Finally Finished!

Emily has at last finished her huge "seasons" canvas/acrylic painting. She did summer and winter months ago but finally yesterday she did spring and autumn.
You can't really see from the photo but spring was meant to be in a very loose, squiggly style with splattered rain drops on it. I really like the perspective and colours in autumn.

Today Emily's lost her voice thanks to a persistent little cold that we all can't get rid of. She and Jon went off to two Christmas Fayres this morning and came back with various goodies. Apparently lots of ladies from tai chi had stalls there and made a big fuss of Emily, bless 'em. We must get a stall at the next one.

Yesterday my Mum took the big cats to the vets for their booster vaccinations and to find out more about what on earth is happening to Merlin, who is now so thin that it's really awkward to pick him up without hurting him. He's going back first thing on Monday morning for a further round of blood tests and liver function tests. Yesterday evening the poor thing had diarrhea all over our sitting room floor. He's constantly eating but since they've ruled out thyroid and diabetes they now think it could be something with his liver that's stopping him absorbing food properly. Emily's PC up here has a photo screensaver on it and recently it's been showing a lot of photos of Merlin in the last lot of snow we had, so I guess that would be about 11 months ago. He was never a fat cat but the difference between how healthy he looked then and how poorly he looks now is shocking :-((

Work wise we're plodding on through an ever increasing work load. Our run of bad luck with our business bank continues, as they've decided to bounce yet another cheque to a supplier despite the fact that by the time the statement had updated to show the bounce (and the hefty fee) it was also showing the several thousand pounds in that would have covered the cheque if only it had been 12 hours earlier. Ridiculous. What with several corporate customers being so late in paying us and a hugely long run of payments arriving just 24 hours too late, it's been a traumatic couple of months, but we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now.

With only a few days to go until December I guess we'd better get up in the loft and find Emily's advent calendar box thingy. This year the advent fairy's going to bring her a colletion of Harry Potter collectable badges in the little drawers instead of choccies ;-) so we're looking forward to seeing her enjoying that. After much thought and soul searching, we've decided against having an 8th birthday party after all. With the cashflow situation as it is, we simply couldn't afford both that and the riding lessons we'd promised Emily, so we sat her down and explained things and asked her to choose. Very sensibly, imo, she chose the riding lessons, and fortunately didn't seem in the slightest bit bothered at not having a party after all. Which is a huge weight off our minds. I'd already got lots of HP themed decorations etc so we'll still decorate everything up and I think we'll do a Harry Potter type task/treasure hunt thingy for her so she's got some games to play before finding her pressies. And a fab birthday tea with all the family, obviously!