NotSheep

I’ve been out this morning. Actually out of the house. In a car. With me driving.

The midwife told me to check with the insurance company to find out when I’d be covered to drive again. The insurance company said I could drive when my doctor said so. “Which doctor?” I asked, “The GP I’ve never met, or the obstetrician I’m never going to meet again?” So then the insurance company said I could drive when the midwife said so. The midwife said I could drive when I felt up to it. Clear as mud.

It went okay - although all I did was drive about six miles in a quiet-on-Sunday-mornings town. I’m not prepared to drive in heavy traffic yet, or through the city, but even being able to drive into our small town will mean I can get out of the house a bit. And, perhaps even more importantly, I’ll be able to get the children out of the house a bit. Even if all we do is go to the library or a playground, it will a) improve their moods/behaviour, and b) give me something I can do with them when their moods/behaviour is driving me up the walls. And it might save me from starting another round of people singing Abba songs on Twitter, which would probably be a good thing.

I’ve also been discharged by the midwife this week, so I guess all that means I’m recovering well. The scar is healing nicely, and I’ve yet to see any symptoms of all those nasties that the swab found a few days after the surgery - I’ve had no fever, no shivers, no feeling ill - so I’m glad I chose to hold off on the antibiotics. Usually there are almost no medications in this house at all - when Toby was born in August 2005, I had to send out for something for the afterpains, because there wasn’t so much as a paracetamol or ibuprofen pill here - and the painkillers that were bought then were mostly still here when Louie was born. Now I’ve got a supply of paracetamol, ibuprofen, codeine, two different antibiotics (actually three, because one is a combination tablet), as well as a month’s supply of another, stronger painkiller, which is only supposed to be taken for a few days at a time - but the midwife asked my GP to prescribe me some and he sent an entire box.

Scratchy has been back at work for a week, and we’ve all made it through. I’ve done very little around the house, largely because I’ve been sat on my bum with a baby attached to me - but as NattyEm wisely pointed out on Twitter, “that is just the best reason in the world to not do something” I have managed to delegate fairly effectively, though - having big kids is great, because they can do so much around the place. Barney made a batch of chocolate-chip cookies this morning, which means he now knows how to use the Kenwood Chef that I scored on Freecycle a few weeks ago - complete with lots of attachments - I was very pleased and probably would have blogged about it at the time if I hadn’t gone into labour before the next time I wrote a blog-post! Anyway, now that Barney can use it, I’ll be placing orders for all sorts of delicious things - especially as the rolling-pin, which had been missing for a few weeks, has been found (in a bookcase - well where else would you keep a rolling pin?)

I’ve spent some time with my nose buried in Louie’s hair, getting high on that new-baby smell. He’s four weeks old today, and the falling-head-over-heels thing has taken a bit longer with him than it did with the others (perhaps to do with lack of birth endorphins, perhaps to do with trauma), but I think we’re well on the way now. He’s gorgeous - very spotty right now, but almost all of my babies have been through that stage and it doesn’t seem to have made them any less handsome afterwards He is a much better sleeper than the others were - I’m regularly getting four-hour stretches at night, which is more than any of them did at this age - it’s more than George did at a year, never mind just under a month! He took to breastfeeding with absolutely no trouble at all, despite having a start which can sometimes make that more difficult - I think the fact that he was permanently in bed with me, even overnight in the hospital, made a difference. He’s getting bigger too - he hasn’t been weighed since leaving the hospital (unless you count me standing on the bathroom scales with and without him), but I’m sure his hands and feet and head are bigger, and I know he’s longer, because his feet stick out of the bottom of his nightshirts now. I notice little changes in him every day: in the past week he’s become more interested in watching things around him, he’s starting to give little smiles, and he’s waving his arms and hands in a more deliberate way. Watching him and my other children - both separately and interacting with each other - makes me want lots more children. I won’t have any more, for many reasons, but not wanting more isn’t one of them.

We had a visit from my friend L, who I hadn’t seen in just over a year. She’s a teacher, and between that and her children and elderly parents, she’s very busy during term-times, so most of her socialising is done during the school holidays. George and Freddy were particularly pleased that her son R came along - they used to see a lot of him when he lived across the road, but since they moved last year, R has become fairly reclusive - and especially has not wanted to come here, because it would have meant seeing their old house. But he enjoyed the visit too, and when L left, I offered to have R here for a while longer, and he quickly agreed to stay; I hope that now he’s taken the step of visiting us once, we’ll see him more often.

New mp3 players have arrived for Barney and George. This means that Barney has had to be convinced that it is not a good idea to drown out the sound of approaching cars whilst cycling, and that George, rather than singing the same song for days on end, has been singing a variety of songs, and talking at the top of his voice (because he can’t hear himself over the mp3 player). I’m not entirely convinced that’s an improvement.

I’ve given the children some studying to do - the weather has been horrible, and sitting down with books for a while each day keeps things much, much sweeter around here. They’ve mostly only been doing an hour or so a day - although certainly the impression of hot-housing could have been given when Toby (not quite three) started trying to teach Louie how to use a calculator! - and he does insist on having “work” of his own while the older boys study:

But quite a lot of the time has been spent thus:

I will post more photos of Louie soon; it’s just a bit difficult to take photos of the baby in your own arms..

I’m losing the habit of regular blogging here. Must try harder. I’ve just realised that apart from my post checking if the WP upgrade was working, the last thing I wrote was ten days ago. I was off-line for half that time, and it’s been too sunny to be indoors ever since. So it’s back to dredging the depths of my memory, with help from Twitter, to try to figure out what’s been happening. And another looonnnnnnggggg post. The short version: friends, sun, sea, sand, ice-cream, caravan, garden, French practice, interesting people buying stuff from me, annoying midwife. Doesn’t sound bad overall, does it?

On Friday (not last Friday, the Friday before that - it’s bad, isn’t it?) we went to visit friends who are soon moving overseas. They had a baby three weeks ago, and have three other children under six, so they’re pretty busy right now! It was lovely to see them again, and E (the mum) and I went into town together - abandoning all other children with K (the dad) - to get passport photographs of the littlest one taken. Ever tried to arrange it so that a three-week-old not only keeps her eyes open for the photo but actually looks straight at the camera? That took a while…I did get to cuddle the baby though, and that made me even think this pregnancy-business might be all worthwhile

(One of the midwives phoned me during the photo-attempt, and asked if I was going to have certain blood-tests done. I said no, and explained why - because the supplements I’m taking would make the results meaningless - and she said “well, it’s all about choice”. Which seemed good at the time.)

On the way home, Jack made me laugh when he said thoughtfully, “It’s weird that Daddy got you pregnant just by saying pregnant.” I’m not sure where that particular thought process originated.

On Saturday (not last Saturday, the Saturday before that…), as mentioned, I did a WordPress upgrade, in an attempt to correct the errors that had been appearing ever since the php upgrade on the server. It seemed to go smoothly - there are still a couple of plugins not functioning, but I haven’t actually properly looked at them yet, so fingers crossed they won’t be difficult to upgrade/correct. Once I was sure the blog was working (a girl’s gotta have priorities), we all took off to the caravan - taking two cars, so no packing people and stuff in to bursting point - yay! In fact the children shared themselves between the two vehicles to the point where we were actually driving with one child in each row of seats, which certainly made for a peaceful journey.

In the afternoon the boys took themselves off to various parts of the caravan site, apart from Barney, who spent some time in the caravan trying to get a digital tv box working - when asked why, he said, “So we can watch Eurovision tonight”. I pointed out that it was on a channel we could receive directly on the tv in the caravan, so the digibox wasn’t needed, and he exclaimed with relief “Thank goodness for that!” Should I be worried at how fascinated my children are by this song contest? During the show, Freddy wanted to know if anyone had ever entered a song just to make people laugh…hm, I’d have said that would be most of them. I didn’t stay up - after seeing the calibre of the first five or so entries (and wondering just how bad the songs that didn’t make it through must have been), I took myself off to bed, and was soon asleep.

We woke on Sunday morning (not yesterday…) to a gloriously sunny day. I was given a cup of tea in bed (and asked, “Is that cooked enough?” Er…) before getting up and hanging Barney’s one-and-only shirt over the deck to dry. He does own more than one shirt, but didn’t pack any extras. There’s always one, it seems… we spent the time doing some French revision (well, practice papers), then he joined his brothers in playing around the site with all the other children who were around. It’s nice to be up there on a weekend occasionally (although we love having the place to ourselves during the weeks too!) We spent some time down on the beach in the afternoon, and brought some of it back with us in our shoes. Scratchy left in the evening, as he’d work on Monday.

Someone (looks accusingly at eldest) taught my youngest to demand that people “say please!” when they want anything from him. This would be fine if he would settle for us saying it once, but he likes to hear it several times…

On Monday we went into the town, although I can’t remember why now. I took a bunch of kids and a bunch of coupons to Burger King and fed the lot of us for the grand total of £6, which I thought was quite impressive - and fortunate, for when we returned to the caravan, I decided it was much too hot to do any kind of heating-up-of-food, and we had cold chicken and good crusty bread with hummus for dinner. And coleslaw. Lots of coleslaw. Jack discovered he loved coleslaw, and ate half a family-sized container of it. He didn’t even stop when I told him it was vegetables

Tuesday morning was still bright, but breezier, and we hung out on the site for the morning. Freddy and Toby had a debate over a sudoku book - Freddy saying “It’s my sudoku!” and Toby arguing, “No! It’s my work!” In the afternoon, in an attempt to convince Toby to have a nap, I put everyone in the car and we drove off to a nearby town which has a lovely seafront with a great playground. Afterwards we went to buy ice-creams; the ice-cream shop owner was very interested in home-education and we’d a good chat about that. Over the years we’ve been home-educating, I’ve found that the responses I get have changed. At first it was nearly always “oh, I didn’t know you could do that!” but more and more often now, I’m hearing, “oh yes, we know someone who…”

There are two sites for touring caravans next to ours, and one of them was inhabited last week by a very small caravan and two sisters who must have been in their 80s. They were lovely ladies, and thoroughly enjoyed the company of my boys (especially Jack, I think, who took to stopping and talking to them frequently). On Tuesday evening I went out for a short walk and was asked to see if I could fix their television. One of them had asked the other how to turn up the volume, the other had said it was the second button across the front, the first had counted from the wrong end and detuned it. She was very grateful when I managed to tune it in again, telling me it would save her from hearing “Now we could have been watching tv if you hadn’t…” all evening

On Wednesday, we had a lazy morning, during which the midwife from Friday’s call phoned me again, and announced that she had consulted with a haematologist and my GP (neither of whom has ever laid eyes on me, and none of this done with my consent) and they’d all decided I needed to be taking iron supplements (er, no…) and that she had arranged a prescription. Nice of her to make all these decisions for me…I expressed how cross I was at being told it was all about choice and then it being made clear the choice only existed as long as I was making what she considered to be the right choices, and she tried to tell me that the haematologist had been my idea - which was nonsense. In the end I told her I was considering her involvement in my pregnancy and would let her know what I decided, and hung up. Very cross.

We drove home on Wednesday afternoon - it was Barney’s last chance to get to a Scout meeting before Scout Camp, and we thought it might be quite a good idea to have the info about the camp. George and Freddy also went to Cubs, and came back with yet more badges. The pile of badges waiting to be sewn on is now about thirty-something high…

I had advertised a couple of items for sale in the local paper, and got home to find the ads had gone in sooner than I’d expected, so there were lots of phone messages. I spent Thursday ringing people back about them, and a couple of people came to look (and buy). One person said, “Oh, just give me your postcode, I’ll put it in the sat-nav” - and then rang three times during the 20-minute journey for directions. The last person who came turned out to be one of those fascinating people you occasionally meet - a New Zealander who’d been transplanted here, started a hairdressing business, branched out into various alternative therapies, and then found his passion in animal rescue - all kinds of animals. He’s invited us to go and visit his animals anytime, and we certainly will

The rest of Thursday and much of Friday were spent in the garden, enjoying the sun (and wondering if we were the only place in the UK getting any, given the tweets coming from people in other parts). We’ve a patio in one corner of the garden which is quite a little sun-trap and which is also very private, due to the arrangement of houses and windows on houses and trees around the garden, so I was able to free my bump without worrying about the neighbours - although I did wonder how visible it was to the helicopter which flew overhead. The boys got their super-soakers out, and I yelled to Twitter “Super-soaker fight!” - but sent it to the wrong recipient on my mobile phone, so presumably I’ll get a phone-call requesting an explanation the next time my mother turns her phone on

I also had a phone-call from one of the midwives (not the same one) wanting to make arrangements for getting cylinders of oxygen and entonox delivered - and never a word about blood-tests or doctors or anything else - think I must have scared them). The cylinders are to be delivered at the end of next week - which make the birth seem reassuringly close, but really, let’s face it, it’ll be mid-July, won’t it?

Scratchy, having spent the last two or three years making fun of me (and the three older boys) for doing Sudoku and various other logic-puzzles, got hooked on Sudoku himself, which caused great mirth for the rest of us

(In the meantime, I’m now doing Killer Sudoku in a magazine plus Hashi, Hanjie and Hitori on-line, so perhaps I shouldn’t laugh too hard at him )

On Saturday we did some tidying-up in the garden - trimming bushes etc - and played in the paddling-pool. On Saturday evening Scratchy was filling the bathtub with water so that I could have a soak in it, when Toby went in to investigate, leaned over it - ready for bed, in pyjamas and all - and fell in. He was perfectly fine, but a bit miffed

Sunday morning was more of the same, but after my nap (er, I mean, Toby’s nap…well, that was the intention), it was getting cloudy so we put some things away in preparation for the inevitable (we thought) rain. Not sure it ever actually arrived, though, and this morning is, once again, warm and sunny, so I think that’ll be our plans for the day arranged then

If this publishes successfully, without giving me any errors, then I might have succeeded in sorting out the problems of the last few days - through a reluctant upgrade, admittedly, but then a reluctant upgrade that works is better than a non-working blog, right?

If you pick up any errors, please use the Contact Form to let me know.

Errors won’t be fixed immediately, because the “minutes” in the title refers to how long I now have to pack and get everyone into the car (cars!) because we are off to the caravan and beach for a few days. See y’all later

Edit: Seems to have worked. I’m off!

Okay, okay, I admit it. Once in a while, I get something wrong.

Like one year ago today, when I wrote this:

I see Merry is twittering and I thought I might give that a go. I can’t actually think how it would be useful, but that’s never stopped me before

Ahem.

Another one of those silly things that tells you what you say the most. I’m sure I say “argh” more often that it claims though

Thanks to Sarah for the tweetcloud link - here’s a snapshot, but if you follow this direct link you can also hover over the words in mine and see how often they occur. I usually use initials when referring to the kids, and they seem to have been stripped out, which is unfortunate, but it’s still a bit of fun.

George and Freddy have gone to Cubs - after a great deal of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from George because he couldn’t find his Cub scarf. Mine’s been missing for weeks, so he couldn’t borrow it. Barney offered to lend his, but George couldn’t find that either. I think he eventually found one before they left, but I was pretty much tuning it all out by that stage so I can’t be sure.

I never did get breakfast on Monday, and lunch consisted of oatmeal-raisin cookies the boys had baked on the weekend, but we did eventually get on with studying. George and Freddy returned to ju-jitsu on Monday night. Barney’s been thinking about Air Cadets, which meets locally on a Monday, but decided he was too tired on Monday evening, though he says he’s going to go and check it out next week.

We ploughed on with the studies yesterday, interrupted only by someone who came to have a look at our insulation and who, I realised afterwards, hadn’t even raised an eyebrow at all the children being here during the day, or when I mentioned that we home-educate. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. Maybe home-ed is becoming mainstream?

Today has been a lazy day around here; I think an hour of active games with Beavers last night pretty much took any residual energy I might have had. We’ve all been studying hard for the last couple of weeks though, so I don’t feel too guilty. I did speak to Mr. B (the French teacher who is being so helpful in arranging Barney’s GCSE exam) again; I read him a couple of samples of Barney’s past papers and he was impressed. The exam has four components: reading, listening, writing and speaking. The first two of those are “wee buns”, as they say around here, for Barney: it’s like filling in forms for him. I don’t think he’ll have much trouble with the speaking bit, but Mr. B is going to meet him when we go in to do the paperwork for the exam-entry, and he’ll be able to give us a heads-up about any potential problems there. The writing is the major sticking-point - Barney has no exam experience and thus none of those skills which are needed on top of actual ability in the subject in order to do well in an exam. (Having said that, I’m sure there are plenty of students who do have exam experience but who still don’t have those skills - I know I was one!) That’s where the past papers are really needed for him. His first attempt at a writing paper saw a letter which answered all the required questions but with no additional information. His second attempt saw the same letter, re-written, massively long and full of details - but took much too long. On his third attempt he spent most of his time planning the letter and then ran out of time to actually write the bit that gets marked. His fourth attempt was a great improvement; he got everything completed and squeezed in nearly everything that the marking scheme mentions, although he didn’t have time to do a read-through at the end. Still, 37/42 on the weakest bit isn’t bad. We’ll keep at the practice papers and with luck, by the time he’s doing the exam, he’ll have the technique perfected. Expect lots of bits of French on this blog in the next few months as I try to keep up with him…

No Scouts tonight; one of the leaders is away on a residential with the school where she’s a classroom assistant, and it didn’t occur to the other one that she could have asked Scratchy to come in until after she’d rung all the Scouts to cancel it. Ah well. It will give Barney more time for Facebook before they shut down Scrabulous

I’m going to finish this with a mention of a very good friend who is undergoing heart surgery tomorrow. Lots and lots of fast-healing vibes are heading her way!

Last week, after our flat tyre was replaced, I noticed the car was making a strange noise. We tried to get it looked at on Friday, but the mechanic was too busy. By Monday, it was worse. The mechanic said it was a wheel joint (or something like that - I’m really not very good at car-mechanic type stuff) and it’s not going to be cheap - and the part he needs won’t be in until next week. In the meantime, he recommended that we not drive very far, because it might seize up.

So here I am, without a vehicle, for nearly a week.

I did risk driving to Beavers last night; the only other option was cancelling it and we had a visit to the library planned. The library is only about 300 metres from the Scout Hall, so we set a trail for the Beavers to follow, using stones and bits of twigs to create trail-signs, then gave them a sheet of what the signs meant - it went down very well Barney and George missed Scouts and Cubs tonight though, and we’re missing a home-ed outing that was planned for tomorrow And I have no idea how we’re going to get groceries. Public transport around here is very limited, and the only shop within walking/cycling-back-with-groceries is currently closed because it’s being rebuilt. Hm.

Apart from that, it’s been a fairly typical couple of days. Barney’s mood improved dramatically after a decent night’s sleep, and we’ve been doing lots of education-type stuff - well, with no car, it’s not like we can go anywhere anyway.

Otherwise, highlights of the last few days have included:

Four of our five Postcrossing postcards have been registered on the site as “received” - which means there should be some postcards on their way to us soon - and I’ve had a message from someone in Belarus who particularly wants a postcard from this area, so we’re going to exchange cards with her too.

George and Freddy spent some time following the links from the Usborne site, from their Internet-Linked Romans book. (Every time I say that, I have visions of centurions with laptops.) They landed on a quiz site in which every correct answer gave them a chance to score a goal against a famous person. They were in fits of giggles aiming the football at GWB’s head

I noticed Jack using his hands for emphasis - he’s been doing this for a while, but it was only yesterday that I realised who it reminded me of: Ali G. What’s that about then?

I had a look at Education City and considered whether it might be worth a subscription. I don’t think we’ll go for it though, as I’m not sure what’s available on the site justifies the cost of registering at least two and possibly three children.

Jack, trying to sound out the word “crisps” - which he calls “crips”, which complicated it slightly: “cuh, rr, ih, sss, puh, sss…” - then, under his breath, obviously trying to make the picture fit the word: “packet…”

Freddy, using “the words in the box” to “fill in the gaps in the paragraph”, wrote “The sun is… opaque.” Well, yes, I suppose it is. I think they might have been going for something else though

There was something at dinner tonight that made me think I must blog it, but I can’t remember what it was. I wouldn’t have remembered half of this post without my Twitter archive; I really must have another look at updating my Wordpress installation so I can use the Twitter plugin to stick my tweets in automagically.

It was a bit rainy this morning, so we stayed in the caravan for more time than usual. It’s not a very big caravan, but that doesn’t usually matter, since we’re in and out so much and spend so much time at the beach or playground or just generally around the site. When we do stay in on a day like today though, we do start to feel a bit on top of each other. The boys did some educational stuff we’d brought up - some maths and German for Barney, some French for Freddy and George. They also watched some television for a bit, then when the weather dried up a bit we went to the beach with the dogs. We saw what we thought were jellyfish - dozens of them, all over the beach, presumably because the tide had just gone out; normally I’d have googled to find out if they really were jellyfish, but since there’s no internet access at the caravan, that wasn’t an option. Later googling confirmed our analysis

When I say no internet access, I really mean it. To get on-line, I’d have to drive about 10 miles into the nearest big town and go to the library - which has lots of sites blocked, including my webmail There isn’t even a wireless network in town that I can steal a few megs of bandwidth from (I’ve tried! LOL)

The afternoon was spent around the site, on bikes or in the playground. At one point when we were inside, Barney looked at the glued-together jigsaw which is on the wall above the table - it’s the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album - and asked, “Which one of them is Elton John?”

Since the dogs are able to leap over the fence around the deck, I hooked their leads around the slats to keep them contained. That worked until Andie chewed through her lead - well, I assume she did, since the lead was in fine condition this morning and when I found it on the deck it was in two pieces. So that’s one lead and one collar she’s destroyed this week. Fortunately we have both a lead-doubler (which lets me walk both dogs on one lead) and the retractable leads with us.

When we were tidying up before bed and I was changing Toby, I left the pups on the deck gnawing on bones, the caravan door open so I could hear them. Until I realised I couldn’t hear them anymore. I then spent 45 minutes running around the site looking for them, with several other people from the site helping, including three teenaged boys on bicycles, who’d offered to help after I’d asked if they’d seen them. Another dog-owner from the site went out into the town and down to the beach in case they’d gone that way - I didn’t really think they’d have left the site but it was a possibility. I was just starting to get really worried when Barney rang me to tell me that they had arrived back at the caravan on their own.

I went back to the caravan and got everyone settled down and had a shower. I was just nursing Toby to sleep when there was a knock at the door - the site owner. I was ready for him to complain about the dogs running wild, but in fact he wasn’t worried about that at all. He’d found two teenage boys around the site and they’d claimed to be helping someone look for their dogs; he didn’t believe them, so they brought him to me so I could confirm their story. I was glad to do so, as they’d been doing a great job of searching for the dogs, even if they didn’t actually find them in the end. They weren’t pleased about being accused, but I could see both sides; the site owner was only trying to do his job.

Wasn’t this supposed to be the quiet life?

Picked up on dillo towers; I had to do this one because it includes my all-time favourite book. It includes some rubbish too, but any list with Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and more than one John Irving is okay by me

Look at the list of (100) books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicise the ones you want to read.
Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.
Movies don’t count.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Only five Harry Potters in there though; there oughta be seven

This having dogs business is great; the exercise and fresh air are doing us all good This morning we headed off to some parkland set on a hill; as well as woods and gardens there’s even a castle. There were quite a few people walking their dogs; we got chatting to one couple and discovered that we already knew each other through an on-line dog rescue forum We even let the pups off their leads for a while, since there was a wide-open area to run where we could see them, and no roads anywhere near - and I was very impressed by how well they did

Back for lunch, then I cleaned the kitchen and Scratchy went to basketball; my kitchen is probably now about as clean as it was when I was heavily pregnant and heavily nesting.

Still playing with Twitter too, and trying to decide if it’s worth upgrading my WP to 2.2 so I can run the Twitter plugin

I’ve been very remiss about blogging recently; the better weather has meant that we’ve been outdoors a lot, and when I have been at the computer, I’ve been moving stuff from the old laptop to the new one. So this is going to be one of those “stuff my kids said and I’m blogging to remember” posts. Please forgive any typos; I’m still getting used to the new keyboard - my old one was a US setup, plus things like the “end” and “delete” keys are in completely different places on this one. Also this laptop has one of those touchscreen-mouse thingies, and I keep touching it unintentionally and end up typing the ends of sentences halfway through the previous paragraph.

Anyway, funny things:
Jack was demanding lots of things. I was fed up with it. He came to me and said “Can I have anything I want?” In retrospect, he probably meant “is there anything I want that I can actually have?”, but I took it to mean “can I have everything I want?” and said “No!” Freddy looked up from his seat in the corner, with a gloomy look on his face and said to Jack, “See? I told you it had to be a dream!”

They were watching Doctor Who. They love this, but Freddy does get scared. I’m not really into it, so they were watching it on their own (I know, bad mother). Freddy came into the kitchen to find me and said “It’s not even half-way through and I’m already scared!” - with a big grin on his face. I said, “I think you like being scared a bit.” He agreed and went back to watch some more. A few minutes later he returned. “The monster died and then it came back. I mean, honestly, how do they even expect us to believe that?!” Then he thought for a minute and said, “How could that even happen?!”

Later there was a analysis of why the Martha shows are scarier than the Rose shows - or something like that.

George and Freddy are planning Freddy’s birthday party; he’ll be 8 next week. I said I didn’t have time to do much, so they took it upon themselves. They’ve made a list of things they need to do, produced invitations on the computer, got Scratchy to help them print them out and delivered them to their local friends, and asked me to email them to the others. I suspect I’m still going to be expected to buy and cook the food though…

Points for whoever identifies the nearly-lyrics-in-the-title. Artist and year get you extra

We have a few laptops around the house, received from a variety of sources, all of them, with one exception, acquired second-hand. Our first was bought in 2002; we were planning on moving overseas in 2003, so a portable computer seemed a good investment. It took a lot of abuse. It got bounced down a flight of stairs. It got crumbs and liquids of various kinds dropped on the keyboard. It even had a wooden bread-board dropped on the keyboard (it broke the “1″ key, but Scratchy scavenged a replacement from an old laptop at work - okay, so it was a different colour to the rest of the keyboard, but I didn’t care). And it survived.

Until… twelve hours before we were to put the family on the plane to move. I walked past the bed, where the laptop was sitting. I tripped over the cord and pulled it to the floor - and the screen went black. That laptop had so much information on it: our flight details, telephone numbers, the address where we were spending our first few days, our car-rental booking, banking info… I had to go to my mother’s house, where our desktop pc was, and plug it into the monitor there so I could copy all the details onto a notepad.

For the first few weeks after we moved, we rented a house from the boyfriend of a friend of mine. He offered us a spare monitor so my laptop was usable, though no longer portable. Then we bought a house, and put the laptop and monitor into the rec room in the basement. We moved into the house on a Friday. On Monday, our shipping was delivered, and all the boxes were placed in the basement. On Tuesday morning, we woke up to find that we’d had a flood - water was gushing from the dishwasher connection. There was about 30 cm of water in the basement, all of which had poured through the ceiling from the main floor, where there was still more water. Most of what we’d shipped was soaking wet, much of it destroyed.

Not the best day of our lives.

I don’t know how much the insurance claim came to in total; I know it was in the tens of thousands for the construction work, without even starting on the contents. The entire ground floor of the house had to be re-floored. As for the basement - even the walls there had to be taken apart, dried out and rebuilt. The insurers were fantastic; they sent in a clean-up crew immediately and worked really hard for weeks. The guy in charge of the clean-up crew picked up my laptop and water poured out of it; he sent it to be dried-out in case we could salvage data, but wrote it off and arranged for a replacement (the lone new laptop mentioned earlier). Since my laptop had been a few years old when we bought it, the replacement had far better specs, as well as being smaller and lighter and, in my opinion, quite wonderful. A few weeks later the old one was returned along with the other items which had been dried out. We borrowed a monitor from a friend, plugged in the laptop and, once we remembered the password to log on, discovered that it still worked

The replacement laptop is still being used, but it’s four years old, and it’s been abused even more than the one it replaced. The screen surround is broken in two places, the cover is cracked, and it’s having a few minor issues in its functioning - the most pressing one being a fan that works only when it feels like it. Scratchy’s taken it apart and rebuilt it twice, but the fan still isn’t functioning reliably. We could replace the fan, but the cost of the part and the labour would be more than half the cost of a new laptop…

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

So we started looking for a deal, and I have just taken delivery of a shiny, new laptop. It’s much bigger than the one I’m using - the screen is probably twice the size - but I wasn’t going to be able to find one as small as this at a price we could afford, so sacrificies had to be made. But… don’t expect to hear much from me for a few days, because I’ll be busy getting rid of Vista and moving all my stuff over.

It’s been a quiet week; we’re not going far from home because the pups aren’t old enough (or trained enough) to go anywhere yet. The boys have done some of their usual routine activities: George and Jack came with Freddy and me to Beavers and we all planted sunflower seeds in peat pots and the Beavers took them home with them, and on Wednesday George had Cubs. It still seems much too quiet without the extra running-about that we did with Barney and Henry.

C&A (the dogs! LOL) are doing really well; despite being only seven weeks old and having just been here a week, their only accidents are now when they don’t have access to outside, and they are getting better at using the bit of the garden we’ve set aside as their spot - otherwise known as “the trading post”, because if they do their stuff there, they get to trade it for a treat Everyone says they’re gorgeous - even people who are not at all into animals keep gushing over them… and I counted back to work out when they were born, and discovered that they share my birthday, a fact which excited me far more than is reasonable for a grown woman

My laptop is not behaving; it keeps giving me a scary-sounding message about a cooling system error, so I’ve backed everything up and Scratchy has been experimenting with it. He thinks it’s an OS-related problem; if he’s right it’s good because it means the laptop doesn’t have to disappear for a week for expensive repairs, but it’s bad because it might mean re-installing everything. At least I do regular backups now, so if I do have to re-install from scratch, it’s not such a big deal - just time-consuming, really. If it turns out Scratchy’s wrong… well, anybody know a good deal on a very compact notebook pc?

No Barney, no Henry, possibly no laptop for a bit… lucky I’ve got those pups to keep me busy really

Blogger has just allowed me to sign in for the first time in weeks. I’ve not even been able to load the sign-in page for ages. So those of you who have Blogger blogs - beware! I shall be doing much commenting today! Well, this morning anyway, since I won’t be here this afternoon

If the periodic wailing coming from Jack is any indication, he is coming down with the same thing from which I’m recovering. (I hope. I mean, I hope I’m recovering, not that I hope he’s coming down with it.)

Jack is not a good patient - he makes a lot of fuss when he’s not well. As a result, he gets sympathy for the first couple of hours, then we’ve all had enough.

Oh, and the too-light-for-old-and-otherwise-eyes-blue links in the sidebar are now a slightly-darker-blue. Better?

And I’ve just discovered I’ve no search-box. I’ll have to rectify that too.

I’m sick - as in, I can’t swallow, I ache all over, I’m hot then cold then hot then cold again, and I was delirious (not in a good way) all night. So since I’m no use to anyone in any other way, I changed my blog-theme. Comments aren’t threading and the recent posts widget refuses to show anything less than ten posts (so I’ve removed it until I figure it out), and I’ve decided that widgets are a pain in the neck, but other than that, I think it all works. Let me know if you find anything that’s broken.

I got tagged by Allie to tell you weird stuff!

Six weird things about me: THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the ‘6 weird things about you.’ People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says ‘you are tagged’ in their comments and tell them to read your blog.

Hm, where to start

1. When I work out at the gym, I set the exercise machines to run for 9 minutes or 18 minutes or 27 minutes - any multiple of 9 will do. The reason? The little display has 18 columns, and it bothers me when they correspond to odd units of time like eighteen-tenths of a minute.

2. My appendix was in the wrong place. When it had to be removed, it took them a while to find it.

3. I find Lord of the Rings boring. Star Wars too - I fell asleep during it twice (once at a drive-in movie theatre).

4. I don’t watch television. Consequently I often have no idea about things that become part of “mainstream culture”. But I don’t consider that becoming acquainted with “mainstream culture” would be worth the many hours of my life that it would take, so I’m not bovvered. Do I look bovvered? (Did I get that right?)

5. I’m not “trying for a girl”, and never have.

6. I often eat breakfast in bed. About 11 p.m.

People I’m tagging (quick as I can, because it seems like nearly everyone’s been tagged already):
Sharon
Hazel
Jax
June (now that she’s finally awake ;-))
Unshelled
Sally

…for all UK home-ed blogs - click “join” in the green box over there :arrow:

It’s been a quiet day around here - that’s “quiet” as in “very little noise”, not as in “not much happening”. I’ve been busy planning and organising various things. One of those things was the birth of a new blogring, much like the Early Years ring, but without a focus on any particular age-group. I figured since half of my own lot were past the EY age-group now, it might be good to link a few blogs with similarly-aged children. So if you have your own blogs (and if not, why not?! ;-)) - click here and join I’ve stuck the box-thingy at the top of my sidebar for now, just to give it a bit of startup publicity - you should see it over there :arrow:

As well as that, I’ve been writing a long list of things we’d like to do and places we’d like to see before some of our children run off to France. There’s so much we’d like to do, and the time is just zooming past. I did think of working out, but thinking was as far as I got. The boys entertained themselves for most of the day - much GameBoying (with link cables) and reading and a bit of computering going on. At one point I went upstairs to see what everyone was doing and found four boys in Barney and Henry’s room - I was told it was “a Pokemon party”. Not being even faintly interested in Pokemon, I didn’t ask for details

So I had a choice. I could get up and do stuff, or I could stay in bed and do a brief review of 2006. Well, of course I chose the latter. Except, in the end, it turned out not to be so brief. We did a lot of stuff!

In January, we recovered from Christmas ‘05 and did lots of at-home activities. I sewed (this was big news!) and we all made Flubber. We must do that again before Henry goes back to France. We also attended Chinese New Year celebrations.

In February, Freddy started his own blog. The boys visited a crisp-factory with a group of home-educators, and we had a family visit to the science centre. We ran out of heating oil and had a family sleepover so we only had to keep one room warm. We bought a food-processor and haven’t stopped using it since

March brought Jack’s fourth birthday, celebrated by a party with lots of friends. I got so sick that Scratchy took time off work. On the way back from visiting friends, Scratchy tried to turn the light on in the service-station toilets, and instead set off the silent alarm, summoning the police The boys all got very involved in speaking pig Latin, and for Mothering Sunday, I got a humongous freezer. My breadmaker died, and I turned off my laptop for long enough to install extra memory

In April, we managed to run out of heating-oil again Toby got his first tooth, and George went out on his bike and collided with a car (fortunately no major injuries). Jack started to attend a kids gymnastics class - his first programmed activity. We visited the science centre again, and Jack fell and split his head open, which resulted in a trip to Casualty. There was another trip to the hospital when I got a bit worried about Toby’s weight (or lack of). The security guard at a local shopping-centre tried to donate two little girls to my family; we didn’t take them but we did stay with them until their mother was found (which was more than anybody else did - it was all very weird).

In May we took Toby back to the hospital for an appointment involving lots of tests, lots of blood being taken George had his first night camping with Cubs (a district event). We all went on a tour of our local castle with a bunch of home-educators, and we also had a party to celebrate Freddy’s seventh birthday

George had another camping experience in June - this time with the Cub Pack. We visitied the science centre again, and went on another home-ed trip to ECOS, an environmental centre, where the boys participated in pond-dipping and various other activities. We also visited the local castle again, when Barney “worked” his first event with St John Ambulance. There was a fencing tournament on, so we all went to watch. I learned exactly how important backing up your computer data is. Barney went to Scout Camp. Toby had more hospital appointments, and so did I, having fallen downstairs. We discovered that the local paediatrician is a bozo. We planted sunflowers which grew like, um, weeds, and we heard about En Famille, an organisation who arrange exchanges between children from various European countries. We rounded off the month with George’s ninth birthday and another party

July brought sad news - Scratchy’s grandfather died. Scratchy went to New York City for the funeral. Barney camped for a weekend with friends, and the boys built a barbecue - all by themselves. We tie-dyed shirts and various other items (this is something that’s on Henry’s list of things he wants to do before returning to France LOL) The refrigerator threatened to die and the washing-machine did (and was replaced by a humongous one - hm, I see a pattern in humongous appliances emerging…) We went whale-spotting. Someone ran into my car. We doggy-sat for Chip, a collie-cross (now, sadly, gone to doggie heaven); we took her with us on a trip to the beach. We went to visit the Nomadic, a ship which ferried passengers to the Titanic and has since had a chequered past.

In August we celebrated Toby’s first birthday We also did more doggy-sitting, this time for a miniature schnauzer. We went to the museum and made African masks. Barney started cycling to the leisure-centre on his own, and went to St John Ambulance Camp. We visited a corn maze and attempted to fly kites. I started to exercise in an attempt to not look pregnant, and we visited the Carrick-A-Rede Rope Bridge. We got information from En Famille and decided to apply to do an exchange.

September brought a sudden new arrival: within the space of about three weeks after we sent in our forms for En Famille, we had emails and a telephone call from a family in France, they visited, and we acquired Henry! While the whole family was here, we visited the local castle again. We also had two trips to the science centre - one before Henry’s arrival, one after. Our sunflowers continued to grow, hitting about eight feet tall.

October was a busy month. The boys built a crystal radio and made some Roman mosaic items. Scratchy took Barney and Henry to the museum, and they also started to attend a local youth-club. Henry was invested into Scouts (and very proud he was too). We visited ECOS again, and went to several movie showings as part of National Schools Film Week. My car went in to have the damage from the accident repaired and I had to drive an Espace for two weeks - didn’t like it. We bought a second car, a Voyager - do like that We had another trip to Carrick-A-Rede Rope Bridge, and visited the Giant’s Causeway. Not sure what was scariest: the rope-bridge, the headlice, or Hallowe’en. Or it could have been the chicken-pox, which got Barney mid-month and migrated to everyone else by the end of it.

In November, Barney started to attend a fencing club, George learned to sew and Freddy got his yellow belt in ju-jitsu. The boys went to see the Belfast Giants in action, and Scratchy got so sick he actually took time off work. Toby had an appointment with a cardiologist and was found to be fine, and an appointment with another paediatrician, who broke news to us that left us reeling - but only for a short while, until we realised that it’s minor stuff and we can cope. Barney celebrated his twelfth birthday near the end of the month with the sleepover to end all sleepovers.

In December, Jack started swimming lessons and went along with Freddy and me to a special Christmas event for Beavers. George took part in a show with the other Cub Scouts, for his Entertainer badge. We all baked lots of cookies, and had two (or was it three?) trips to the science centre. Then there was Christmas, and much good stuff going on. After Christmas we went to stay with old friends and Henry made a new (bovine) friend

And while all that was going on, we still had the routine stuff: Scouts/Cubs/Beavers, St John Ambulance Cadets and Badgers, ju-jitsu, archery, swimming, soccer, trampoline and gymnastics clubs, basketball, looking after the cats and the aquarium… not to mention all the more formal studying and ordinary, everyday family life. I’m exhausted just reading about it

Here’s to a terrific 2007

You know how sometimes it seems like you’ve been really busy, but when you look back you don’t seem to have actually done anything? That’s how it’s been around here.

We did try to go swimming today, having phoned yesterday to check on the pool opening-times and having been told that it would be open until 4.30 today (then there are classes on for a couple of hours) - but when we arrived, at about two minutes to three, we were told that it was closing at 3.30. So much for that plan. We’re now intending to go tomorrow instead - in the morning probably.

The order from the Book People arrived, and this time only one item was missing. I hardly ever order from them anymore, since they decided that people in this bit of the country should pay more for postage. Those free-postage-if-you-spend-x deals? Not for us. I did complain to them when they started this, and they said it was because their courier charged them more. Right. And who chose their courier? Right.

We had a (gasp) health visitor here today, to weigh Toby. (This was part of what we agreed when we saw the paediatrician a few weeks ago.) He’s gained about a pound, which puts him actually on the charts. Only just, but still… I had an interesting conversation with the HV about Dr. Bozo; when I said he hadn’t even looked at Toby, she said “Eye contact wouldn’t be Bozo’s strong point.” (She didn’t actually call him Bozo, but that’s what I heard, because my brain now automatically translates his surname into “Bozo”.) I don’t think there’s much that’s Bozo’s strong point actually. She made faces and said a few things about him; in fact she did everything except tell me straight out that I should make a formal complaint. I do intend to; it’s just finding the time.

Anyway, Toby is clearly thriving, just small. And when she left, she said she felt that we could probably leave it for… I waited for her to say “a couple of months”… but she said “six months or so”. Clearly not much concern there then. She actually seems embarassed about how everything has been handled to this point. Not her fault, but certainly some of her colleagues should be red-faced and shame-faced.

Apart from growing, Toby has also been sleeping through, mostly. The consequences of that have included more sleep for me, but less night-nursing… and so the painters are in, Aunt Flo’s visiting, whatever you want to call it, the extra sleep was so not worth it.

We’ve been working on our Christmas jigsaw puzzles. It’s interesting to see how much more, uh, useful Jack is this year compared to last

What else? Oh, how could I forget! I had a minor panic attack this morning when my laptop flashed up a message telling me there was an error with “the cooling system” and I should “turn off your computer immediately and return it for service”. Eh? What? Off? What are they thinking?! But I did turn it off. I even unplugged it. And then I phoned Scratchy and hyperventilated. But he agreed that it probably just needed a clean, so I went and bought a can of compressed air (for £10!) and it got cleaned, and now it does seem to be working fine. I’ve backed everything up (again) though, just in case.

Other news… there is none. It’s five days before Christmas though. Time to break out the Chrimbo smilies

No sign of any of this though

One good thing about being sick in the first week of December is that when you disappear into your bedroom for the afternoon - to do, uh, preparation for the weeks ahead - your children assume you’ve gone to bed and leave you alone.

Mostly.

Jack (pushing door - it’s locked): Mummy!
Me: What?
Jack: What are you doing?
Me (faking sick voice): Resting!
A few seconds of silence.
Jack: Then what are those noises in your room?
Me: Uh, I’m writing a letter.

He seemed satisfied with that, though I think he came back to listen through the door again a little while later

All the Christmas gifts have been wrapped, except for those that haven’t been bought yet. I’m going to have to brave the shops again at least one more time I’d buy on-line, but it’s getting a bit close now, so the shops it will have to be. Most of the outstanding stuff is for people outside the immediate family. If anybody has any really good ideas for girls aged 12.5 and nearly 10, let me know in the comments - which are now working again. It appears that while trying to fix the problems with this theme, I managed to prevent anyone from commenting, but I’ve sorted it out. I don’t think this theme’s going to make it as far as Christmas though; too many annoyances

Barney, George and Freddy had swimming classes this morning. George and Freddy were also supposed to go to the gymnastics class display, but the instructor said they had to be there for 9.30 - which happens to be the time that Freddy’s swimming class finishes, and the time that Barney and George’s swimming class starts. When I told the gymnastics instructor that, she shrugged in a sort of “that’s too bad” way and said something about it being too difficult to manage individual children with so many in gymnastics. I can see that, but I do think it’s a bit off to be getting annoyed because you’ve decided that a child needs to be there 2.5 hours earlier than usual and it turns out they’ve other commitments In the end they didn’t go to the gymnastics at all.

I worked out while they were swimming - first time in a week, but it wasn’t as hard as I expected. Meanwhile, Mollycat finally came home - a full week since the last time we saw her. She’s stayed out all night a few times, and has disappeared for two nights once or twice, but she’s never been gone as long as this before, so we were concerned. However she showed up this morning, looking plump and well, so clearly she’s been getting fed somewhere else - and one of neighbour’s cats came looking for her soon afterwards, so presumably she’s been hanging out with him. Very independent, cats. Human don’t have cats, cats have staff

Yesterday morning (once I’d finally dragged myself out of bed), we made giant snowflakes from the pattern here - they turned out great. I meant to take photos of the boys with them, but forgot - I’ll try to remember tomorrow. We’re planning to make candy-cane reindeer tomorrow too, and I might even manage to sew that tablecloth I planned.

Scratchy took the afternoon off because I really didn’t feel up to taking the boys swimming - and now that Jack has a swimming lesson on a Friday, we can’t just not bother. Henry decided to stay at home with me; I think he felt the need for a bit of quiet. And it was very quiet with all the others gone

It’s fairly quiet now too, mainly because the kids who make all the noise are asleep

I am sick and I am coughing and I am too tired to get up and do anything so I am also bored. And you know what that means, don’t you? I’m playing with my blog

Yes, this new theme is fairly in-yer-face, and no, it doesn’t all quite work properly yet, but it’s only for Christmas I have to say though, those widget things aren’t any easier than a half-decent sidebar markup.

In other news… well, there isn’t much other news. Someone helped themselves to some of everyone else’s Advent calendar chocolates and nearly caused a riot. But there’s been a confession and reparations and so the less said the better. George went to Cubs last night, but Barney and Henry didn’t make it to Scouts (Barney was busy thinking - there’s a clue there - and Henry decided not to go if Barney wasn’t).

Scratchy has seen a chiropractor and with any luck his neck will shortly be back to normal. Toby’s been taking more steps (and the others have been taking turns to play with him so I can lie about feeling sorry for myself). And I still haven’t written that half-way-through-the-exchange post that I promised.

Oh, and one of the cats hasn’t come home since last Saturday. Getting a bit worried about her now