More Weather

Emily's still got a heavy cold but so far, touch wood, it hasn't developed into the chest infection that normally follows whenever she gets a cold.

We've been working away on the weather still this week and we've covered loads in the last few days. Emily has, at various points:

• Colour coded a world map to show climate zones
• Used her PC atlas to find two places in each of the climate zones, research the weather in those places and write it up
• Done a lot of work on air pressure including experiments to see whether air takes up space, whether air weighs anything, and what happens when air heats and cools (bottle with a balloon over it in hot vs cold water etc)
• Researched and written about what causes high and low pressure and what effects each has on the weather
• Found out what isobars on weather maps are/show
• Done her daily weather recordings
• Found out about thunder and lightning, drawn a fab diagram to show what happens during a thunderstorm and why, and tried various experiments to produce her own lightning....these latter, unfortunately, without success despite following the instructions to the letter. Will have to look for some different ones. We did one a long time ago with a battery connected to a steel file which when you stroked it with a wire produced sparks and affected a radio, but I'm looking for something a bit more dramatic than that this time.

Today in the post we received this free interactive weather presentation disk from the met office. Haven't had time to try it out yet, but it's looking promising.

Emily was too poorly to go to football practice on Monday evening, but she did go with Jon yesterday evening to watch Scunthorpe at home to Port Vale (3-0!) and they've also got tickets for Saturday's game against Cheltenham and the big cup game against Aston Villa next Wednesday.

Yesterday afternoon Emily went to yoga, first lesson back after the summer, and was really pleased to get her level 3 certificate. She also had her photo taken for the centre's publicity leaflets and website.

We're planning to go off to the caravan for a week at the end of the month, so it's all systems go at the moment to try to get things up to date, business wise. I sent off my first journalism assignment; I'm already stuck on the second one, lol. A bit of application and dedication required, I think - won't be able to wing this one with five minutes here and there. Jon hasn't had time to do any of his art course for weeks :-(( Outside pressures are really getting to us at the moment so it will be wonderful to have a break.

Tonight we're promised big thunderstorms - good timing, as Emily's work today was focused on thunder/lightning. I rather wimpishly refused to go outside this afternoon when she was collecting her weather data - I'm afraid the garden has turned into my vision of a nightmare with massive spiders and webs **everywhere** and a plague of daddy long legs or crane flies to boot. Just stood at the back door I counted 18 webs complete with large inhabitants and that was only within immediate view, let alone the other dozens and dozens further up the garden. It's revolting. I don't remember it being like this any other September :-// We seem to hosting a spider ball indoors too, they're popping up every flippin where. Late last night I woke up to find Juliet pawing at something on the floor by the bed. Through my sleepy haze I left her to it but was vaguely aware of her eating something, with difficulty. Looked an hour or so later when I let them out and there were three HUGE spiders legs left where she'd been :-///

Speaking of cats, I've also just spoken to the vet about Merlin. Good news is that they can't find any evidence of liver, kidney or blood problems, nor of a thyroid issue or diabetes. Bad news is that it's therefore a bit of a mystery why he's losing so much weight and generally losing condition. His bald patches have improved now we're finally flea free though (rolls eyes - that was a lot of fun) so that bit looks to have been just simple dermatitis. We've got to keep an eye on his weight weekly and get back to them if there's any further deterioration but she said that generally, for a cat of his age, he seems to be in pretty good shape. Bizarre.