The Wednesday Hodgepodge! #19

I hope you are all having a good week? It's Wednesday which means it's time to join in with the Wednesday Hodgepodge with Joyce over at From This Side of the Pond! Each week there are 6 questions, we answer and then link up. Simple!

1. What does adventure mean to you?

I’ve never been the type to chase adrenaline or throw myself into the unknown. I like my slippers more than hiking boots and I’m happiest when I know what’s for tea and where I’ve left my keys. Adventure can be small. It can be trying a new recipe, planting something I’ve never grown before in the garden or taking a different route on a daily walk. It can be saying yes to something that makes me a little nervous like meeting new people or starting a new hobby.

2. What are your thoughts on tipping? What businesses or service providers do you regularly tip? Do you resent being asked if you'd like to add a tip? What about when a suggested amount is presented?

As someone from England tipping isn’t really a thing, it’s not rude not to tip! It's something I don't really think about. In fancy restaurants service charges are added to the bill and most other places tips are not expected. The only times I do tip is in taxi's, I round it up to the nearest £5 or £10, the hairdressers and I always give a little extra to the takeaway delivery person if I am paying by cash.

What I do find a bit awkward is when I’m paying by card in a pub or restaurant and a screen pops up asking if I want to leave a tip especially if there’s a person standing there watching. It can feel a bit pressured and sometimes the suggested amounts are really high. 

3. I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream...do we? Is ice cream a favorite treat at your house? What's your favorite flavor? Regular, soft serve, gelato, sherbet, or some sort of non-dairy version of ice cream...what's your pleasure?

I love ice cream, it's something we always have in the freezer, all year around. Tubs of different flavours, ice cream on sticks and of course from the ice cream van which drives around on summers evenings. During the warmer months I eat some sort of ice cream at least a couple of times a week!

My favourite ice cream from a tub is a bit of a cheat, I like Neapolitan where you get vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry but my all time favourite is a 99 Flake from the ice cream van. A soft serve vanilla ice cream in a cone with a Cadbury Flake stuck in and strawberry sauce on the top! I am also partial to a Strawberry Split, vanilla flavour ice cream with a strawberry flavoured ice coating. Yum!

4. What's your 'back in my day, we____________________ ' story or saying?

I am always saying to my girls "back in my day" and it usually revolves all around mobile phones. Back in my day, we had to press 7 four times just to type the letter S, our ringtones sounded like a robot having a breakdown and to get a good one you had to pay £3, the batteries lasted forever without having to charge, we topped up with a £10 scratch card from the corner shop, the only apps we had were the calculator and a stopwatch, you couldn’t just Google it, you text your mate who might know the answer and even then we used texts sparingly as they cost 10 pence each. There were no unlimited plans, we had no camera, no internet and amazingly still survived!

5. Somehow this is our last Hodgepodge in the month of June. Next week's Hodgepodge lands in July. Wow. Sum up your June using three adjectives.

Productive - I feel like I have got a lot done around the house and in the garden.

Hot - It has been so hot here, every day for the last couple of weeks it seems like the weatherman was saying it has been the hottest day of the year every day!

Lazy - Even though I have been productive I feel like when it has been too hot I have been lazy, I don't do well in the heat and lose all motivation.

6. Insert your own random thought here.

The latest heatwave has passed which I couldn't be happier about. I am one of those people who all winter complains about it being too cold and then in the summer complains that it is too hot. It needs to be just in-between for me to be happy and over the last couple of days we've had that. It has rained a little too which has been great for the garden. We were forecast thunderstorms but they never came, phew! I am not a fan of thunder!