It's a public holiday today, but it feels like Sunday,  Matt will have his Lily back this morning and he sounds as though he's missing his girls as much as we will be by this afternoon.

Their stairs are clear and glossy now, unlike my paintings.  Got a few first coats on, but the temperature and humidity are not helping at all.

After two days of sub 20° temperatures and overcast skies I'm starting to feel as though we could be in London.   I don't think I'm suited to a proper winter.

Winter

The little Chinese man with the pigtail holding on to the pincushion as though his very life depended on it, probably likes rainy winter days.    He gets to sit out in the lounge room enjoying the view.  It must be quite a change from sitting in his drawer in the office.

I can't say that I blame him really, after just a few days and a few more nights stuck next to his drawer I've got pins and needles in my brain.

But the mail list is ready to go now so our network of canal friends should be interconnected. 

Cool.

Like the weather, still too damp to get the clear coat on the paintings.  Maybe I shouldn't have left it till the last three weeks, but at least I've still got Lily here to cuddle.

Chaos!

While I take up every square millimetre of elevated horizontal surface, our Lily seems to have spread across the house.

Mark, our neighbour chef gave a more or less impromptu Master Chef Master Class this morning, so it was risotto for lunch, and an entirey different scraggy horde coming for dinner mean that my mess will be bundled into a pile to either be forgotten or lost.

Problem solved.

Till we are in France and find we've forgotten a map.

Perhaps we'll just leave a baby powder trail so that we can retrace our steps.  

Meanwhile it seems that Dave, the nice American in the support team somewhere in Atlanta has seen my point and is leaning on the accounts people to refund my costs for the dud email service.  If Dave is no smaller than some of his countrymen whom we count as friends, then I'd be very afraid if I was in accounts.

On the other hand our new provider seems to be very kind and efficient.  We may be able to have a map emailed to us after all.

The mountain comes to us!

While we feign busy-ness, our Lily is growing at an enormous rate.  She obviously misses us greatly so she decided it was time for a long weekend visit with her mum.  

I hope Matt gets the painting done, because it's a huge price to pay, being away from his girls for a whole weekend while he paints, and paints, and paints.

Me? Well no, the paint I bought was a dud batch, so I've had it replaced.

The email hosting service I bought was a dud too, so I'm trying to replace that.

We have to get that right so we can get our pictorial updates!

Every day is extraordinary of course, and I'm sure that today, with a fire lit first thing in the morning because, well it was a bit cool for us, things would be no different.

Clear blue winter sky, fringing palms and a fire indoors.  Heaven.

It was too cold to paint because the clear I'm using says 15° or more, and too windy anyway or my paintings will all end up with a coat of central Australia on them.

So we did what any sensible person would do and went to the movies with friends.  It was cold enough the jacket I've worn in respectable places for the last for years or so.  It was so cool that, dressed as I was and going out as we were I became slightly disoriented.   I crawled across two seats in the cinema, sat down and subconsciously reached for my seat belt, fortunately no one understood my movement or if they did they weren't telling.   This was one monster aircraft.

Robin Hood.  In France.  With improbable landing craft on the shores of Dover.

Dinner afterwards in Turkey.

Home to battle with our ISP in America.

Who needs travel when one can stay at home and have conversations in five accents in one day.  Come to think of it, Russell Crowe managed to do more than that in just one movie, and he was only playing one role.

Time Travel

My words of yesterday fell on my own deaf ears.  I am writing this post next Saturday which is a fair indication of how quickly time is travelling for us.

Where once we had weeks to get our act together, now we have days, and our act is a very big one apparently.

There is more on the table than yesterday, and it's supposed to be clear, the paintings aren't lacquered yet but at least I've bought the paint, and I seem to have wasted an entire day not fixing our domain hosting issues.

Despite all that, we have progressed a little.

We have travel insurance.

And a map.

What more do we need?

We have of course bade our farewells to the soldier crabs, which is just as well, because the baby stingrays have arrived in numbers.

Well it finally happened.   I actually lost control of this journal, not only pushing it aside for a few days, but buried as we are, up to our armpits in paper and thoughts of what we might need to do during the next four months, it has become difficult to think what happened more than an hour ago!

That is of course because we are in a vicious circle of changing over automatic payments from our old card to our new, and even though we are being very diligent, we don't seem to get to the next account before the last one has "bounced".

Never the less in a split second of weakness we've booked a train ride, a hire car AND a hotel for the first two nights we are in France.   We've even bought some charts of the waters through which we hope to travel.   More signs of ageing I suspect, although tempered somewhat by the last minute nature of the effort.

All of this is happening under the watchful eye of Mr Three, who perched as he is temporarily where we can keep an eye on him for the week or so he has left with us, he has heard every gasp as we receive one outrageous price after another to send him to France with his eight mates.   

It would be much more cost effective to send the subjects in person than the paintings!

The dining table is starting to look as it did fifteen years ago, but I had an excuse then.