Barren Mare

The sky is falling

This by way of a quick update:

The roof- apparently it's worse than we thought. In addition to the other repairs needing done, the chimney stack needs replacing in its entirety. Evidently, said chimney stack would be lined with gold and mother of pearl, because sums in the region of £20,000 have been bandied about as the price for the work.

Undeterred by impending financial catastrophe, I went ahead and bought an iphone. And I looooove it. As a gadget, it does seem to me to be eyewateringly overpriced but everything about it is so just so pleasing to me that I just shrug and play another round of Angry Birds.

Compounding the spending insanity, I ALSO went ahead and booked a holiday for the three of us. Someplace warm with lots of water sports activities and an excellent kid's club for Botany so they can teach her to paraglide and scuba dive while I lie by the pool in blissful ignorance, sipping a cocktail. In all seriousness, though, it's a great set up very much geared up to a good balance of family time/adult time- so apart from the absolutely hellacious flight schedule (arrival at the hotel at 3am? Urgggh)- I'm very much looking forward to our first family holiday in over two years. Cost be damned. Who needs a new chimney stack anyway?

 And now I am going to lie down again, since it appears I've contracted a charming variety of the coxsackie virus- it's hand, foot and mouth or herpangina but either way, it's hell. Knox had it first- we think he picked it up at work- and he spent about five days feeling as if he was gargling shards of glass, with horrendous ulcers all over his tongue, mouth and throat. And now he's given it to me, hurrah! I don't have any of the ulcers yet- so far I have only enjoyed a fever of 103 degrees and a very sore throat, together with the sense that every ounce of energy has been sapped from my being. The good news is that Botany doesn't have it- yet. But I have a sense of foreboding doom, that it's inevitable. A shame, since having now bounced back from her ear infection she's been delightful of late and I shudder at the the prospect of reverting to her whiny, grumpy, sleep disrupted, clingy state.

I will close my eyes and dream of sun.

Ear, ear

True to form, Botany's ear infection led us in a merry, cyclical dance for another couple of weeks. I think the day after I posted last, the nursery called me to come collect her early. I went in and found Botany lying asleep curled up in a miserable heap on the floor. On the drive home, I looked in the rear view mirror and her eyes were sad and her face was a sort of appalling, washed out grey tone. RIGHT! I thought, enough is enough. As soon as we got home, I broke out the antibiotics.

She showed vast and startling improvement almost immediately and so I gave her the full course and chalked it up to experience. All seemed well for about a week. Then her mood deteriorated, along with her willingness to get dressed, go to nursery or do anything other than cling on to my left leg while demanding cuddles and backrubs on tap. She started complaining about her left ear again- and not just in the morning when she was being forced into her coat and shoes. So without further ado, we trotted her back to the doctor, who pronounced Botany's ears as both being red and a second course of antibiotics prescribed.

This will hopefully do the trick because goddamn, I am fed up with it now. Aside from the general misery caused by having a cranky, sick child, the timing could not be worse in terms of my work. I remain hideously, crushingly, unrelentingly busy at my job this month as my £250 million project teeters precariously on the edge of falling through. And while there is no doubt that Botany comes as my absolute first priority at all times, I could not help but feel an overwhelming desire to panic and throw up whenever my internal phone line rang about 2 o'clock, in case it was the nursery calling to say she wasn't well again.

Speaking of precarious teetering, the roof of our tenement building appears to be crumbling to bits in places. Or at least one of the chimney pots directly above the front doors is a bad state. We woke up at quarter to eight on Sunday morning to the sound of a large and noisy vehicle outside our bedroom window. At first we thought it was the bins being emptied but even our loony Council is not that keen. Finally Knox ventured to the window and saw the street had been sealed off and two men in neon green vests watching as one of their colleagues cleared off the loose mortar and debris that had come loose from around the chimney- and fallen on a car in the night. Interestingly, their method of sorting it out was simply to take great handfuls of the stuff and just huck it down on to the street and pavement, which led to a very near miss just inches from my neighbour's BMW. She was also watching from the street as it landed and from the look on her face, practically swallowed her own tongue with the shock.

After about an hour the crane came down, the men moved off and that was the end of it, although I confess I don't like to linger by the front door for too long. Apparently the roof still needs work and the quote is to the tune of about £700 per household plus we're all going to get slapped with an charge for the emergency repairs, for god knows how much. You do kind of tend to expect these things living in old tenement buildings- but even so it's somewhat of a blow since I was trying to stash some money away in hopes of actually getting a holiday somewhere this year. Or maybe an iphone, since my mobile is presently held together with duct tape and I am a sucker for the idea of iphonage, having secretly coveted one since they came out. But no. Instead I will dutifully pay for the roof and sadly eye my once more depleted war chest, telling myself not to be such a whiner since we're lucky to have a roof over our heads and all. Sigh.