Five on Friday

Joining in with Amy and Five on Friday.

1. Excuse the horrible light in the last photo, the sun is barely up. I wake like clockwork every morning, far too early. By early afternoon I'm tired. The other day I put my head down on the desk (well, it's the dining table actually) next to my laptop and went to sleep. I can't recommend it, I could hardly straighten my neck afterwards. Maybe I need more exercise to wear me out a bit. I'm pressing on with the calligraphy which is SO much harder than the professionals make it look. I do it last thing at night instead of knitting. I'm writing the date on the pages in the hope that I'll see an improvement in a few weeks (or years...). I've ordered a new bottle of ink. Being a particularly clumsy person with pale carpets, bottles of inks scare me. We all know where it's going to end.

2. There was yacht racing at the coast at the weekend. The littlest boy found the most adorable French bulldog puppy to play with. French bulldogs are at the top of our list of Potential Dogs now. Although I fear we should go for something a bit more robust, see clumsiness above. In reality, dog ownership is over two years away and it will be a secondhand one. In the meantime we like to picture ourselves with every different breed we take a fancy too.

3. Technical hitches are continuing and I still get an email every single time I leave a comment on someone's blog telling me it is not possible to notify them. I spent the whole of Saturday morning trying to set up a new email address, but I just couldn't get it to send and receive in Windows Live Mail. (I use Windows Live Mail because as I recall I couldn't get Outlook Express to work last time I had to tinker with something). I wasted a whole glorious sunny morning on it and was no further forward by lunchtime which made me SO cross.

4. On Monday I tried to plug in a new DVD player, which you would think would be simplicity itself. Except that there are about forty wires stuffed through the back of a really small hole in the tv unit and so that bit was tricky. When I finally managed to manoeuvre out all of the old wires and get all the new wires in place (the new wires were different from the old wires, and I'd already had to delay everything while I bought a new wire because the old ones didn't work...) the new DVD worked perfectly. You thought I was going to say it didn't work didn't you. No, it was the television that no longer worked. I spent a while ranting and grinding my teeth and finally the only way I could find to fix it was to put the old DVD player back in underneath the new DVD player. A lot of my life is cobbled together in this way.

5. Here at ATR Towers a mad Rubik's cube obsession has gripped the children. I wake up to the sound of cubes being turned and it's the last thing they do at night. I'm guessing they dream in little plastic squares. The biggest boy has a dodecahedron shaped one now as well. When someone scrambles someone else's cube uninvited a riot breaks out. I am staying at the table clutching my bottles of ink and hoping it all blows over.