Boing, Boing, Boing!

It's been a very bouncy day, as Zebedee might say.

Well then, yesterday: Romy and Hazel came over to play. Jonathan put up a little tent in the garden (freebie from Viking Direct - one of their more useful ones, I have to say, as the proud owner now of SIX badminton sets...) which Emily loves to bits, and the girls spent a while playing in and around it and making playdoh food.

We also brought Emily's polly pocket collection up from the dining room where it's been for, oooh, ever and she's rediscovered the joys of playing with it. She spent all evening yesterday and all morning today on a very involved make believe scenario of some sort with it.

I managed a whole two hours in the garden this afternoon (I'm so NOT an outdoors person, especially in summer) and we had a loooonnnng play of horses (Emily's space hopper, hence the boing boing boing, went on for hours!) and Henry's Hunting Lodge (tent) with musical accompaniment from bells, castanets and other strange scrapy rattly instruments the names of which I totally forget (if indeed I ever knew). All very noisy and lots of fun, although I do wish it would rain properly so we can picnic in the tent and listen to the noise.

Emily and Jon have been doing a lot of swordfighting lately, inspired by the fight scenes in various Romeo & Juliets. Think we'll make enquiries to see if there are any fencing clubs around here. I loved fencing when I was younger (and slimmer!) and I think Emily would enjoy the elegance of it.

Jon's car passed its MOT today, which was rather a surprise. Business wise things are turning frantic again - how come there are never enough hours in the day?? Had v.v. bizarre conversation with very nice lady customer who informed us that she wanted to cancel her Paul McKenna order because she'd been told by his company that the CDs had been out of print for six months and were NOT being reprinted. At all. Ever. Which was rather odd as the whole lot was released in 2005 editions back in April, and boxloads of the newest of the newer new editions are on their way to us as we speak. Sigh. What a fiasco that particular reprint has turned out to be.

Must find time to bite the bullet and upgrade our Actinic Catalog software to the latest version soon. The CD's been sat on the desk for a week now, but upgrades have never yet gone smoothly so it's a case of getting in the right frame of mind to deal with the inevitable chaos, worry, lack of technical support and lost orders until it magically decides to behave itself. A frame of mind which, since the version we're currently on is having a long-term tantrum with customer order confirmation emails, we shall indeed have to get into. Poo.

Right. That's enough rambling. Off to Normanby Hall on a peacock feather hunt. Minus the spacehopper, if Emily can be persuaded to part with it.