This time tomorrow I will be on top of Snowden setting up camp.  Then on Saturday at day break we will be off to do the other 14 peaks in the 15 Peaks Challenge.  Wish me luck, it is not too late to sponsor me.

 I have not had much time to BLOG with doing several training weekends on the mountains and three days a week at the gym.  The walk is taking place this weekend, we climb Snowden on Friday the 19th, sleep at the summit and then start off at day break on Saturday,  to cover another 14 peaks all over 3000 feet high, (hopefully) before dark.

From Thursday to Saturday last week, I stayed in Breacon with my family, my good friend Nigel and his two sons, and Ted and Alice Waldron.  Ted had kindly offered to give me a few pointers for the Snowden 15 Peaks Challenge by taking me on a 20km hill walk.

We had a great time camping, real open fires at night, lovely farm with ponds and ducks.  The newest member of the family, BEN the dog had great fun.

Walmsley

We have launched the new web site for www.walmsley.co.uk estate agency in Caversham, Reading.  This site has taken a lot of work to create the exact bespoke look that they and their print design team envisaged.

There are many bespoke elements to the sites including all the drop shadow images and the search page elements.

We wish WALMSLEY all the best in the future and I know the site will do a lot to boost business as it looks very fresh and includes all the latest things required for good search engine optimisation.

Property to buy, sell or let in Reading, Caversham, Berkshire, RG4, Walmsley Estate Agents – Selling, letting properties, bedsits, studios, flats, apartments and houses for sale or rent. executive, premier and distinctive homes. Walmsley is independent, and that means focusing on what we do best, helping vendors and landlords sell, buy rent or sell your home in Reading, Caversham, Berkshire, RG4, at the right price. Walmsley are an energetic sales and letting team with a refreshingly different and straightforward way of doing estate agency business. We offer a complete service covering all aspects of the sale or purchase of your properties in Reading, Caversham, Berkshire, RG4. We aim to make things as easy as possible for you at every stage. We match homes for sales or rentals to your requirements and avoid unnecessary or time wasting visits. We have a state of the art computer system that thinks with us backed up by a database of hundreds of clients in Reading, Caversham, Berkshire, RG4, at any one time, actively in the market for houses. Caversham and Reading Berkshire RG4 property to buy, sell or let Walmsley Estate Agents. Sales, renting, lettings and information on properties, valuation, appraisal, surveys, mortgages and mortgages and finance. Caversham and Reading Berkshire RG4 property to buy, sell or let Walmsley Estate Agents. Sales, lettings and information on properties, valuation, surveys, mortgages and finance.Caversham and Reading Berkshire RG4 property to buy, sell or let Walmsley Estate Agents. Sales, lettings and information on properties, valuation, surveys, mortgages and finance.Caversham and Reading Berkshire RG4 property to buy, sell or let Walmsley Estate Agents. Sales, lettings and information on properties, valuation, surveys, mortgages and finance.

Richard has been very kindly giving up his mornings three days a week to do training sessions with me in his gym.  I ache all over, which he says is a good thing, but I am really enjoying it and I am very, very grateful to him for the time he is putting in and the equipment he lets me use. Cheers again.

I start the day by walking the kids to school (about a mile), and then back again.  Then I walk to Richards house in Wordsley (about two miles), and begin the workout which lasts about an hour and a half (I think it is supposed to last an hour?), doing bench work, bike and all manner of other stuff that Richard has all the names for but I don’t have a clue, yet!  Then I walk back home and have a massive sandwich, which is probably wrong, but I am always starving by then.

I follow this with the two mile round trip back to the school and do a bit of work on my own bike and weight before bed.  I like the exercise and the company, and though we have only done two days of these sessions so far, I really feel it is helping more than anything I could achieve without Richards input, patience and time.

Wow, our team at WWW.FRANKPAGES.NET built the site for C and K Catering last week.  We were so pleased to see it go in at number one on Google the next day, for phrases like Party Food Brierley Hill and Catering Brierley Hill.  It was then sandboxed by Google after a couple of days and disappeared for 24 hours while they tried to push us towards Google Adwords.  What a relief to see it back on their index within 24 hours, a new record for us.

However, we are having trouble with pushing the phrases; Wedding Food Brierley Hill, Wedding Party Food Brierley Hill, Golden Wedding Buffet, Silver Wedding Buffet etc.  I hope by writing this blog we can help push these phrases as the site does deserve the hits.  C and K Catering can really help out if you need to feed a crowed of people at a wedding or similar function with high class wedding party food in Brierley Hill and the West Midlands UK.

I will keep checking back to see how they are doing.  Also thanks to Richard at www.webspaceunlimited we are using Google Analytics to monitor our progress on the Wedding based phrases.  Cheers Richard.

A special thanks to Kaye and Colin at C and K Catering Brierley Hill for their gift of a few bottles of wine as they were so pleased with the new Web Site www.brierleyhillcatering.co.uk the home of C and K Catering.

Since we launched the new web site for WWW.FRANKPAGES.NET, several people have asked me about our statement that all our small items, like mobile phones, Bluetooth devises and cameras etc., are charged from solar power.  I thought I should take a moment to say how we do this.

It is quite easy and reasonably cheap to set up a solar array in your office.  We use two different solar systems. 

We are lucky that the office windows face South, and that we are on the second floor.  This means we get a lot of sun and can afford to block one of our windows completely with a large solar panel.  This is quite a modern efficient panel which is plugged into a 12 volt car battery.  The system is turned on when ever the sun comes out and switched off when it gets dark.  This saves a small amount of energy which would otherwise be wasted lighting up LED bulbs.

The battery slowly trickle charges every day and means we can store the energy from the sun for when we need it.  Once the energy is in there, you can simply add an inverter which changes the 12v supply to a low wattage 240v supply, which is powerful enough to charge things like a mobile, and it has a standard 3 pin plug socket which is great for most types of charger.

The second system is called Freeloader, a small gadget with a battery built in and two small removable solar panels, this allows us to charge our mobiles and some other devises even when we are on the move.  They sit on the windowsill and gather power from the sun.  It does take a few days to fully charge this small gadget from solar power, but it’s compact design and portability makes it worth the effort.

Solar panels are not yet brilliantly efficient.  They are getting better and cheaper all the time though and I think they have already reached a point where (if you wait for the sales at electrical shops like Maplins. or camping suppliers) you can easily pay back your initial out lay in a short time.

I think we have spent about £120 so far on kit, but if you think that we have charged all our small items on the system for about a year now.  And used the system to power our lighting etc., on camping holidays, rather than paying for campsite hook-up power.  Then we are doing quite well.

Today I spent a few hours in the company of Richard at www.Webspaceunlimited.co.uk .  He was gratious enough to show me how to add things to this blog like links, tags and catagories.  We also had a go at adding plug-ins and started to learn about changing the template, which I am going to do in the background and apply the changes in a few weeks time.  Watch this space.  Cheers Rich, and thanks for all the coffee again Mel.