365/265 Fruit

Busy blog today.. a few things to cover.. questions to answer...

1. What do we do?

Lynne asked me what our business is.. well we design & make handling equipment. It is probably dreary unless it is your 'thing' but we have been doing it twelve years and it is treating up pretty well (now). We started when Col was looking for a 'not-influenced-by-the-weather' alternative to civil engineering dive works. We met a super guy who held a patent on a trolley mechanism, and to cut a long story very short, we created a company with him and developed the patent application to apply to lifting heavy drums. 

At first Colin was chief sales / development / promo, everything and I was the paperwork behind the scenes girl!  Our first outing was at the Tomorrow's World Live show and we won a prize for innovation to avoid back injury.  The following year we had taken the product further and Colin won their Inventor of the Year show award.. awwwhh. Henry, the original patent holder was at this point 85 and was delighted to see the growth of his idea and evolution of the ideas. He died just last year and we still have letters from him saying how much he enjoyed being part of it with us, though to be fair it was quite an arduos expensive journey at times!

12 years later we now have a designer partner who is also one of our oldest friends, employ 14 people and manufacture a whole range of handling solutions for rolls, drums, doors, all kind of things.. and because we supply kit which meets all the awful H&S regs we sell to big food, drug, chemical companies, hardly anyone close to home really.  Hence Colin's draining trips up country, it is not easy being based in Cornwall, not really the centre of the world for manufacturing but hey, we get boat and dolphin days and all our family is here. 

You can see more stuff at www.sts-trolleys.co.uk It is a bit of a 'we-job', our daughters do the video editing, the website and stuff and our sons get involved with some of the workshoop stuff when time allows. Oh and I make lots of tea!  It really suits us as you can be home and at work at the same time, I even have a washing machine in the office kitchen (for overalls of course) and so can be found folding shirts thgouh the day just after I have answered the phone to someone in the MOD!

Hopefully that gives you a little taste of our lives and Lynne you can see how amazing it must have been for Zac to find one of our trolleys in the engine room of a cruise ship in Oz xx

2.  22.45 update.. (yes, teen taxi again tonight, but everyone is chatting with Zac, his last night so he will be up late playing X box later with our SiL too!..)

 ..well my Samsung tablet updated yesterday and now I can't do a thing with it! (remember the washed my hair and can't do a thing with it phrase!)  I feel like Anne now.. I have had to change the keyboard properties and now I am trying to upload some pics to this blog and it is on standstill!  It won't even upload a picture I know it uploaded before..bah!
I had some nice pics of the new layout I have done for the latest Happy Scrapper challenge, but no luck.. tomorrow I will transfer to this pc and do it the old way.. I still prefer a keyboard to tablet etc but it is great technology!

3. And so to fruit.. I should have photographed the girls today. I had Lyla come food shopping and then we got Lilly from school.   Lyla loves food and fruit especially.. in the few hours I had her she ate grapes, strawberries, raspberries and banana!  Lilly is doing great at school but it's long days. She does the mornings for academic stuff and it seems a shame to bring her home to miss cooking or playing activities..

Well my picture may have been here before it was taken in France, I love their pastries..