Happy Birthday Future; Nostalgic!

How did that happen? It's not like me to forget a birthday, let alone the first anniversary of my own blog. *Hangs head in shame* The eagle-eyed among you will no doubt have noticed that Future; Nostalgic celebrated its first birthday on 6th May, 2009 but, I hear you ask, where was I during the festivities?

Well, the truth of the matter is that I was up to my armpits wrangling software onto a new laptop and completely lost track of the time, or the day come to that! You will also have noticed there has been a dearth of posts over here lately, apart from my #FridayFlash stories.

There are a number of reasons for this, most notably that we've had the builders in (and no, that's not a euphemism for something else!) to have our bathroom re-modelled, and Our Skiing Correspondent (OSC) has been in hospital for surgery on her knee.

The bathroom work took longer than expected and, whilst the end result is spot on, two weeks of building work is enough to try anybody's patience.

Our Skiing Correspondent's knee has been causing her problems for quite some time, to the point that, during our recent Slovakian trip, very little actual skiing took place. OSC's grandfather kindly paid for her to see a surgeon privately, the rest of her treatment was on the NHS.

The whole thing was a bit of a whirlwind - after OSC had seen the surgeon one Monday morning last month, an NHS MRI Scan was arranged for the following evening and she only waited a fortnight to discuss the results with the surgeon in his NHS clinic. None of us were expecting him to ask her what she was doing the following day, or for him to operate at 8.30am the day following the clinic appointment.

The surgery was, thankfully, a complete success, so much so that OSC frightened the life out of the nurses by wandering about the ward an hour or so after the operation (sans crutches for the first time in months I hasten to add); they didn't think she'd be up and about that quickly. Nor has she needed any of the large bag of drugs the hospital sent her home with. For the first time in months she's pain-free and looking forward to skiing again. Talk about a weight off all our minds.

Anyway, all of this has rather put me off my game and I have a few posts in the works now things are starting to get back to some sense of normality – there are some reviews, and the rest of our Slovakian travelogue to post for starters; apologies to those of you who've been waiting patiently to find out what we bought on our trip into town. I'll try to get these up as soon as possible.

In other news, I have received confirmation that one of my #FridayFlash stories, Twist in the Tale, has been accepted for inclusion in the 2009 Best of FridayFlash Anthology, and another story, Driftwood, got itself an Honourable Mention in Laurita Miller's recent story contest. I guess that means I can call myself a published author, right?

Also, we have finally received details of MIL's military service during World War 2, so now I can begin the somewhat mammoth task of attempting to document this turbulent period of her life. It's going to take me some time as additional research is required, but rest assured, I will post the results in due course.

And now, a Giveaway...

By way of a thank-you to all of you who've supported Future; Nostalgic through it's first year, I feel a giveaway is in order, so I've put together the following small goodie-bag of items I hope you will all enjoy:

By the way, the laptop is not included in the giveaway!

The goodie-bag contains:

1. a Fountain brand “Daisy Bundle” A5 lined notebook (256 ivory lined pages).
2. a pocket-sized Asda Executive notebook (80 sheets squared paper).
3. a Parker Jotter fountain pen (blue with one blue Parker cartridge).
4. a Staedtler triplus mobile office set (fineliner, ballpoint, 0.5mm mech pencil and highlighter all in a handy plastic carry case, which doubles as a desk stand).
5. a Maped twin tip 4 colour ballpoint multipen (blue, black, red and green 1.0mm tips).

To have a chance to win the goodie-bag, please follow these rules carefully:

1. Leave one comment on this post by midnight, GMT on Saturday, May 15. You are limited to one entry. Please feel free to link to this giveaway on your blog, or Tweet about it on Twitter; neither are required but either or both would be very much appreciated.

2. I will use the True Random Number Generator over at Random.org to pick a winner (comments will be numbered in the order in which they are received) from the comments section of this post, and will announce the winner on Sunday, May 16. [edit: I will announce the conest winner in a new post.]

3. The winner will have one week to contact me via email. Please use my Contact page.

4. Should the winner not contact me within one week, I will choose a new winner from the other entrants.

5. I will ship the goodie-bag internationally as I know Future; Nostalgic has many overseas readers and fans.

Good luck and thank-you for your support and encouragement through this past year.

Happy Birthday Future; Nostalgic!