April now

Hope everyone had a happy Easter : )

Being in the music group at church, Easter is quite a busy week as well as being the culmination of the Christian year. I love Easter and celebrating with the rest of my church family. We have:

• a service for the nursery school and other young children and shoppers on Wednesday.
• a service for all the Baptist churches in the neighbourhood on Maundy Thursday.  It was our turn to host the service and provide the music this year.
• an ecumenical service on Good Friday morning and it was our turn to lead the music. We always hold this service at our church but take turns in leading it. Then we walk in a procession of witness to the Anglican church up the road and hold a short service outside that church (it didn't rain this year) before going into their church hall for a drink and hot cross buns.
• a service on Good Friday evening for just our church
• Easter Sunday morning - an early morning service of celebration led by my husband and followed by breakfast (catered by me) and then followed by a music rehearsal.
• Easter Sunday morning - the main service of celebration at the usual time. We all got given a cream egg and this was the one Easter egg I got (and ate) this year.

On Easter Monday we went out to our friend's farm and admired the lambs. They are so very cute when they are little and all wide eyed and innocent looking. And I love to see them doing that stiff legged bounce which they can only do when they are really little. We had a phone call this morning to say that they have had their first calf of the season  too.

Yesterday my husband had been invited to take the service in a church in a little town about 20 miles away. they invite him every year around Easter time. Afterwards we found a little country lane to stop in and we had a picnic. We had hoped to go for a walk but it started raining and we decided not to venture forth. It was fun to have the first picnic of the season though : )

We also went to the Countrywide store which is only about three miles from the church we went to. I am so sorry that they have gone into administration.  It costs £9.50 for a sack of branded hen food at the local feed store which is a ten mile round trip from our house. It costs £6 for sack of own brand at the Countrywide store but with a 40 mile round trip. So :
- 6 bags from the local feed store at £9.50 cost £57 plus 10 miles of diesel @17p per mile = £58.70
- 6 bags from Countrywide at £6 cost £36 plus 40 miles of diesel at 17p per mile = £42.80

You can see why I like Countrywide! And I usually buy 10 bags at a time if I can get there which maximises the savings too. I've always found the people there to be really friendly and helpful and I'm sorry that they will probably be out of a job soon.