Special Ops

I've had some news, sort of not good news, followed by very good news indeed...

My sister (my inspiration, my mentor, my friend) was taken poorly yesterday and was rushed off to hospital to discover that, without any warning, she had developed appendicitis overnight! The doctors took her off to the operating theatre and in the small hours of the morning (last night) they removed the offending object. This morning, my amazing sister has got up and showered, feels fine and all being well, she will be back at home tomorrow. She is hopeful that she will be allowed to go on her planned rather special holiday to Corfu on Monday!

Now if this had been me taken into hospital yesterday and had an invasive proceedure during the night, I would still be lying in the hospital bed moaning and crying. Would I be up and about, showering and thinking about coming home? I don't think so! Would I be contemplating going on holiday next week? Absolutely not! She is just incredible, she's so fit and healthy, so active and full of life that I guess she has just bounced right back. She has yet again proved to be a complete inspiration to me. I wish a full and speedy recovery and send her all my love.

Dave and I have been working flat out over the bank holiday weekend and since, my fault really. I casually mentioned a while ago that I would like to revamp the website, so that our new ranges of furniture, spongeware etc are easy to find. As a temporary measure, Dave changed some of the catagories on the existing site, but unbeknown to me, he started to write a whole new look site for Pretty Practicals and he presented the bare bones to me late last week. Since then we have been working together to build on the skeleton site and create something that we are both happy with. It seems ages since we did this task, we both really like this process of sitting side by side working on different aspects of the same project.

I don't have a very good sense of spatial awareness, at least not when I am just looking at a page full of programming code (remember The Matrix?) and sometimes I accidentally delete a vital piece of coding thinking that I am changing one part of a page, only to discover that I have just wiped out two whole days worth of work. It's a good job that Dave knows that I am prone to doing this and very carefully makes copies of every stage of his work.

Well, it's still going to be a while yet before I can show you the new look site, but I'll keep you up to date with our progress.

Chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2006 - 2008 except where stated.

Cool Beans!

Oh dear! You know how sometimes we get a song stuck in our heads and sometimes it's a phrase, well I am suffering from 'Cool Beans' this week. My problem started when I spent a week with Cecily-Daisy, who without realising it, probably said the phrase 100 times over the time we were together. And now it's well and truly stuck in my brain and I am busy passing Cool Beans syndrome to all my friends and family. The only upside to this is that there must be lots of things that are good news or I wouldn't be saying cool beans so much... cool beans!

I overslept this morning; so not the best start to the day, but Dave made my world good again by making me a cup of tea. We then trundled off to work and packed the orders that were placed overnight and I continued to type out address labels to send out our catalogue.

As the weather was so cold and miserable, we warmed ourselves with supper of locally made sausages, bacon and mushrooms and then I had the oats, linseed and yoghurt mixture that I have been enjoying daily this week.

It's another late Saturday evening, the usual prime time television has been flickering away in the corner of the room. Inevitably, the programme I most wanted to see (Pushing Daisies) was accompanied by white vertical bands moving across the screen and the sound faded in and out, but I mostly got the gist of what was being said. This doesn't mean that I actually understood what was being said... but I did hear most of it. If you haven't yet seen this programme (you have missed 2 episodes), it is well worth a try if, like me, you have a somewhat dry sense of humour. Dave watched it with me this evening, he didn't see last week's programme and thought that perhaps he would have understood it better if he had, but I assured him otherwise.

My big sister sent me a card that arrived today and with it she enclosed a big smiley sticker for me to put on a file in my office that contains our thank you letters and cards. Actually, she is not my big sister (she's smaller and slimmer than me), she's my 'older, wiser and more beautiful sister' (according to her) and I feel very lucky to have her support and affection. I am her 'younger, prettier and smarter sister' (according to me) and we are very proud of each other.



Gosh the time has flown by and Dave had just bought me a refill... Cool Beans, Liz