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When Lucy and Sophy took their places on the arms of the chair in the living room I just had to add Amelia into the mix.

No sign of babies last night, and instead of quietening down as expected with two and half weeks to go the little one in fact had her most active 15 minutes to date. It felt like she had about 16 arms and legs.

Jon is back to work today after a nice long weekend and I am sure that as much as he hates the commute to Canary Wharf I’m going hate it as much or more that he is back at work as I miss the company and conversations that aren’t one-sided and along the lines of:

“What’s that noise?”

“What are you into now?”

“That’s my lunch you are looking at!”

“Stop eating/licking plastic! I’ll feed you in a minute”

“Why must you knock your crinkle ball under the sofa, can’t you see I can’t bend over!”

Cats are never good company if you have thumbs and clearly aren’t making the most of them. Thankfully they are currently being good, and by that I mean relatively immobile as they are now napping off their breakfast.

Last night I started another blanket for the baby, again crochet, but I’m now doing a chevron stitch with the pale yellow and pale turquoise fuzzy DK from the giant stash of wool. I’ve only got about 3 rows done so far but hope to get some more done this afternoon once I’ve finished off the curtains. I will probably treat myself to putting my feet up and Shakespeare’s Retold Taming of the Shrew - seeing Rufus Sewell in drag always cheers me up!

The plan for tomorrow is then table runners and hopefully my new microphone will have arrived and I can finally record my LibriVox chapters…

But on a happier note (no, still no charger) our new washing machine will arrive on Friday! Hurrah!

Having Jon home for a long weekend meant that he could experience the rattly noise it made when in the spin cycle… Which to him sounded like the house was about to fall down. And given that his hearing isn’t the best as he still is only wearing one of his aids, is quite good so there was no resistance to replacing the five year-old and now out of warranty washer-dryer, which no longer  dries either. So on Friday the John Lewis man will deliver a nice shiney new Miele (Jon was suitably impressed by the Miele vacuum that we bought  about 6 weeks ago) and take way the old clapped out Hotpoint.

And then all my excuses to not do laundry will have vanished…

Sophy is the younger of our two cats, having just turned 1. She is a very pingly, long-legged, short-haired tortie who loves to sit on the bean slab in the living room where she has a good view of the TV. She sometimes likes watching it up side down.

This morning she has just exhibited some more than usually cute, and unusual behaviour that seems to further confirm her love of movies and TV shows. We have a sort of DVD shelving nook in one corner of the room, with an arm chair in front of it, and she bounded up on the back of the chair mewing and then stood up on her hind legs with her front paws resting on the shelves before starting to peruse the DVDs’ spines; chirping as she did so. This went on for about 3 minutes until she decided that I obviously wasn’t getting the message. She has now settled down on the arm of the chair, possibly waiting for a more intelligent human to come along and get down the movie that she wants to watch, which given where she was snuffling with her nose seems to be ‘Annie Hall’.

Not that I can blame her; she probably wants to watch it for the Lobsters.

I’m currently trying to put together a nice banner for my Etsy shop and as far have been unsuccessful in tracking down some photos which I now suspect are not on the 1.3 TB under-the-stair storage array. However, I did come across two photos which are worth posting, one because it is a very cute one of Lucy and the other because it is just cool

Here is a photo of Lucy taken in November of 2006 - so she would have been just over a year old at that point. She’d made a little nest out of a fleecy blanket and it looks very cosy indeed.

The second photo is from also from that Novemeber when Jon and I trudged into London, we walked from King’s Cross to the Forbidden Planet near Neal Street, laden down with a pile of books.

The reason for this was that the books included out of print first editions of fantasy illustrations and one Goblins pop-up book, and we were going to a book signing by Brian Froud.

It was very cool to meet him - I was praticaly struck dumb, which is a bit silly but I’d grown up looking at his drawings in my mum’s illustration books and loved the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

I’d met Alan Lee about 18 months previously; Brian Froud and his family essentially seem to live at a cottage at the bottom of the Lee’s garden, like the fairies as my mother puts it. They seem to enjoy a good natured rivalry - one of the books I had brought was the original run of ‘Faeries’ which they had both worked on and I had already had signed by Alan Lee, Brian joked that Alan’s signature significantly reduced the value of the book

As with the books of Alan Lee’s that my mum had brought over from Ireland, some of the books I had brought which were from the late 70’s were so incredibly out of print and hard to get that the shop assistants were madly pouring over them.   In fact Alan Lee had said to my mother that even he didn’t have copies of one or two of them!