Chaos Continues

Well, Grandad came out of hospital last Thursday. About two hours ago, we had to call an ambulance again and he and Jon have gone off in that. I don't know what's going to happen now, whether Grandad's being readmitted or not. That's why I'm blogging, lol, I'm tied to the phone on the desk waiting to hear what's going on, cos if we go back downstairs we'll never hear the phone.

Anyway, since I'm here I may as well catch up on the last week's lack of blogging. We all visited Grandad twice a day when he was in hospital. After bringing him home on Thursday afternoon, we had a fairly relaxed Friday. Emily and I finally got to celebrate a very late Beltane. We didn't have all that much time, but we did decorate the festival/seasonal tree with paper flowers, leaves and pictures of the Green Man.

We also read lots of Beltane stories and myths and tried making fairy mushroom mereingues. Um, that didn't work. Even though they were in the oven for over two hours, it still seemed like raw egg at the bottom. Not very appetising! More successful was the honey bath Emily and I had - we loved that! Used up a whole pot of (Tesco value, lol) honey all over us and got incredibly sticky and very giggly. I'm sure it's good for the skin and it was certainly great for morale.

On Saturday Emily went to what would have been her penultimate dance lesson, but despite saying she didn't want to go any more, she was upset when it came down to it, and now she DOES want to carry on going. She wants to do the modern exam which is coming up next, then the next ballet and character dance exam, and by the time they've done those, it will time for the next theatre show, which she also wants to do. I guess we'll play it by ear then. I'm really cross with the teachers, but if Emily's happy to go, then I guess that's the only point that matters. I think Emily was also upset at the thought of not seeing her friends at ballet any more, which is probably the crux of the matter, really. We see Kayleigh outside ballet, but she doesn't really see the others except in class (bad mother, must do better in that dept!).

Yesterday Emily and I got back down to some work as hardly anything's been done in the last fortnight. Think we crammed quite a lot in, really, with maths, spelling, lots of latin, finishing off Hammurabi and his code of laws in history, finishing off a biology lesson we abandoned half way through for some other crisis previously, which was all about the parts of cells. We also did a physics lesson about force, work and energy, which involved taking a slinky out in the rain, hanging it from a tree and measuring the amount of work various fruits did when they extended the slinky. Emily worked it out using the work = force x distance formula and seemed to get the hang of that easily enough.

This morning we did more latin before Grandad was taken ill. It's funny how much you miss the "normal" mundane daily life when you've had extended periods of chaos, isn't it? I guess it stops you taking "normal" for granted, at least. We're so desperate to get back to some kind of "normal" now and beginning to wonder if it will ever happen.

The lack of normality hasn't been helped by huge computer woes yet again. In order to get Emily's new PC online, I had to order a new BT voyager hub and wireless adapter, as vista refused to work with the existing wireless adapters and BT were thoughtfully refusing to release vista drivers for it as they deemed the hardware too old. OK. New stuff arrived, installed it all painlessly in fifteen minutes. Knew it was too good to be true. Within mintues of installation, our main work PC (this one) running windows XP started to freeze solid, with great regularity. I think on Saturday we must have been forced to switch it off at the power more than a dozen times, which no doubt mangled its insides thoroughly. Much hair tearing out later and we'd tried just about *everything* we could think of, every solution that we'd found searching online, you name it, we'd tried it. Nothing.

Finally on Sunday morning I managed to get the *old* BT hub and the old adapter working again on this old PC, and much huffing and puffing later finally managed to get Emily's vista PC to talk to the wireless network after all via the new adapter. So far, it's sorted, but I'm not holding my breath. I loathe computer hardware!!

On a more positive note, on Sunday night Jon's psyhic circle held an open evening and Jon did his first ever public platform mediumship demonstration, which went fabulously well. My friend Janette and two of her friends went along to support Jon as I couldn't go, having deadlines up to our ears still. After the mediumship demonstrations, all the members of the circle offered free readings to the various guests. Jon did six or seven psychometry readings, with impressive results. The evening was supposed to wrap up around 10pm but they were still going strong gone midnight when Jon finally left, so I guess you could count that as a success!

In amongst all the chaos recently, Emily and I have been having fun on some computer games. We both love the Dumbledore's Army Multiplayer Spellcasting Game and Fairy Godmother Tycoon is a huge hit too. Very addictive that one, and very, very hard!