Potter-ing in the Garden

Potter-ing as in Harry, that is. Prompted by a friend's new interest in Harry Potter, Emily's re-visting an old passion. Well, the passion never really left but there's been slightly less of HP in our lives since last summer once Deathly Hallows had been devoured. He's back now, rofl. We're re-reading Half Blood Prince together and Emily wants to do an English activity based on each chapter as we finish it; she then wants to do the same for Deathly Hallows.

We read the first two chapters on Tuesday and Wednesday; on Tuesday Emily wrote two newspaper articles about the collapsing bridge/unseasonsal mists/murders etc, one from the point of view of the muggles and one from the Daily Prophet. On Wednesday, she wrote a diary entry for Narcissa Malfoy following her visit to see Snape in Spinner's End. Narcissa's visit, that is, not Emily's - although with Emily's soft spot for Snape (why else would kitten Voldemort's brother be called Severus?) I'm sure she would have loved to go along for the ride. All good stuff, very imaginative indeed.

We've also been doing lots more work on Emily's garden project. She built a choice chamber for woodlice and tested to see whether they preferred light or dark, whether they preferred damp or dry, and then which of damp or dark was most important by offering a choice between light/damp vs dark/dry. The woodlice, ultimately, were cleverer than we thought they were and opted for crawling *under* the wet cotton wool in the light half, thereby outwitting the experiment somewhat! Emily has also built a snail home, and we're going to keep track of which snails end up where. An experiment is in progress with various seeds growing against wet cotton wall in tall glass jars; Emily has also been dissecting seeds to see the embryo plants/cotyledons inside. She planted pumpkin seeds in the garden too, to join the veggie patch - the plants sprouted in two days and are growing huge.

Went to Jacki's last Friday and had a great day planning renovations to an old caravan and doing mental maths tricks with the three girls. We also went to the psychic circle as normal on Monday night just gone - Emily had a ball with Mei Lin, Jasmine and Alex, as ever. I had a slightly less wonderful time since an elderly lady there saw fit to give me a huge lecture on why Emily should go back to school. Just what I needed in my current fragile state of mind. Gee, thanks.

It's Jon's birthday on Sunday; we're having a barbecue to celebrate :-)) Mind you, how we're going to buy the food is a bit of a mystery at the moment, considering the BBC still have not paid. We were promised last week that a same day transfer would be made ensuring the money had cleared into our account this Monday. So we wrote cheques. All ten of them bounced. The money didn't arrive. £300 in bank charges. Again. That's about the seventh time they've given us a date and then not followed through. Two days ago we were told again that a same day transfer was taking place immediately AND that a cheque was being sent to us. Neither the cheque not the transfer materialised. I'm so running out of patience and am about to well and truly lose my temper on this one......