Saturday, April 22, 2006

Welcome to Hogwarts!

Yes, a warm welcome indeed - provided you're no more than 2 inches high and you have pertinently placed holes on the soles of your shoes, lol. Drumroll, please: the lego castle is finally complete! And as you can see, someone's thrilled to bits:

Course, all the action is round the back, with moving staircases, trapdoors, revolving cupboards and all that malarky:

Emily's now keen to start on the Chamber of Secrets set. Oh, right. Should be a doddle at "only" 650 pieces compared to the 900+ of the castle, lol.

Yesterday morning it was back to ballet for Emily, for once at a decent early-ish time rather than sat bang in the middle of the day. They're well into the choreography for his hula dance thing now, so it's been hip swivels galore since she got home. Must get tickets - apparently they're going really fast.

Emily spent Saturday afternoon, planning out a Harry Potter Project (it had to come...) and designing several Winx Club posters in between bouncing around with a seemingly endless supply of energy.

This morning, she discovered this and spent ages doing all the quizzes on it. I was particularly impressed with her over the Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them Quiz - she didn't have a copy of that book (well, she does now, lol - advantages of being a book retailer; there aren't many popular books we don't "just happen to have" lying around!) so didn't know any of the answers, but once Daddy had performed his magic and a copy arrived on her desk within minutes, she got stuck in and spent an hour carefully looking everything up. Ha! Reading comprehension masquerading as blissful enjoyment - love it.

This afternoon, apart from finishing off Hogwarts, Emily and Jon have been playing treasure hunts in the garden in the nice, soft, shiny and CLEAN sand Grandad kindly got for her sandpit.....the other stuff was years old and well, when you have four cats, you don't like to enquire too closely as to what's actually hidden in it.

Jon has been aiming for the world sleep depravation endurance record, hitting bed at around 1 am and being up at 5am for umpteen mornings on the trot; that'd be why business is booming! I've been busy with the usual deadlines and also worked most of yesterday on the new shop, which is looking a lot fuller ready for its imminent launch. Also wrote a rush job for the BBC teens section about how horoscopes are calculated; they wanted it in answer to some email queries they'd had but they liked it so much they're going to publish it properly :-) I know you're supposed to slave for hours or even days writing an article, but honestly with me the rush jobs always end up being the ones I'm most proud of. I suppose I just work better when under pressure!

Meanwhile, we're all massively looking forward to going off to the caravan in St Bees in a couple of week's time. When we went for our maiden visit back in November it was of course very dark, very windy and very wet - right up my street, but it'll be lovely to be able to enjoy the rather fantastic beach with a bit more daylight and less howling wind! Love that beach. It has rocks, caves, shingle, sand, a freshwater stream, bridges, pools; it's like all your perfect beaches rolled into one. Booked our travelodge stay at (oh, how exotic!) Scotch Corner as an approximate half way point - we'll leave straight after Emily's yoga class, I think and get half way before stopping. We *were* going to then visit The Forbidden Corner the next morning before travelling on, but it turns out not to be open until noon, which is no good to us. Not on the way there, anyway. You have to book tickets for a specific timeslot, apparently. Might do it on the way back. Has anyone reading this been there?

Anyway, that's enough day dreaming about a rare break. Back to work!

1 comment:

Elderfaery said...

I've got to admit..that is a beautiful lego construction! My Willow had the same one ..but as with all of his constructions it only remains erected for a day or so..then it is disintegratd and becomes other forms..never to be seen whole again! Emily did a really good job:)