Playing Catchup

Time is running away fast again and no matter how quickly we run we only ever catch a glimpse of its backside sashaying out through the door :-/

Last couple of days have involved:

• Emily playing some extremely involved Harry Potter lego/Barbie/Polly Pocket thing in her bedroom for *hours* and then some more *hours*, listening to more HP cds and chunnering away, lost in her own little world.
• Breakdown of our sky system; calls to the maintenance contract people; visit by the engineer; discovery that it still wasn't working; more calls to the maintenance people; half an hour on hold; discovery that they'd booked the call to Jon's Dad's sky account (which is completely seperate to ours) instead of the right account and had re-programmed his stuff instead of ours........despite being repeatedly told, when booking the call, that it referred to our account not his.
• Emily's drama lesson which covered a lot of speech work and more practice for the play.
• Emily's ballet lesson which the teacher chose to be absent from (again) leaving it as utter chaos with her well-meaning but not exactly well organised teenage assistants. Came home armed with oodles of dates for show rehearsals, photo calls for the programme, details of hairstyles and make up required, blah blah.
• Catching up (finally) with all outstanding orders including the very healthy uptake of orders in the new shop.
• Celebratory dance on finding that google has picked up our new shop URL and that our rankings have in fact further improved - we're now either number one or in the first half a dozen for every single one of our major keywords and phrases :-))
• Taking Jon's Dad to Grimsby Hospital for a "complete waste of bl**dy time" (his words, not mine). Emily came with me and was utterly adorable. She sat for the entire two hours reading Harry Potter Azkaban and playing Harry Potter hangman with me. An elderly couple opposite were incredibly impressed with her behaviour and decided to test her spelling and arithmetic. I hate it when people do that, but they were very encouraging and complimentary and nice about it, so I let it go. They were very positive about home ed too. I think they were just surprised to find a child who sat quietly and patiently and played something half way intelligible instead of running around annoying everyone.
• Listened to alarm bells ringing in our heads as both my Mum and my Dad now have urgent hospital appointments pending for serious issues. Coupled with Jon's Dad's state of health the picture is far from rosy :-((
• Quoted for three new big freelance jobs. Hopeful that at least one of them will go for it. Keep reminding myself that we ought to go and *look* for clients - so far every client we've ever had has found us, lol, instead of the other way round!
• Filled in VAT return and marvelled at how we can "owe" inland revenue such a large amount of money. Someone remind me of the point of VAT, again, other than to penalise small businesses?
• Dramatically re-thought our educational philosophy (not as in a document for the LEA, but as in really re-thinking where we're going and why)
• Watched the first half hour of the big brother launch show before completely giving up. When they put normal people back in there, I'll go back to being interested. The first two or at a push three shows were fun, imnsho, but I'm no longer remotely interested in watching a bunch of rather odd extremely up-themselves people. The beauty of the first few series was that each contestant was "get onn-able with" if you see what I mean, in isolation, so the chemistry and interaction between them was interesting. When you have a bunch of people who seem obnoxious/annoying in isolation, they simply become more obnoxious in a group. Or maybe I'm just geting old.......
• Watched lots of David Attenborough videos and DVDs with Emily.
• Attempted to explain the Da Vinci Code to Emily.......which is one instance of the blind leading the blind as I've never read the flippin' thing nor read much about it either. We do a roaring trade in all kinds of biblical intrigue stuff, though, so I suppose I ought to get up to speed. Besides, ever since falling in love (??) with Leonardo on this DVD and seeing part of the set at Lincoln Cathedral, Emily's been itching to know what it's all about. She wants to know about the Mayan Calendar and 2012 too. Sigh. I'm not sure how someone who used to have nightmares about black holes and the sun burning up will take to the end of the world!