Our Palm Sunday: Part 1

We decided that a change is as good as a rest and, yesterday, paid a visit to one of our less frequented (by us) local churches for the Palm Sunday service.

We had a pleasant walk there in lovely spring sunshine and we arrived with enough time to spare to explore the ruins of the old church ...


The 'new' church is infact quite old, but it is very different from the old stone one, which was allowed to fall out of use. From the the outside, the 'new' church is a rather ordinary red and green tin structure, but inside, there is some lovely wood panelling.

We all received palm crosses which were blessed, and when we returned home Gio and I showed them to the rest of the gang.


On our walk home we rescued lots of distressed daffodils which had been picked by flower vandals and casually discarded. We think this is a horrible end for a beautiful flower and so we gathered them up and took them home for a long awaited drink.


The flowers were very grateful and in return gave us a marvellous display of colour.

Lots of love

Bris & Gio xxx

Easter Comes Early

What a lovely basket full of chocolate eggs: Easter has indeed come early this year.


So how did we come by this bounty?

Our picture shows the principal members of the Bears Unlimited dog walking team, and this basket of eggs is a thank you present to them for services rendered this week.

Our guest at the Bear Cave for a few days this week, has been one of our all time favourites, Dilly Dog. You may well remember her from previous posts as she is quite a regular visitor.


It's always a pleasure having Dilly to stay as she is so friendly and well-behaved, although, having set out dog walking at 6.40 a.m. on Friday, to fit it in to a busy day, we did feel we had earned our eggs.

If we can keep our paws off the eggs for a day or two, we think it might be fun to organise an Easter egg hunt as we've got some great hiding places.

Lots of love, the Bears Unlimited dog walkers xxx

It's A Mug's Game

Talking to you about that special day, Mothering Sunday, reminded us that we have news for you from another special day that happened recently, Valentine's Day.

It was special for us this year, not for romantic reasons - we leave that to our minders - but because we gained a new member of the Bears Unlimited family.

His name is Gerry and he arrived in a pink and white striped mug with a heart shaped handle. He was a Valentine's gift from one minders to another and, as such, is pink and has hearts embroidered over his chest. We're fairly confident he's a giraffe but being an unconventional colour, it's a little bit hard to be sure (don't tell him we said that!)

In the truest of Bears Unlimited traditions, he was welcomed to Bears Unlimited, in the presence of the Bear flag, by the previous newest member of B.U.


We have a slight problem here in as much as Rosa, who is doing the welcoming, has not been welcomed herself on the blog, although she has featured a couple of times. This is of course, purely a blogging omission, as she was, and continuously is, made very welcome amongst us (you may have noticed that we are a bit short of female company!)

Rosa has something in common with Gerry: like him she came with a mug, and in Rosa’s case a mini tray as well. They are fine mugs, but the living mugs that came with them are far finer and have gorgeous smiles.

The more the merrier is definitely true for Bears Unlimited.

Lots of love all at Bears Unlimited xxx

Happy Mothering Sunday

A very happy Mothering Sunday to all mothers everywhere, but especially to those associated with our extended family. Lots of virtual hugs and kisses to each of you.

We remembered our Mum today and did her proud with a card, flowers and chocolates (Maltesers, her favourite, no less) as you can see in our picture. She was very pleased with us all.


If you look closely, you will also see Bris and Gio with a delightful posy of flowers that they were about to hand over to our Mum. This posy came from one of our churches and was lovingly made, along with lots more, by one of our young 80+ year olds, who is an inspiration to us all. It had a lovely red and yellow tulip, some daffodil buds and some greenery.

We all enjoyed the Mothering Sunday service and, in the talk, we had fun playing true or false with some of the facts about mothers. Can you believe that it is true that one lady had 69 children! It was just a shame that families were not together in the pews this year. Hopefully they would have been meeting up later.

Lots of love, Ungi, Jimmy & all at Bears Unlimited xxx

Going Bananas

We don't know about the other big supermarkets, but our local one, Morrissons, has loads of great offers on fair trade products at the moment, to coincide with Fair Trade fortnight.

Of particular interest to banana lovers Monkey, Ellie and Billy, when we visited last weekend, was the 25% reduction on fair trade bananas. These 3 decided that we should take advantage of the offer and buy twice as many bananas as usual. One of the reasons we could do this with confidence was because of the purchase of our new banana bag. You will see it, along with our fair trade bananas, in our picture.


The banana bag, purchased the week before last, is already proving a great hit with us all. It is lovely and yellow and it keeps bananas fresh in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. This is simply great as we all prefer a nice fresh banana rather than a black and furry one.

If you want to take maximum advantage of great offers, like the Morrisson's bananas discount, get yourself a banana bag, and you can do some serious bulk buying. Don't forget to look for the fair trade label though.

We're loathe to tell you where they come from, as we think they would make great Christmas present for our families, but since we hope there will be people reading who won't be getting a present from us (sorry!), we'll let you know that you can buy them in Lakeland (formerly Lakeland Plastics.

Lots of love, the Bears Unlimited Fair Trade supporters (that's all of us!) xxx

Fair Trade Tastes Good

Hopefully we've got our readers so well trained now, that you will all be aware of, and supporting, Fair Trade fortnight, which is now half way through.

We all had a lovely time at a fair trade wine tasting last Monday. If this gives you a sense of deja vu, then, yes, we did attend a similar event last year and report it in our blog. It went so well last year that it simply had to be repeated, hence last Monday's event. While it is always nice drinking wine, what we really enjoy is chatting to other people about what they think of each bottle, and inevitably the conversations take some interesting turns and we find ourselves chatting quite happily to people we may hardly have known before the event.


The lady who organises the wine tasting is our local Traidcraft distributor, so just after the event Gio and I spent a pleasant hour going through the Traidcraft catalogue and placing a big order. It feels good to have a significant part of our Christmas shopping already in hand, as well as lots of lovely fair trade chocolate and snacks on the way for us all to enjoy.

We'll be back soon with another fair trade report.

Lots of love Gio, Bris and all at Bears Unlimited xxx

Have You Discovered Wasgij?

It's been simply great to see sunshine and blue skies this week, but we understand it's all due to come to an end tomorrow. Still, at least we've recently discovered a great way to spend a wet and cold afternoon. In other words we've discovered Wasgij puzzles.

It all started when Jimmy & Noel received their jigsaw mat for Christmas - remember January's post telling you all about their lovely gift? Well a very nice lady in our village, heard that there were some puzzle enthusiasts about, and leant us a rather special puzzle, which we'd never heard of before. This was the wasgij puzzle we mentioned earlier.

Either you'll know all about Wasgij puzzles or you'll think we're talking double Dutch. To cater for the latter grouping, we'll explain.

With a wasjij puzzle the image you see on the box lid only provides the clues to the puzzle image. The box image shows the reaction of the onlookers to the main event which is the image, which you, the puzzler, have to build, but cannot see. You have to look carefully at the picture of the onlookers to obtain vital clues as to what is going on in the puzzle.


Here is the 1000 piece puzzle we completed in just over 2 days. We do admit to working after midnight on 2 consecutive nights, which shows just how addictive these puzzles are. We won't tell you what the picture on the box looked like for us, so as not to ruin the fun, should you come across the same puzzle as we did.

The reason it is so addictive, is because you have no idea what you are building, until you start putting similar pieces together and see what is obtained as a result. Once you are under way impatience kicks in and you are desparate to know what will be on your picture.

We are going to have to ration ourselves as to how many we buy or borrow, otherwise we won't get any jobs done. We do have the promise of another puzzle from our kind lady friend though, and will very happy when it arrives.

Lots of love, all at Bears Unlimited xxx