Newsflash!

First Official Event a Success!

That's right folks! The car boot sale so generously supplied with stock by Jo, Adrian, myself, Jen and Shirley (who used to cut our hair when we were toddlers) was a roaring success and even though we only expected a modest return, it was a little bit less modest than expected and was well worth the time and effort.

Jen arrived at my house at about 9.30pm on Friday having got stuck behind an accident on the A1 (no bad thing for me really as it meant I got to tidy the house a bit more and watch Eastenders before she arrived). Having not actually seen her in the flesh since xmas there was a considerable amount of "I love what you've done with your hair" and "gosh, what nice earrings" and a little bit of "shall we open another bottle?" which reminds me I'd better make a stew next week to put the leftover wine in (sadly I didn't make it to the bottom of the second one).

Anyway, after waking up with a hangover on Saturday at 8am I got up and had time to watch a film and clear up the kitchen before Jenfer surfaced - that student lifestyle hasn't worn off yet obviously - and we consumed a large amount of breakfast consisting of cereal, toast, bagels, croissants and pain aux chocolate (sp?) before deciding that it was about time we got around to sorting out the stock situation and working out how the flippin' 'eck we were going to fit it all in the car. At this point we realised we had a crisis - no table!!!

After much debate about boxes, we decided on a two-pronged approach.

1. Six normal sized boxes in three columns of two supporting a very long thin box which my (now stolen) bicycle arrived in, with a rather nice green tablecloth over the top (which was supposed to be going over my nice new garden furniture the next time I have a barbecue).
2. Two normal sized boxes supporting a smaller but similarly shaped box in which my lovely faux suede (thanks MFI) dining chairs arrived in (I told SYM they would come in handy), this time simply opened containing our goods rather than covered with them on the top.
   

We agreed this strategy with the minimum of fuss and argument (my, we must be growing up) and continuted sorting out the stuff - and actually managed to find about a fiver's worth of each other's stuff that we quite fancied having, so we retreived that and put £10 in the pot which nicely covered the cost of the pitch. We came accross some really good items that we retreived to sell on ebay instead - one item of note was a WWII Soldier's Record and Pay Book which I don't think was in the box intentionally and I intend to return to it's rightful owner - can't let a little piece of history like that disappear at a car boot sale. Or am I just being a history nerd?

Anyway, the nice stuff got separated for a table top sale my mum is hoping to have as part of her Raleigh Coffee Morning - you have to have a higher class of jumble for the ladies wot lunch. The rest was all boxed up and shoved in the car, and we were all set!

Imagine my surprise then, when I got up at 6am to find that little smelly was already in the bathroom - what a departure from the previous morning! I sloped off downstairs to start the breakfast and related washing up, and when she surfaced, promoted her to Chief Tea Maker and nipped off to the shower. I even had time to straighten my hair before we clambered into the car and off we went.

Before we'd even got the stuff out of the car and the table set up there were fellow car-booters rooting around in our boot. I know we were there to sell stuff but even so I found this more than a little odd, and with the recent sticky fingeredness of some thieving little youknowwhats where my bike was concerned, we kept a close eye on the takings tin. Anyway, once the table was up only had one little accident when the positioning of the columns under the main table were incorrect and caused the whole thing to topple over. Thankfully Jenfer was in the way and managed to catch all but one rather nasty blue aromatherapy candle in a jar, which no one would have wanted anyway. A little bit of re-jigging and the Grand Sale opened!

Well I must say the phrase one man's trash is another man's treasure is really true. We sold an amazing amount of stuff. We got rid of almost all the books and more than a few items of clothing. A dance mat went for a few quid to a fella whose two boys had practically bankrupted him in the previous two hours. We sold some of my grandma's old belts for 50p each, and a young boy of about 10 bought three language courses - French, German and Dutch. I don't know what a 10 year old wants with three language courses, but he seemed pretty determinded, so good luck to him. We got rid of the fake space hopper for £1.75 to a woman absolutely determined not to pay £2 for it; one fella bought 10 of my History magazines for 20p each - I can't decide whether I should have told him that I'd already done the crossword, but it's too late now.

The process of a car boot sale however is pretty boring I must say. Although in traditional Kate fashion I had prepared a large flask of tea and provisions in advance, we'd eaten all the ship's biscuits by 10am and the marmite sandwiches were gone by 10.30. And tea made in a flask always tastes of flask.

Anyway, after having been there for 5 and a half hours and having no idea how much we'd made, things started quietening down and people started to leave. We packed up what was left (a children's potter's wheel, a few books, clothes and videos, and rather a lot of candles) and brought it home. A quick tot up of the takings revealed that we had made....

...drumroll please....

£72.20!

Not going to set the world alight, no, but add on the gift aid and I make that approximately £92.50! Which means that we have a grand total of...

...over £1000!We're a third of the way there!

WUHOO!

Alright, so I don't know what the grand total is. But Jenfer's got the rest! She'll have to add it up!

So a big thank you to everyone who gave us some stuff. It's really appreciated and was well worth it. However, a friend of mine did point out that we would only have to do another 40.5 to raise the entire amount. I'm glad we're not *just* doing car boot sales. I'd have nothing left!

Slacker

Firstly I would like to apologise for not having blogged in AAAAAGES (what a loser), and I feel especially bad since the recent discovery that we have regular readers (wooohoooo!!), although I have something of an excuse in that I've been stupidly busy moving stuff home from Uni, which has proved to be a mammoth task as I have accumulated so much junk in the past three years that we only just managed to get it all home in two car loads... and that wasn't even with the bed. :s Having said that, one of those cars was only my piddly little Citroen, aka The Tin Can... to be honest I'm surprised it made it all the way up there. The journey wasn't that fun either, was like being stuck in a sauna for three hours. Someone thought black interiors was a great idea in a car with no a/c, windows that don't roll down the whole way and a fan that is about as effective as a chocolate teapot. But, all this accumulated junk means much to sell at this car boot sale... hurrah! Which is G-R-E-A-T... one man's junk is another man's treasure and all that, or words to that effect.

Well, anyway, sponsorship for this Brecon Beacons thing is going extremely well, all my friends have been more than generous, and mum and dad have excelled themselves going round all their friends which is FABULOUS, and I think the current sponsorship stands somewhere between the £6-700 mark, so thank-you so much to everyone that has sponsored me so far. In fact, if you look to the right of the page you will observe that Queen Kate of HTML has updated the Jen-ometer, and with the stuff we'd already raised that takes us up to a total of nearly £900; almost a whole third of the way there... which I think calls for a celebratory dance *does a jig*

Right. Jig done. Next on the agenda... I'm mid-letter-writing to some trusts and things, as I've been informed that they like to donate to these sorts of causes. I've been looking on the Charities commision website for people that are relevant and found some organisations that focus on Costa Rica and Nicaragua which is great, and I'm going to write to the local Lions/Rotary/Round table as well, but if anyone has got any other ideas who I could write to then please let me know! I'm going to try and compose some sort of little brochure type thing about Raleigh and what they do to include with it to make it look like I've put the thought and effort into it... which of course I have....

Also, I'm going to be organising some kind of party around Hallowe'en, probably a fancy dress malarky, in my village. So next thing is getting the hall booked, and sorting out the 'entertainment', although my great friend Bob is a bit of a DJ genius, so he's said that he'll do that for a minimal fee for me if he's around which is brilliant. Also, I've been chatting to the landlady of my local pub who just happened to be my supervisor in a weekend job I had a couple of years ago, and she's said that I can put on a Raleigh International week at the pub sometime late summer, so there'll be different things going on every night that week to raise money... I'm thinking a twister tournament, raffle etc... So provisional plans are going well... just have to actually get on and organise it all now... argh.......

First Fundraising Event!

Right, having started this blog over a month ago now and getting ever-so-slightly worried that I haven't actually done anything practical or fundraisey yet, I thought I'd better get on with it. And so having got a good response for my request for quality unwanted items from some of my friends I now have (almost) enough gear to do a car boot sale in two weeks' time, and I've also managed to engineer it so that Jenfer is visiting so she can help (I'm buggered if I'm doing it all by myself). Hurrah!

However, having checked it out today I'm not so sure I'm going to make an awful lot of money. Everything seems to sell for about a quid, and I'd be very lucky if I managed to shift all of the stuff. Ho hum. Can only hope for the best I suppose. Also, if we put the profits on the fundraising page at www.justgiving.com/sendjenferoverseasdonations, we can claim tax back on everything so for every £1 I flog something for, I am actually getting £1.28 (I think) which is fab.

Amongst my £1 items, I also have a couple of bits that I'd hope would go for a bit more. I've got a brand new ADSL modem (all questions about that to someone else please as I don't know what that means) which should get at least a fiver apparently, and a working VCR with remote (does anyone use those any more?) . I really have no idea about how much I should expect to make on anything really. But like I said, I can only do my best.

Delicate little flower as she is (Ha. Ha ha ha. HA HA HA!), Jenfer is going to need some looking after while she's here to get over the three years of brain-work and alcohol abuse she's been subjected to over the last three years, so I've already got the blankets and cushions on standby and a flask of tea all prepared, ready to make on the morning of the grand sale. I figure a nice Mediterranean Vegetable Ring and an early night on the Saturday and we'll be all set for a good day's sitting about, er, I mean hard work, on Sunday. Marvellous.

Hey! Stop Stealing My Material!

Jenfer, it wasn't you that got stampeded by sheep, it was me! I went up to the village rec in about 1992 with some girl I used to know to find that the field next door had had a hole burned in the fence (your friendly local drug addicts, I believe) and that about 50 sheep were all now happily munching away on the football pitch thinking that all their christmasses had come at once. Immediately we ran to the church warden's house (I don't know what I thought she was going to do about it), and were sent away with a black umbrella, for reasons which I don't recall but seemed perfectly sensible at the time. Then, for (more) reasons unknown, we decided that rounding up the sheep would be a good idea.

I will never be mean to a sheepdog again. Not that I ever was. It's bloody impossible.

After running around after these blasted sheep for about half an hour, one of them, the biggest and nastiest-looking, had obviously had enough, and decided to charge at me like a raging bull. Well I'm damned glad that Mrs. Church Warden had given me that brolly because it was the only thing I had to fight off this bloody sheep. In the end, I realised that it was actually the brolly that he was after so I chucked it in the air and ran for my life (not that I know how a sheep would go about finishing off a human, but at that point I didn't really feel like finding out). I never did replace the brolly. And I've never had a call from a producer at channel five wanting to interview me for a documentary entitled "When Sheep Attack".

Anyway, just to finish off we'd like to say a big "eh-up, chuck!" to Mechanical Mutt who has made a donation on the donations page at www.justgiving.com/sendjenferoverseasdonations. Thanks!

A graduate begging for money... surely not?

So, with a week of celebratory sex, drugs and rock n' roll (well, copious amounts of sleep anyway) out of the way and the Brockian Ultra-hangover to prove it, the fundraising proper starts here.

So, a little more about the Freeze-Your-Butt-Off-Trudging-Around-A-Welsh-Mountain challenge.

On the 8th of July I'm going to be dragging four of my most easily persuaded friends (more fool them) to camp out overnight in a Welsh field only to be awoken with the cockerel (no really, I'm taking one to beat them around the head with) to embark on a thirteen mile trek up-hill and down-dale around the Brecon Beacons in a mere 8 hours. So I'm asking every lovely reader of this blog to sponsor us to do it. '13 miles in 8 hours?!' I hear you cry... 'what a piece of cake! why should I sponsor you for that?!' well, here's why...

I'M SO UNFIT I'D PROBABLY LOSE A RACE AGAINST AN ASTHMATIC SNAIL

...and so averse to exercise that I would rather endure a party political broadcast by the BNP than go anywhere near a treadmill. So you see, for me this is about as appealing a prospect as having to resit my exams, and as tradition would have it, the more horrible the challenge, the more worthy of sponorship it is. So there you have it... even if you only sponsor me because you want to laugh at my attempts to wheeze my way around a mountain (and with my navigational skills, probably getting lost and stampeded by sheep for good measure... you think I'm joking but it's already happened once. No lie.*) that is as good a reason as any and I'm happy to be laughed at if it means more donations! So, free your pockets from all that spare change, and while you're at it, free England from my ugly mug for three months! And of course, not forgetting the amazing cause to which your money will be going; this is not just so I can travel the world at someone else's expense but goes towards ensuring that Raleigh can carry on doing the incredible work they do. So please please please make a donation at www.justgiving.com/sendjenferoverseasdonations and I'll be your friend for life**

*year nine outbound school trip, guess who's group couldn't map read? to the irritation of the local wildlife...
**Or I'll just leave you alone, whichever you'd prefer...?