Bootstraps, I has 'em

Now I just need to work out how to haul myself up by them.

Some of you may have noticed a distinct lack of new content around these parts of late (go on, please say you've noticed?), poor old June has a mere 3 posts to its name! I think it's time I did something about that, don't you?

It's not like I haven't had time really, there have been plenty of hours during which I have sat with my laptop on my knee and wandered around the blogosphere thinking to myself "I should post a comment there" or "ooo! I should post on that too" and sometimes I click into the comment box or open a new post in Blogger and then sit there with no words coming until I click away again. Apparently my brain has been able to manage the intent to write but not the act of doing so.

Work has been busy, much busier and more overwhelming than I'd signed up for when I took the job, but I'm enjoying the work and the people in the office are lovely. Plus we've just got ourselves another pair of hands in to take over some of the stuff that Jen and I were simply not getting around to, so my to do list suddenly got a lot shorter.

Kid and school stuff has swallowed a fair bit of time and energy recently too. There was the Family Fun Day at the school weekend before last - rides, stalls, art show, raffle, auctions - a huge production and although I'm not much involved with the organising, as P&C president I try to be around and do whatever I can. The kids have taken turns at being sick on and off all term, David is at home coughing up a lung today, but luckily none of it has been anything worse than a bad cold (and, yes, they shared with me too).

This weekend we have Tom's Drama class performances of Midnite by Randolph Stow. It's a great book so I'm really looking forward to seeing the show. They do a 3:30pm and 6:30pm show and I've committed to cooking scones, serving supper at the first show, helping backstage at the second show and taking some of the costumes home to wash after the shows. Yes, I'm a twit.

Last week Caitlin auditioned for Annie, we haven't heard back from them yet but she seemed to have fun doing the audition, there was lots of smiling and hugs and her telling me she loves me and that I'm a wonderful mum. (Apparently because I took her to the audition, and possibly because when we came out of the audition and it was raining, I danced around singing "I'm singing in the rain..." in front of all the other kids and parents which she rather oddly seemed to think was ok and cool and not embarrassing at all.)

The dog tried to kill the small grey cat this morning. Unfortunately my leg was in the way so she ended up with a mouthful of my calf instead of cat. High speed staffy teeth hurt even when there's no actual biting involved, just a collision. Clara subsequently spent a good 20 minutes sitting on the landing half-way down the stairs wearing the most abject expression of contrition I have ever seen and begging with her big brown eyes for my forgiveness.

Here's what it looked like this morning, the bruise is developing nicely as the day goes on.

Just a few minutes prior to this incident I'd been admiring how well Clara and Jack were getting on as big brown dog ever so gently nuzzled up to huge fluffy ginger cat, tail wagging and politely asking if he'd like to play. Jack will now tolerate having his bum sniffed and will touch noses in greeting before wandering off again. Samantha turns into hissing, snarling, scratching hell cat whenever Clara comes in sight - hence the homicide attempt. Still got some work to do there.

The second unit of DVD shelves is in place and we have 6 empty shelves ready to accommodate future growth in our collection. Adam has also catalogued the entire collection on his laptop, we own a little less than 500 titles but a significant proportion of those are boxsets so there's well over 500 disks. Bit of a worry really...

As for the bootstraps thing, I figure I'd better stop waiting for the muse and just bloody well write something every day, mundane or otherwise!