A busy weekend. On Saturday, Penny and I were volunteering on a GRW stall down in Pontardawe, at their Winter Festival, organised by the Round Table. We heard about it through Arena Pontardawe, with whom we partner for the May dog show and fun day. The lady who organises it is lovely, and one of those Renaissance women who just take your breath away. She is a very accomplished professional artist, and also a well known teacher. As well, she is passionate about horses, in particular those beautiful Spanish Andalucian ones, and she has some which she trains, rides and schools, not for the faint hearted, as they are very high spirited. On top of that, she is active in a number of Welsh equestrian organisations, which is how Penny got to know her, and now she's involved in the Arena project. You can see more about it at their website at www.arenapontardawe.com Just to make me feel even more inadequate, she's gorgeously glamourous and blonde, and also incredibly nice.

Anyway, there we were on our little stall but of course we had to get there first. This meant leaving home at around 7.15, driving down to Glynneath to meet another Greyhound person to pick up some merchandise and doing a handover in the McDonalds car park. When we got there, to our amazement, it was heaving with people and police as the Welsh Rally was passing through, and every rally fan in the land seemed to be in the car park having a coffee. Then down to Pontardawe via the Heads of the Valleys road, which was looking magnificently wintry. When we left home, it was -8, and down in tropical Ponty it was a balmy 10 C. Set up the stall with Andrew, as Penny was still doing morning stables. Andrew then left me to it, drove all the way up to Cardiff to visit the house, did some Christmas shopping in Cardiff, got some groceries and then drove all the way back to Ponty to pick me up. He thinks he did about 200 miles in total. What a star. So it was then back home, watching the car temp gauge fall steadily as we climbed higher and higher, till back home we were back down to -2 on arrival.

Sunday we spent very quietly as we were both tired, as were the dogs. Andrew decided to put up some Christmas lights, and they look wonderful. I like the house to be visible from space at this time of year, none of that mimsy tasteful nonsense for me. I'm busy with a variety of Christmas crafty things at the moment, mainly cross-stitch. Watched Dawn on QVC this afternoon, my regular Tuesday afternoon treat, and picked up Andrew around 5.

One of the things I bought at the fair was a little cook book put together by the ladies of St Peters Church, and today I have been trying out a couple of the recipes. One was for a chocolate fudge made with cream cheese, and the other was the reason I bought the book, a dish called Impossible Pie! With a challenge like that who could resist? I've just taken it out of the oven, and it looks puffed and golden with a coconut crust, so we'll be eating it later and I'll report back. What made the recipe slightly harder was the quantities were given in cups, which is how most American recipes are, so I needed to do some conversions as I prepped it. Andrew has just returned from his run, so now it's time for our pasta and spinach with pine nuts.