Greeks, Chemistry and an Unexpected Cake!

Yesterday lunchtime, it came up in conversation that we don't have very much food in the house at the moment - yet another self-employment induced cashflow crisis having contributed to the lack of shopping being done. Sigh. Emily disappeared off downstairs. Next thing we know, she's made a cake! Without even using a recipe! She'd got everything out, weighed out the ingredients and mixed it all up, and only called me to have a look because she was concerned she hadn't put enough liquid in. I had no idea what she was doing and was bowled over when I found out, lol.

Indeed she hadn't put quite enough liquid in, but after advice to add some milk she carried on, added some white chocolate chunks too, and dished it out into her already prepared cake tin. Twenty minutes later out of the oven came a rather nice looking cake indeed. Emily then iced it and decorated it. It was pretty yummy actually. A little bit on the heavy side, but she knows now how to fix that next time. Clever girl :-))
Emily was a busy bee on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Monday she did more experiments from her chemistry set, this time investigating dissolving rock salt chunks vs table salt, and whether temperature affects dissolving. We also began Ancient Greeks, which was good fun. Emily spent a while writing out names using the Greek alphabet and one of her real quill pens from gathered feathers. While she was doing that, I read her the first eleven myths from Atticus the Storyteller's 100 Greek Myths and we started to get to grips with the gods' family tree.

On Monday night, Emily went with Jon to Jackie's house; Jon to attend the normal psychic circle, Emily to play with the girls. She came back very late having spent a great evening designing fashions on her nintendo and swapping them with Mei Lin, lol.

On Tuesday morning we continued with Greeks; this time looking at the Greek origins/roots of lots of English words - Emily was fascinated looking at words like autobiography and analysing the literal meaning of each part. On Tuesday afternoon it was more chemistry experiments; some fun stuff like seperating icing sugar from flour by dissolving it and then filtering it, getting the salt back out of a saturated salt solution by heating it, and so on. We've done most of this before, but if it creates enthusiasm and smiles, why not do it again??

We then went out to yoga. I'm not sure that Emily's going to continue yoga past this half term. It's starting to annoy me now - she has fun there, but there's so little yoga involved now (as opposed to when it started out, which was brilliant). It's fairly expensive for what it is and she isn't always that enthusiastic about going. Anyway, we shall see.

On Wednesday morning, it was back to Ancient Greece again, looking at lyric poetry, reading some and writing some. Yesterday afternoon, apart from making the cake, Emily spent a lot of time working through a paintshop pro lesson from a book, refining some photo manipulation skills. She created a lovely image with a giant kitty leaning against a fantasty waterfall, lol.

And now she has a cold and a horrible sore throat. Emily didn't really feel like going out to tai chi this morning, so she stayed home and we watched episodes from The Ghosts of Motley Hall (which Jon remembers from his childhood) as well as half a Harry Potter film.

Speaking of health, I'm in a bit of a state at the moment, truth be told. I just don't want to go out of the house and I especially don't want to see anyone outside the family, out of the house or not. It was a real struggle getting to yoga. Various things have knocked my confidence a lot recently, and my levels of social anxiety are increasing quite alarmingly :( We were supposed to be going to Jackie's for the day tomorrow, but I've had to call it off as I just can't face going (well, plus the fact that Emily's poorly, anyway, and I can feel her very sore throat heading this way too). Seeing friends is turning into an ordeal, which is a terrible thing to say, but there you go. I hope anyone that we do normally see who reads this realises that it's not a personal thing against them; we do know some truly lovely friends whose company I've previously enjoyed a lot, but something's clearly going wrong in my head just now. Called off swimming too. I seem to spend my time constantly worrying about the next time I have to go somewhere or see someone, and my conversation skills with anyone outside the home have lapsed to an absolute zero. Can you tell I'm great company? It would be funny if it wasn't, well, not funny.

It's not that I physically can't make myself see people. I don't have panic attacks or physical symptoms. It's purely a mental/emotional thing. I can see people, but it's hugely emotionally uncomfortable at the moment and leaves me feeling anxious and bad tempered beforehand and depressed and upset afterwards. I've never really been a people person, but things have become much worse so far this year. Obviously I'm going to have to do something about it, as cancelling seeing friends isn't an option that's fair on Emily, and nor are things like not going swimming. I don't know what I'm going to do at the moment since the "just get on with it" option is clearly running out. I daresay a visit to the doctor may have to come into it at some point. Lol - which involves going out and seeing people. *rolls eyes rather sadly*