Hello
Welcome to my blog. I love to talk, talk, talk, which is the reason for my blog, so I can share the things that interest me with anyone who would like to read them.
To introduce myself, I am Karen Freeman and at the time of setting up my blog in August 2011, I have now reached the grand old age of 61 but still has a mind set of a teenager, but everything else definitely shows signs of my real age. My photograph on the home page is a recent one (taken at a nice distance away, so it doesn’t show the wrinkles!!).
I have been married to Steve Freeman for nearly 40 years which we think is quite an achievment in this day and age, and we are very proud, although Steve thinks he definitely deserves a long service medal for putting up with me for all these years. We have one Son Adrian who is 35.
I could write pages and pages about my life, and you never know, when I have the urge I might go into my past, but I will start my blog slap bang up to date with just a brief introduction to myself and my family.
Steve, husband retired as a Chief Superintendant from the Devon & Cornwall Constabulary after serving 30 years and in the last few years leading up to his retirement, I left my employment as a Legal Secretary to start up our silver business, where we sell good quality silver items on ebay and in our own silver website It took these few years to successfully get it up and running, so when Steve retired I put him to work straight away, and kept him busy, so he wouldn’t be bored after working in a stressful and pressured environment. I did however sack him in the first few days, as he took it upon himself to play around with my computer and move some of my files, which clearly was a sackable offence. I did however re-instate him fairly quickly once he restored them to their rightful position and we have been blissfully working together in the business ever since. I would hasten to add, that we have a clear defining line, as he has his jobs and I have mine, and we have different rooms in the house, as being together 24 hours a day, definitely would not work.
He now does all the buying of the silver, the cleaning (as he has not had much practice in any sort of cleaning throughout our married life!!!) the photographing, and then he hands everything over to me to book the items in, prepare the listings and deal with all the sales and customer contact, which I really enjoy. Steve also now builds websites in addition to the silver side, so his knowledge on this has helped me set up my own blog.
I will now be totally honest, and say that although I love my family, I am very much an animal lover, and sometimes I do prefer animals to humans, I know this will shock quite a lot of people, but anyone who knows me will bear this out. This probably is because I am extremely stroppy, can be very bad tempered, very opinionated, and all things bad about humans, but somehow I can relate to animals in a much softer way. I particularly love dogs and donkeys and am a volunteer at the DAT (formerly EST) Centre in Ivybridge where special donkeys are used to give riding therapy to disabled and special needs children. The EST is a charity within the main large Worldwide Sidmouth Donkey Sanctuary I have set up categories in this blog giving more details of this and also my experiences with police puppy walking and boarding for Hearing Dogs for Deaf People.
Update 2015/16
In addition to selling our silver on Ebay and on our own Antique Silver Wesbsite we also sold at a few Antique Fairs which we both enjoyed as we were actually meeting potential customers face to face. It was very hard work as we had to leave early in the mornings, unload the van at the location and then set our stand up which took a good 2 hours to do. If we did a weekend fair then we had to stay overnight, but I must admit I did like this part as at the end of each day we enjoyed a nice meal that I didn’t have to cook.
However over time, Steve started to suffer with his back as in addition to all our stock that we took, we also had large display cases which had to be humped in and out of the van and with Steve doing all the donkey work it began to take its toll, so in 2016 we decided to stop doing the fairs altogether and just sell our items online. We both missed it, but when it starts to affect your health we had to stop.
Update 2017
After giving up the fairs in 2016, we then decided that we would start winding down the business altogether and sell off all of our stock so we could fully retire and spend more time doing what we wanted to do. We also decided that now was the time to get our own dog after looking after various dogs and puppies over the years. After months and months of research Archie finally arrived. We plan to do lots of walks to keep us fit as we both hate the gym and we are now also members of the National Trust so we will have lots of new places to explore