Miserable Monday.....

What a horrible, cold, wet, dark, miserable day.......

I've finally succumbed to the cold and put the heating back on.  Small Dog is all curled up beneath two of her blankys which is about the best thing you can do on a day like today. 

Despite the cold, I've had quite a productive day, working on a new catalogue as our old one is so hopelessly out of date.  It's tempting to believe that EVERYONE is on the internet these days and can therefore access our website, but in reality that is far from the case.

I had a phone call from a lady at the weekend who had seen our ad in the latest issue of The Doll's House Magazine but doesn't have a computer or internet access so wanted to know if I could send her a copy of our catalogue.

"Yes of course", says I.

"No problem at all".

"It will be my pleasure".

However, after hoiking it out of the bowels of my laptop and dusting it off, it rapidly became apparent that I would have to compile a new one as it featured barely a single currently available toy or kit.

I'm so out of practice at producing anything in hard copy, aside from our little brochure which I regularly update and goes out with every order.  A proper catalogue, from which people can select and make purchases is a whole different kettle of fish. 

In addition, so many of our toys are one-offs, and all are listed on our website for instant purchase, so a paper catalogue is out of date almost as soon as it's printed and certainly within a week or so.

However, a customer has requested a catalogue, so a catalogue she shall have.  And now that it's finished, all I need to do is keep it updated on a monthly basis rather than leaving it to languish, unloved, for years on end.

Why do I feel I'm making yet another resolution doomed to fail.......?

Daylight robbery.....

Tonight's the night we put our clocks back by one hour.

However, that extra hour in bed in no way makes up for the fact that tomorrow it will be pitch dark at 5 pm

It already feels like an awful long haul till next spring despite the fact that we're now in freefall towards Christmas.

Our hopes of moving house before Christmas are fading fast.  With just 7 'useful' weeks remaining it would require a small miracle.  Having spent the last 8 days with a tentative offer on the table, our prospective buyer has apparently disappeared into the ether, taking his spurious (and ludicrously low) offer with him.

Now, I know that you don't have to actually LIKE the person who buys your house, but it seems to me that a measure of mutual respect and trust would be a pre-requisite for entering into a transaction worth several hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Or is that just me.

And to add insult to injury, the couple who were due to view at midday simply didn't turn up. No notice, no phone call to the agent to cancel.....  Having spent all of yesterday afternoon and this morning making the house immaculate, to say I'm a bit hacked off is putting it mildly.

I'm so hacked off I could spit.

When I rang the estate agent to see what was occurring, he committed the cardinal sin of making no end of excuses for the no-show couple which tipped my hacked-offedness into full blown anger and I subjected him to a 10 minute rant on the importance of good manners and common courtesy which reduced him to an apologetic wreck.

Sheesh.....  knowing that we'd been given the run around for a whole week by one of their 'clients' you'd have thought that us having a no-show from another lot this morning would have prompted them to show at least a modicum of tact and diplomacy in our direction.

Ah.

No.

Wait.

What am I thinking.....?

Expecting an estate agent to be sensitive to the stress and anxiety of a vendor is about as likely as an anaconda considering the stress and anxiety of a tethered goat.

Which is to say, not at all.

*sigh*

However, I've just thought of at least one good thing about the clocks changing....

Yardarm will arrive a whole hour earlier tomorrow.

YAYYYYY!!!!!

Triumph of hope over expectation.....

It never ceases to amaze me, how even the slightest glimmer of hope, no matter how faint, can lift the spirit.  Which is just as well, given the trials and tribulations of the past week in which extensive negotiations on the house front have thus far failed to reach a resolution.

We've been tantalising close a few times, but on each occasion our hopes have been cruelly dashed, so we are still on tenterhooks, awaiting a decision one way or the other.

So in the midst of the maelstrom, I've been using work as displacement activity, which is probably a first for me.  Every day this week, to take my mind off the temptation to speculate on what is likely to happen (or be more more accurate NOT happen)  I've been working exceptionally hard and have completed not one, not even two, but THREE brand new toy kits which will be released early next month.  

This unexpected bonus has got me thinking, and it seems to me that perhaps displacement activity of the creative kind is exactly what I need at the moment.

So, having mothballed La Mignonette last month, during the Great Cleaning Frenzy, I'm inclined to get it back out and have a proper go at it.  This will entail putting all my tools etc away for viewings etc, but that's a small price to pay for a bit of creative 'me time'.  I'd ended up stuck up a creative cul-de-sac with it during the summer but I feel I could do it more justice now so I may have inadvertently stumbled upon A Damn Fine Plan.

In other news, our current industrious work ethic seems to have shamed Small Dog into taking her responsibilities more seriously.

Far be it from me to suggest that this conscientious behaviour might have something to do with the fact she'd just come in from the garden with cold, wet feet and needed a warm lap to dry and warm them up......

Or perhaps she's acutely aware that it's almost time to announce Employee of the Month.
 

Weary Wednesday......

It feels as though I've been dragged through the emotional wringer over the past 5 days.  I've gone from the heady heights of joyous excitement to the depths of despair and back again.

Several times.

Why I thought any of this house-moving mallarkey would be, if not exactly easy, then at least not demoralisingly difficult, I have no idea.  

Every single house move I've ever made (and over the past 35 years since I bought my very first flat there have been several) has been dogged by delays, gazumping, gazundering, endless frustration, unexpected expense, and in one spectacular case, downright daylight robbery!

I naively thought that in the 9 years since my last traumatic relocation, things might have moved on, and the process would have become more transparent, easier to negotiate and generally less wearing on the nerves.

Ha!

I don't know WHAT I was thinking.....

Suffice to say I'm losing all round.

Losing sleep, losing confidence, losing the will to live.

The only things I seem to be gaining in spades are grey hairs.

 

A word from our sponsor.....

As a child of the 60's I loved Stingray, Fireball XL-5, Thunderbirds, Catpain Scarlet, et al.  But my overall favourite was Stingray.  I definitely carried a torch for Marina, the alluring but sadly mute former slave girl of King Titan, evil aquaphibian ruler of the underwater city of Titanica.

I have no idea what she saw in Troy Tempest.  Admittedly he was ruggedly handsome and square-jawed (quite literally) but he didn't move his lips when he talked and he had funny, squinty eyes.

But I digress.

Aquaphibians.

I think I might be turning into one. 

This is a direct result of all the rain we've been having.  I'm developing webbed hands and feet and there is a definite emergence from the side of my head of what might be gills.

Also my hair sticks up funny like theirs when I get up in the morning.

And my bum looks just like theirs from the back. 

And I sometimes sound a little bit like them in the night.

I'm not sure whether this is a Good Thing or not.

Probably not.

In other news.... well there is no other news.  Unless you count Small Dog being given a new bacon wrapped rawhide chew yesterday.  

Initially she buried it in her basket, spending absolutely ages nosing it around, trying to get it under the cushion.  It was only when she glanced up from her labours and saw us both sitting watching her that she came over all paranoid, and decided to hide it in a more secretive spot.

She disappeared into the sitting room and when she emerged some time later, I assumed that she'd found the perfect place behind the sofa, or under a cushion, so I happily let her out in the garden in a state of unsuspecting innocence at to her intentions.

I present to you Exhibit One.....

Upon her return from the garden, she bustled in past me with her head down, as she is wont to do, but she had a guilty look about her and her ears were flat down.  Thus alerted to the possibility of wrong-doing, I intercepted her trying to get upstairs, presumably on her way to attempt to clean her face on our newly laundered duvet cover.

I suppose if that expression on her face says anything, it's

"It's a fair cop guv.... you've got me banged to rights."

It took PP several goes with the wire brush and Dettol to get all that hard packed mud out of her whiskers.  We have no idea where the hide chew is.  We hope she's forgotten all about it.  Which is entirely likely.

Except probably, at some point in the next few weeks, she'll have an epiphany and suddenly remember it.  Whereupon she'll surreptitiously go and disinter it, then smuggle it indoors to hide yet again.

If we're very lucky she'll simply bury it in her carry basket in the kitchen.  If we're not we'll find the festering, stinky object under a pillow, or down the side of the sofa next to the  TV remote control.

Quite why people think she's a cute, ladylike, little dog is beyond me.....

Curl up and dye.....

I've been hard at it all this week, preparing two new Christmas kits to coincide with the unveiling of our vintage miniature Christmas blog on November 1st.

This has entailed the dyeing of a quantity of silk ribbon as I couldn't find quite the right colour in my sizeable stash.  I'd quite forgotten the joy of dyeing.  In fact I enjoyed it so much that I've decided to do a dye batch just as soon as I receive new supplies of plain white silk ribbon in various widths.

I've also been tackling one of my least favourite tasks, stocking up on miniature wigging packs.  It's such an unfavourite task that I always leave it till I'm down to zero packs and have absolutely no alternative but to re-stock.  It's a messy job.... the fine filaments of viscose get everywhere... in my eyes, up my nose, down my throat.... and I end up covered in a fine film of hair which subsequently transfers to everything I touch, which in my current 'must-keep-the-house-clean-and-tidy-for-viewings' frame of mind is a Very Bad Thing.

Even Small Dog starts sneezing when I go anywhere near her, although I think that's a bit rich coming from someone as patently hairy as she is.

Nevertheless, I've persevered and battled on, and now have a full stock box.

Hurrah!

Despite having ticked off loads on my To Do List, I've got a very busy few days in prospect.  It's already half way through October and the hounds of time are nipping at my heels.

I'd better go and make a start then......
 

 

Selling my collection.....

As part of my seemingly endless downsizing exercise, I've decided to sell a sizeable proportion of my private miniature toy collection, amassed over the past 30 years.

Many of the items are by artisans long since retired or no longer trading.

I've made a start on listing them on the website HERE, but there are far too many to list all at once so I'll be adding them regularly, on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Well that's the plan anyway.

They range from the merely lovely to the absolutely fabulous and include heirloom pieces of unsurpassed miniature craftsmanship, such as this amazing tool bench complete with 50 meticulously detailed hand tools.

On a more whimsical note, there's Bruin the Bear, who once graced the ground floor of my toy shop and was a particular favourite of the proprietor, Mr Albert Lowther.

From my boxes of unfinished projects, comes this wonderfully distressed artist's table, filled with all manner of messy paraphernalia.....

Not to mention the first few of my collection of pewter miniatures by Hantel, Minnie Maria and Warwick Miniatures....

Many, many more still to come so keep checking back on the website......

 

Nip & Tuck......

For some time now, perhaps the past 2 years or so, I've had a recurring lump on my face, just under my left eye.

It used to be tiny, would hang around for a while, then disappear as quickly as it had arrived.

Over time it's been getting bigger with each reappearance, and the time intervals have shortened.  Just lately the bottom edge of the frame of my glasses has been rubbing against it, and it's been been alternately burning and throbbing.

I'm not usually over-concerned about these things.  It's not as if it's destroying any natural beauty or anything.  But it's definitely getting bigger and I can feel people looking at it thinking "what's that THING on her face".

All I need is for it to start sprouting hairs and I won't even need to dress up for Halloween.

I know in the grand scheme of things it's the very least of my worries, but it's bothering me now, so today I took my lump to the GP to get it looked at.

He looked at it, prodded it a bit then said it wasn't very noticeable at all.  Perhaps he should have gone to Specsavers because even Small Dog has noticed it and she's not renowned for observational skills unrelated to squirrels/pigeons/cats etc.

He then proceeded to regale me with how awful it would be to have it removed.  This took me aback slightly.  Aren't doctors supposed to reassure you and say stuff like "Now this won't hurt at all" when it patently will.

Being told that it WOULD hurt (despite a local anaesthetic) and would leave a scar wasn't quite what I was expecting.  He leavened this advice with the assurance that the scar would be as small and neat as possible and not a great sweeping gash like a pirate's scar.

At this point I wondered if he might have been drinking till I realised he was making an attempt at humour.

So anyway, he's going to make a referral to a plastic surgeon who will take a look at the lump and decide what can be done.  Seizing the humour baton and setting off down the home straight with it, I asked if the surgeon might see his way clear to doing something about my jowls and double chin, or a bit of cheek(y) liposuction.

Sadly this request fell on deaf ears and I was then treated to a mini lecture on what the NHS can and can't fund.

Sheesh.... I was only joking! 

Needless to say, as soon as I got home, I immediately Googled 'removal of sebaceous cyst' to find out what the procedure entailed.

BIG MISTAKE!

Honestly, if you're even the slightest bit squeamish or if the mention of causing sebaceous material to spray across the surgery room might make you feel a bit faint, I urge you, under no circumstances to look at THIS LINK.  As if that wasn't bad enough, I foolishly decided to  watch a YouTube video of the procedure but couldn't get beyond the first 10 seconds.

EWWWWW! 

I can't say I'm looking forward to it, but it's either that or continue to look like the Creature From The Black Lagoon for the foreseeable future.

 

Sunny Sunday....

Lovely sunny day today, which is good, especially as yesterday's weather was completely schizophrenic..... sunshine, rain, sunshine with showers then hail.

Yes HAIL.

Great lumps of ice which came bouncing down the chimney and hissed into the fire, giving Small Dog a conniption fit.

It was even more spectacular out in the garden, bouncing off the table and the patio in all directions, like shrapnel.

So.

Today's calmer weather is more reassuring, but although it's sunny, it's also quite cold.  I've been busy this morning, packaging orders and getting organised to hit the ground running tomorrow with a batch of casting to complete.

However, enticed outdoors by the sunshine, this afternoon the three of us set off into the woods behind our house, hunting for horse chestnuts.  Predictably it was very muddy underfoot (or in Small Dog's case, underpaw) and she quickly became absolutely filthy and covered in leaves.  Having successfully filled two carrier bags with chestnuts, we set off home, Small Dog jauntily out in front, oblivious to the fact that she was heading ever closer to her nemesis.  A session in the shower to wash all the mud and woodland debris out of her fur.

If you've never seen a Yorkshire Terrier after it's had a bath then you're missing out on comedy gold.  As soon as she's released from the towel after a quick rub down, she races through the house at 100mph, rubbing her face on the carpets, rolling on her back and wriggling like a mad thing, flying up and down stairs several times in quick succession till eventually she falls into her basket, completely exhausted.

That's where she is now.... exuding the delicate aroma of damp dog, paws twitching as she chases squirrels in her dreams.

It's definitely a dog's life......

Picture perfect.........

Have finally managed to track down Small Dog's pet passport in anticipation of her rabies shot this afternoon.

Inside the passport, under 'Description of Animal' (which Small Dog opined should simply read "Gorjus") there is a blank space for 'Picture of the Animal (optional)'

Due to a slight difference of opinion between ourselves and Small Dog, we have never been able to agree on a suitable photo.

For example, she immediately declined this.....

Closely followed by this.....

This......

And this......

So, instead, I suggested photographs more representative of her preferred daily activities....

She remained unimpressed.

She helpfully suggested one of her camping photos, so I offered these......

 

 

.... to which the reception was definitely chilly.

So.....

Still no joy.

By now I was beginning to get a bit fed up.....

I have to say that Small Dog is remarkably lacking in the sense of humour department.

Or so I thought till I came across this .......

However, in the end, after much wrangling, we all decided on this....

Displacement activity.....?  How very dare you!


 

A shot in the arm.......

Had my seasonal flu jab yesterday and have been feeling the effects ever since.  The composition of the vaccine changes every year, depending on the flu strains currently in circulation so it's a bit like playing Russian roulette vis-a-vis possible side effects.

Some years I've had no reaction at all, others I've felt somewhere on a spectrum from slightly to very ill for hours or days afterwards.  A few years back, it was routine to wait for 15 minutes in the doctor's surgery before going about your business.  Nowadays it's in and out quick smart with barely time to sit down.  

Yesterday, after my jab, we had to do some food shopping, and no sooner had I set foot in Tesco than I came over all peculiar.  Sort of woozy and faint with ringing in my ears.  It passed after a short while but over the course of the afternoon and early evening I felt increasingly 'not right', culminating in a very restless night, alternately roasting hot then shivering cold, skin crawling, diffuse aches and pains..... in fact a feeling not dissimilar to flu.

As far as I'm aware the vaccine isn't 'live' so shouldn't cause symptoms similar to the illness it's designed to prevent, so perhaps my raddled immune system is simply waving the white flag in surrender.

Even Small Dog is not immune to this week's medical shenanigans as this afternoon she's due to have her rabies booster vaccination.  Regular readers will be well aware of her strict zero tolerance policy on all things vet-related so we're none of us looking forward to it.  She has to take her Pet Passport with her which means I've got to go and hunt it out following the Great Clear Up.  I have a vague recollection of putting it in a desk drawer a few weeks back but to be honest, it could be anywhere.

In the meantime, Small Dog seems to have got wind of the impending vet visit and has made herself scarce......

 

Halloween Specials.....!

Despite the fact I'm knee deep in new Christmas kits at the moment, I've managed to find enough time to design and produce a Kit of the Month for October, which, fittingly, is a little wee toy witch doll complete with tiny broomstick. 

They're literally flying off the website (pun absolutely intended) and since I won't be making any more this side of next Halloween, if you want one you'd better hurry!

Information on the kit, plus other Halloween Specials currently on the website can be found in this whimsical slideshow.....

 

What a grey day............

I'm hoping that today is going to be a little oasis of calm in an otherwise turbulent week.

Well I can hope can't I....?

Yesterday I managed to neatly synchronise two appointments in town which on their own would have taken several hours each.

First off, the dentist for a routine check up.  My usual dentist has left the practice so I was a bit apprehensive at the prospect of breaking in a new one.  She was extremely thorough though, and spent a considerable time poking about with an assortment of scary looking tools.  Just when I thought that lockjaw was about to set in, she announced that she would do a quick scale and polish.  I naively latched onto the mention of the word 'quick' which must mean something completely different in her native language as she then spent a further considerable time descaling teeth right down to my skull.  By the time she finished, my raddled nerves were jangling from head to foot and the entire panoply of weird MS sensations were coursing up and down my face.  

All a-jangle, and with 20 minutes to spare before my next appointment, we popped into our estate agent for a friendly chat and to find out what was, or to be more exact, wasn't, happening.  Our chap has obviously graduated with honours from the Estate Agent's School of Charm, with top marks in Bright Optimism and merit in Calm Reassurance.  Apparently we're doing incredibly well with the number of viewings we've had and he's absolutely, categorically, positively, definitively certain that we'll soon have an offer on the table.  Not quite sure how he can be so certain but presumably he knows the local market, what's selling and what's not, and at what price.  He is, of course, fully aware that the clock is ticking in all manner of ways, not least the expiry of his contract when we can take our business elsewhere.  He is also aware of the pressure we're under to get the house we want.  Of course we know he can't conjure up a cash buyer out of the blue and as he reasonably pointed out, we've been on the market less than 2 weeks, which in the current climate is no time at all, so we're not to worry. 

Slightly mollified, I set off for my next appointment..... the optician for a routine check up and sight test.  I was a bit taken aback when she informed me that I have the early stages of cataracts in both eyes!  I know I've been feeling my age recently but that's ridiculous.  Apparently I've nothing to worry about YET but they want to keep an eye (no pun intended) on them.  When I asked if I wasn't a bit young *cough* to be having cataracts I was even more surprised to learn that their onset is probably due to one of the meds I'm occasionally prescribed for MS.  I'm sure I'd have remembered if anyone had mentioned the possibility of early onset cataracts as a potential side effect but perhaps I've got early onset deafness too.

So I set off from home, if not exactly with a spring in my step, at least feeling moderately OK, and returned a few hours later, a jangling wreck.

Honestly, some days it's just not worth chewing through the straps.....

Monday. Again......

Mondays do seem to come around with a wearisome regularity.  I'm not a great fan of Mondays in general.  In my book we should cut straight to Wednesday, from which the weekend is but a hop, skip and a jump.

Mondays seem to run to a different timescale than other days of the week.  Much slower and draggier.  Especially if it's raining.

Which it is.

I don't really understand why I have it in for Mondays.  When you're self-employed, the days of the week are all pretty much the same.  And given that I tend to work for at least some of each weekend it's not as if Saturdays and Sundays are luxuriously lazy.

I didn't quite manage my weekend off.  After the paperwork debacle on Saturday, I started off yesterday well enough with some long overdue 'Sandra Time'.  However, around lunchtime, the sun was shining and PP decided that now was the time to attend to a blocked gutter outside the kitchen.

This entailed PP up a ladder with a trowel, while I was tasked with simultaneously holding the ladder and trying to balance a bucket precariously above my head while she tipped dollops of evil-smelling gloop into it.

Needless to say, not all of the evil-smelling gloop ended up in the bucket.

After most of the gloop had been shovelled out, we then tried to shoosh water along the gutter from the hosepipe.  Admittedly, this did have the advantage of washing most of the evil-smelling gloop out of my hair but did little to unblock the downpipe, which was jam-packed with decaying leaves, seagull feathers, moss, dirt and general detritus.  So we dismantled the downpipe junction thingy and I went up the garden with a stick to poke all the muck out of it.

Thereafter PP spent nearly half an hour trying to wedge it back in place without pulling the entire gutter away from the soffit. 

Lovely way to spend a Sunday.

Thereafter, with the sun still shining, we took Small Dog down onto the seafront for a stroll.  While she was picking up her wee-mails, I idly browsed a poster on the railings.  Apparently the zombie apocalypse is coming to Hastings.  

Quite why this surprised me I have no idea.  Hastings is as likely as place as anywhere else to have hordes of brain-devouring zombies staggering around.  Perhaps even more so.

Further perusal revealed that it is a game, a bit like laser quest, played in one of the parks in the town.   You dress up in army fatigues and get put in a sort of scary maze with a laser gun.  Then actors dressed as zombies are let loose to stalk and hunt you down.  From the pictures on the poster they're unnervingly realistic.  You have to score a hit to their head with your laser gun in order to kill them.

Quite why anyone would pay good money to have the bejeesus scared out of them in this manner is beyond me, but each to their own I suppose.

In other news, things have gone eerily quiet on the house-moving front.  I feel like I'm on the Marie Celeste, beached in the middle of an endless desert, with tumbleweed rolling across the deck.

We have to go into town later so we're going to pop into our estate agent to find out why the hiatus and give them a bit of a poke. Let alone anything else I'm spending an inordinate amount of my time trying to keep the house spotlessly clean and tidy, which doesn't rank high on the 'list of things I really love to do' at the best of times.

Ho hum...... better go and get on then I suppose.



 

Pointless and futile..........

A dismal start to the day has morphed into a beautifully sunny afternoon, although there's still a definite damp chill in the air.

I allowed myself a slight lie-in this morning and after a leisurely breakfast, thought about what to do with myself.  However my eye alighted on a teetering pile of paperwork which I'd put aside to deal with over a week ago and which has been added to every day since.

There are many advantages to working from home, not least the fact that the commute to work takes less than 10 seconds, but the major disadvantage is that work is always there, hovering on the edge of my consciousness, making me feel guilty about shutting the workroom door on it.

The pile of papers and I, eyed each other warily for a while, till with a heavy sigh I decided to investigate its depths.

I now know that this was a mistake.

What can I say.....?

I'm a fool to myself.

Instead of one, admittedly large pile of paperwork, I now have umpteen small ones littering my desk.  They're roughly divided into level of urgency, such as Should Have Been Dealt With Last Week, Extremely Urgent, Very Urgent, Not So Urgent But Heading That Way and so on.

I ended up with just one document in the Not At All Urgent But Not Sure What To Do With It pile, sitting smugly in splendid isolation, sniggering at all the other piles with a self-satisfied expression that made me want to tear it up in to a zillion pieces and scatter it to the four winds.

This would, of course, be futile and pointless.  Except that by having to laboriously pick up every tiny scrap of paper in case we get a house viewing, I could legitimately ignore the other piles for the duration.

Which is also futile and pointless.

*sigh*

There goes my weekend off.

EDIT:  In conducting a futile and pointless search for an image of something futile and pointless to further illustrate the futility and pointlessness of this blog post, I came across this which will do nicely......

 

Frantic Friday......

I've been chasing my tail all week, desperately striving to clear all my outstanding commissions, keep the house in viewable order, trying to cope with various 'out of my control' crises and generally attempting to maintain an admittedly shaky equilibrium.

Today was the self-imposed deadline for completing all of the outstanding orders, and since that is just about the only thing currently within my control I was determined not to fail.

It's gone right to the wire but I'm delighted to report that I've done it......

As of 5 pm I've put the finishing touches to the final commission, which will be winging its way over the Atlantic on Monday, as will all the others.

To say I'm pleased is something of an understatement.  It was always going to be a tough call.

I'm now winding down with a very large G+T and anticipating a less frantic weekend than of late.

Until Monday of course, when we have to step up a gear for Christmas.

 So here, just for the record, is my mood in a picture....... 

 

Wet Wednesday.......

It has been raining ALL day today.

Persistent rain, which has kept itself amused by adopting various guises.   It limbered up this morning with a spot of drizzle followed by a light shower.  However that soon palled and it stepped up the pace to tipping it down, interspersed with periods of raining cats and dogs.

It did all this to show what it COULD do if it really put its mind to it.  Since lunchtime it's been alternately chucking it down and raining stair rods.  I'm mildly intrigued to see where it can go from there.

Torrential downpour....?

Monsoon.....?

Small Dog has nipped outside only twice today to tend to her ablutions and raced back in immediately afterwards.  She's not keen on getting wet.  However even she has appeared fascinated by the variety of rainfall today and took up residence on the sofa, snuggled in her red blanky, staring out at the patio.  I caught her sniggering at a squirrel which looked miserably bedraggled, its normally bushy tails hanging limp and sodden, disrupting its balance as it moped along the top of the fence.

So today has been spent in the workroom, listening to the rain lashing the windows.  I was getting on quite well until the phone rang and our estate agent requested a viewing.

In the next 10 minutes.

TEN MINUTES!!!

PP had answered the phone and I trust he didn't hear my non-deleted expletives to the effect that we needed at least half an hour's notice of viewings.  Cue mad dash round the house, putting away all the detritus of our normal daily lives.  

Small Dog was unceremoniously swept off the sofa and dumped in her basket, swiftly followed by her red blanky.  I raced round the kitchen frantically shoving mugs into cupboards, dishtowel in the washing machine, briefly swished a damp cloth over the worktops and kicked the crumbs under the doormat..... in my defence we'd only just finished eating lunch!

However the workroom defeated me.  I had just begun to tidy up in there when the doorbell rang so our viewer was treated to the unedifying sight of the desk completely littered with 'stuff'.  At least I had time to shove all my stock boxes of materials, which had been lying open on the floor, onto their shelves, but the room did still look messy.

Interesting and creative messy, but messy nonetheless.

I've now recovered my equilibrium but predictably, my whirlwind tidying has resulted in not being able to find anything as nothing is where it should be.  I had been in the middle of completing the last outstanding commission and it's anybody's guess where I've put it.  

*sigh*

I'm beginning to wonder if it's all worth it.

 

 

Tempus fugit..........

If last week passed in a bit of blur, this one is set to go by at the speed of light.  I have so much to do I don't even know where to start.  Plus life is complicated by the need to constantly keep the house immaculately clean and tidy.

We've had quite a few viewings since last Thursday, including one second viewing so we're cautiously hopeful.  However in the meantime life goes on and I'm so far behind workwise that I feel transfixed, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.  I'm going to have to shake off this torpor quick smart though, otherwise I'll never catch up.

So, on my to do list this week, complete the outstanding commissions then carry on with the new kits currently languishing in my workbox.  Hopefully by Friday I'll feel a bit more on top of things........

Hmmmmm..........