening of watching the England game as even the most unsporty bars had big screens up. It was surprisingly fun, mostly because none of us had our glasses on so we spent the first 20 minutes or so convinced that we were a goal up... whoops.

Around Town- The Kooks

(Anyone else feel really nostalgic about The Kooks having re-emerged? I feel like I'm 15 again!)

I sit and pine for wasted time

Over Easter weekend I took a trip back to The Wirral to catch up with my friends and family. We had some looovely weather (some of the time at least!) which made a bit of a crazy contrast to Easter weekend last year where I had a day trip out in the snow with my Mum and Dad. English weather, you're full of surprises.

We spent a lot of Good Friday travelling around about a zillion car show rooms as I've decided that after passing my driving test six years ago its probably about time I actually invested in a pair of wheels. After a few hours, my Dad decided we needed a stop off for lunch which I'm fairly certain was really to stop him from having a minor heart attack every time a salesman uttered the words "fancy a test drive?" to me. Having not driven properly since passing my test all those years ago, my Dad was clearly having vivid nightmares about me being trusted behind the wheel of a shiny test car (can't say I blame him... I can barely remember which pedal is which!). 

Anyway, we ended up in New Brighton for our little pit stop. Back when my Mum and Dad were young, New Brighton was a thriving seaside resort complete with an outdoor pool, but for most of my life I've known it as being a bit of a depressing, run down place that had lost all of its appeal and visitors. Over the last few years, they've really put a lot of effort into redeveloping the Prom and there were just people EVERYWHERE. Normally, I get a bit fed up if somewhere is absolutely chock a block with people, but actually this was a pretty lovely sight and it was great to see that the town is regaining some of the glory and atmosphere it had lost over the years.

 (Oh look, that Primark playsuit I keep rambling on about is making another appearance on here already!)

Did you manage to make the most of the sunshine over Easter weekend?

Overdone- Bombay Bicycle Club

Wisdom's a gift but you'd trade it for youth

Mama and Papa T came to Leeds for a little visit this weekend in honour of my new found oldness. As per, we didn't actually spend much time in Leeds at all, instead using their trip as an excuse to get out and explore the beautiful places in Yorkshire that I don't normally get to visit due to my lack of a four wheeled vehicle to call my own.

This time, we took a trip over to the other side of West Yorkshire to Haworth. I've been to Haworth once before and thought it'd be the perfect parent friendly sort of place to visit. Lots of steam trains to keep my Dad amused, a lovely, quaint village feel to keep my Mum happy, and an abundance of cafes to keep us all happy (we do have a tendency to pick our days out based upon whether we'll be able to get a good slice of cake out of it...). 

Haworth gets a lot of visitors for two main reasons, firstly its where the Bronte sisters lived so there's lots of literary heritage to geek out on, and secondly the railway line has a lot of Railway Children links as the film was based around Haworth and Oakworth stations. My Dad tried to get me to recreate that scene from the film where the eldest daughter sees her father appear through the steam on the platform and shouts "MY DADDY" when a train arrived on the platform at Oakworth. Funnily enough I decided against it given that there were three carriages full of train enthusiasts sat poised with their cameras facing the platform we were stood on. 

Other than that little trip out of the city, I've mostly spent this weekend watching Breaking Bad. I signed up to Netflix the other day but must have missed the warning that I was signing my life away in the process. Its a good job my parents came over or else I probably wouldn't have moved away from my laptop screen all weekend!

Step- Vampire Weekend