Hey nonny nonny, nearly two weeks without an update, but nothing has really happened!

I took a couple of days off work since I was feeling a bit poo after taking Simon back to his dad's after Lucy's wedding. My boss has been really supportive, which is nice. So I just took a couple of days out, to chill and relax and catch up on sleep (not been resting very well.) Am now feeling much more with it and sleeping better again.

Re-read my way through the entire Sandman series, which as always helped me feel more grounded and centred. Which is passing strange for a fantasy series which has some of the most surreal and dreamlike imagery and storylines in the medium, but there we go :-)

Also managed to overcome my neurosis about letting the kittens go outside. I was terrified one or both would wind up running away and either getting hurt or killed, or never coming back. Really quite an obvious sublimination of my loss of control over Simon's parenting and anxieties thereof. Once I realised that, I was much more calm about things, and I took the big step a couple of weekends ago.

They both came out kind of nervously, and they were sniffing away like mad at everything they could reach. I had to clean the existing crap from neighbourhood cats off the lawn before they would go near the grass, but once I did, they decided they liked it. They even said hello to next door's dog (through the fence) and although they bolted inside when he barked, they came straight back out again and went on making friends with him. (He was not barking aggressively, just in that "Hello I'm friendly and very over-excited. Let's play!" way that dogs do.)

I also managed to teach them to climb in and out of the kitchen window so I don't have to leave the back door open. No, of course I didn't teach them by example... LOL. I accomplished it by means of calling them from the window, and brandishing bits of crabstick (their favourite treat) out of the window at them. Scamps got the idea within a couple of minutes, but Sarah, being a bit more "intellectually challenged" than her sister, took about 20 minutes to work out how to get in. She also has a very strange technique: rather than leap up onto the window ledge like Scamps does, she kind of jumps on her hind legs and hooks her front paws over the sill, then just hangs there for a couple of seconds before hauling herself up, pushing with her hind paws. I swear she looks like someone just threw her at the window and she splatted there :-D I have to get some video footage of her doing it but so far, no luck!

Also, their feeding habits are making me go "hmm". I kept switching their food around because they were leaving large amounts untouched, and I stopped buying the Sainsburys really-basic-and-cheap catmeat, because it smelled utterly foul (and I normally quite like the smell of catfood) and they weren't eating it at all. but I was determined not to get into the "Oh no, my babies aren't eating! Let me try a more expensive brand!" thing, because ultimately you end up giving them smoked salmon and caviar... while you're eating Tesco Value noodles :-p But having received some vouchers for free samples of Whiskas dry kitten food and Whiskas pouches, I thought I'd get some. Well, at first they were yumming the pouches down, and I bought quite a lot, because I had a discount code for bulk purchases which made them cheaper than the supermarket stuff. But then after about 5 days they stopped eating it again! So this weekend I thought Bollocks, and I just bought the Morrisons bog standard one. I opened a tin this morning and it looked FOUL and I thought, bloody hell, there's no way they're going to eat this... but they polished off the lot!

In other news, it was Simon's birthday on Sunday. For some reason, my mum decided to send her card, Grandma's card and Aunty Sally's to my house so I could send them on. But she didn't post them until Wednesday. In normal weeks I might have still been able to repost them with my package, but the Post Office had chosen to call a 24-hour strike last week on the Thursday evening. In addition, the gift I ordered for him over a week ago still hasn't arrived, despite their terms being delivery within 3 days. So unfortunately he did not receive his cards from me and mine until Monday, and won't be getting his actual gift until I've had it and sent it on. GRR. :-( Still, he sounded pretty chipper when I spoke to him on Saturday; they'd gone out to eat at Old Orleans and he'd polished off a full rack of ribs! He is also now minted with the amount of spending money he was sent, so I told him he can take ME out when he comes up in the Summer hols!

Speaking of which, only 4 weeks now until I can pick him up and we get a whole week together :-) With any luck the weather will be somewhat improved - so far it's been the wettest June and July on record in Sheffield, even without mentioning the floods - but even if it pisses down every day I know we will have lots to do and just enjoy being together again :-) I only wish we had more than a week, but I couldn't get any more time off work - one of the drawbacks of a small team with every member being a parent: everyone wants the school holidays off! And as the newest team member, I don't get first pick...

Lucy and Rhandolph are back from their honeymoon with loads of great photos which has made me really, really want to go on holiday again. Haven't been away since I went to Mallorca last May with Pat in our sort-of last-gasp attempt at reconciliation, which wasn't exactly relaxing. And prior to that, we'd not been away for 3 years.

Mum and I had been planning to go away together this year, but then Grandma fell and broke her wrist, and of course since then Mum has been looking after her all the time. So there's no way we can get away until we get Grandma into residential care, which the council aren't exactly falling over themselves to arrange. Trouble is, it's hard enough getting people into residential care because they're physically disabled, but the places for dementia cases are even rarer. Lucy and I have told Mum that she'll have to give the social a deadline - just say "I'm going back to work on X date, at which point there will be nobody to look after my mother, so pull your finger out and find her a place, or I'll be leaving her on your doorstep." It's horrible, but she's looking at getting repossessed if she doesn't sort things out soon.

Of course I could go away on my own, but then I'm essentially paying (more) money just to be hotter - I might as well just take a week off, stay at home, and book a sunlamp session.

Also considered taking Simon away (if Pat would consent) but I couldn't afford to go during termtime, and his schooling has already been disrupted enough. Also, he'd want to be in a resort with other kids around to play with, and I don't think I could handle being stuck with pikeys for a week, which is always a risk in a family resort.

Anyway, no point talking about it for now, what I'll do is research average costs at various resorts and times between this autumn and next Summer, try to save a little wonga, and then see how things pan out with Grandma.

Best get back to work for now...

I am sick of writing about, talking about, reading about, looking at and preparing for more of the Flood... so I will deliberately focus on something different: our Lucy's wedding to Rhandolph!

Just had a great weekend with Simon.

As we've only got a couple of weekend left together before his Dad takes him to live in Cardiff, I've been trying to pack lots of good stuff in before then.

So I picked him up on Friday and we went to have a professional photo session at Neo Photography. I got a deal through work for a one-hour session and 10x12in print for £25, which I thought was a pretty good deal. The photographer was really good and we had a lot of fun. We'll get to see the results this Wednesday when we go to pick out the shots we want. I'm hoping they will be really nice :-)

On Saturday, we decided to go over to Leeds and visit the Armouries museum. I love the Armouries because it is FREE! However, having to pay £4 for 3 hours parking across the road really hacks me off. Never mind.

Of course, what we were really trying to do was just kill time until !DOCTOR WHO! came on at 7pm. Wow! What a great first episode of the new series. I am almost ready to forgive the BBC for making us wait eight months for it. (Not including the Xmas episode, which was frankly disappointing.) Freema Agyeman is a welcome change from Billie "Rubberlips" Piper, whose increasingly-encrusted mascara'd eyelashes and Sahf Lunnun accent were really starting to get on my tits. Can't wait until next Saturday, although Simon tends to prefer the futuristic episodes to the historical ones. Anyway it's all good!

So on Sunday, a bit spur of the moment, we decided to go to Alton Towers. It's only about 90 minutes from here. This is the first time that Simon's been big enough to go on really big rides with me, and of course Pat hates them - can't even hack the Waltzer or the Big Wheel, so Simon never gets to go on anything. So we were dead set on having a real white-knuckle day :-)

We were incredibly lucky with the weather - beautiful sunshine all day, and pretty warm - we were wandering around in our t-shirts most of the day. But it's still very early season (the park only opened two weeks ago) so it wasn't too crowded - I think the longest we waited for any ride was 20 minutes.

I have been there before, but not for about 15 years - I went with Dave, Mick and Paul, the year we went to Donington Rock Festival. Time, beer and dope clearly took their toll on my memories, as I couldn't really recognise anything! I think the only ride that is still there now that was there before was the Corkscrew. Oh, and the Runaway Mine Train, but that was shut. And the flume, kind of, but that's been rebranded as the "Imperial Leather Flume Ride", which isn't as grim as it sounds. You still get wet, which is the main thing!

We decided to start our day as we meant to go on, with a trip on Oblivion, in the X-Sector area. Billed as "The World's First Vertical Drop Rollercoaster", this is probably the closest you'll come to bungee-jumping whilst being in a coaster car. The ride starts with the cars being pulled up a very steep 60ft incline... I don't know the gradient, but it felt as if we were almost laying horizontally. The car then rights itself, and moves forward a few feet, then tips forward and pauses a moment... over the 200ft vertical drop into the ground. This gave us all time to savour our impending doom and say a brief Hail Mary if we felt so inclined. Then without warning, the car plummets into the abyss. Dear god! The car travels briefly through the bowels of the earth before emerging again and braking to a stop, almost before I'd stopped screaming. Enough to turn your hair white! I loved it, but Simon pronounced it "tame"! I told him to come back in 20 years when he has some kind of understanding of his own mortality, and then see if it's still "tame"!

We then went on a fairly tame-but-nausea-inducing ride called Enterprise. This just involved being spun around and around, upside down to right-side-up for about two minutes. As the front person (Simon) is forced against the rear person (me) with pretty much every revolution, this was a fairly uncomfortable as well as nauseating ride. After a restorative cup of tea, we set off for the Towers area.

The Towers area is quite nice, and if you were going in a mixed party with some thrill seekers and some more sedate folks, this would be a good area for the quieter people to check out. The Towers were the original home of the Earl of Shrewsbury. You can walk through the building (which is mainly derelict but has been restored in some areas) and the manor gardens. There's also a new ride opened within the Tower buildings called Hex: Legend of the Towers. There wasn't much info available outside or on my map, so we reckoned it was probably some sort of ghost train effort. There wasn't much of a queue, so we joined the line and went in.

It started off with videos - and this is one thing Alton Towers does really well; the amount of video screens playing while you're waiting in queues is great. Most screens are showing a mix of footage of the ride and hammed up "warnings" about the ride, which is kind of Barnum-esque but still enjoyable. As the queues were so low, we didn't really see much of these, but I was glad of the ones we did. Anyway, the Hex videos were all talking about some workers finding a bricked-up doorway leading to some secret chambers in the Towers. All very E. A. Poe. Then we entered a room with a large screen showing a "Reconstruction" of the Legend, which was about the Earl being cursed by a wandering gypsy woman. Then we all trooped into a room where we were instructed to sit on benches, make sure bags were under benches and kids were on the benches and not on parents laps, etc.

Then, the actual ride part started and it was the wierdest ride I've ever experienced. It was like the benches were moving around and we started swinging back and forth (in the same way that the classic "Pirate Ship" type ride does.) But we were moving so slowly! Then we started swinging more and more, and I was babbling, "Oh god, we're not going right the way over are we? Please, no, I don't like it! Argh!" and other wimpish sentiments! Eventually we stopped moving and we all staggered off through the dark corridors to the exit.

Simon said to me as we got off that he didn't think we were the ones moving, he thought the room itself had been spinning and not us, and that it was a clever illusion. He said that when he looked at me when we were "upside down", my hair wasn't hanging forward in my face. I dismissed this at the time because I had felt so strongly the shift in my centre of gravity that I couldn't believe otherwise. But having just done a little searching on Google, he's right! It's the room walls and ceiling which move - the benches and riders stay perfectly still. This makes it even more impressive in my book, as the illusion was incredibly convincing!

It really is a great ride but not one I wanted to repeat that day! So we went for an explore around the Tower ruins, and then headed off to Ug-Land.

Ug-Land is the home of Rita, Queen of Speed, and we were absolutely ready for her. Again the line was pretty short; I think we only waited about 15 minutes. It's also got the best queue entertainment in the whole park - 80's rock classics through the PA system! I suppose that's quite appropriate since it's the Prehistoric-themed area, LOL. As we got closer to the track we could see the cars going around, and from our vantage point on the ground we were left thinking, "Hmm, it doesn't look that fast..."

Once in the cars, however, it's a very different proposition. The coaster is blasted out of the dock, reaching 100kph (62mph) in 2.5 seconds. The G-force is almost too much to let you scream (I managed it, though!) It goes rocketing above Ug-Land with some incredible twists, turns and drops before depositing you back at the station. We loved it, and rode it twice!

Also in the Ug-land section is the venerable Corkscrew, and it's showing its age. Very rattly and quite an uncomfortable ride compared to the modern Rita and Oblivion. Time to put the poor old girl out to pasture, I think!

After a quick hot dog and a slushy, we set off for the Forbidden Valley section, which we were planning to take the SkyRide to, since it's quite a trek, and the views from SkyRide are fantastic (or so they seemed to me in 1991, although I was quite stoned, so perhaps they're not anything special!) Unfortunately, the SkyRide was closed, with no explanation given. Never mind, we walked through the beautiful gardens instead, which really are very nicely landscaped, with lots of ducks around and some very big fishies in some of the ponds.

Forbidden Valley is the home of Nemesis, Air, and Ripsaw. I'd already determined that I didn't want to go on Ripsaw, since it's a variant of the old Pirate Ship type, which I always find uncomfortable and not particularly thrilling. So we started queuing for Nemesis. Unfortunately... once we got to the station, I discovered that my arse was too fat to get into the seat (well, not without a crowbar...) Oh, the shame! Simon did not want to go round on his own, so he was well pissed off. Unfortunately, the same held true for Air, so we had to miss out on that one, too (although thankfully in that case they had a "test seat" at the queue entrance, so we didn't waste time lining up.) Simon sulked for about five minutes, but I promised him we'd come back another time when I was thinner!

It was now getting on for nearly 4pm, so we moved on towards Katanga Canyon, where we planned to do the water rides before setting off for home. On the way there we found a little section called Gloomy Wood, which had a ride called "Duel: The Haunted House Strikes Back". This is a neat little ghost train with a difference: you get a laser blaster to shoot the ghosties and ghoulies, and your car keeps score! I totally pwned Simon with my score of over 60,000, LOL. We went on that twice, too. (I beat him both times, hehe.)

Then we went off to Katanga Canyon for our last two rides. We started with the River Rapids, which is a white-water ride on one of those giant yellow round inflatables. Not really very thrilling, since the "rapids" are actually fairly slow, but good fun. I got wet, of course, while Simon, much to his disappointment, stayed more-or-less dry. From there, we went on to the Flume. I had fond memories of chilling out and sharing a joint on this ride, so it was a nice one to finish with. A bit more of a thrill ride than the rapids, and again I got wet while Simon was hardly splashed!

Then it was back in the car and off home, since it was past 5pm by this time. It's such a long way from the park back to the car that we were both knackered by the time we got there. On the plus side, this did mean that I had dried out in the meantime, and didn't have to drive home with squelchy knickers!

I let the satnav do the routefinding and it took me back through all the country roads, not touching the M1 once, which was nice (and probably quicker than the motorway... well, maybe. Depends on the traffic-to-kaz-speed ratio, doesn't it?)

As we were driving along, we saw a dead pheasant on the road. "Mum, a dead chicken!" Simon exclaimed. I explained it was a pheasant, not a chicken. He didn't believe me until a couple of miles later when I spotted a live pheasant in the hedgerow, and we stopped the car to watch it. We saw another couple of dead'uns a little further on. I explained to Simon about how you can't just take them, to wit:

• If you run over a pheasant, you're not allowed to take it home to eat (or do anything else to it.) That's classed as poaching.
• However, if you come along the road and find a dead one that someone else squashed, you're allowed to take it.

Of course, Simon was then determined that we find a dead pheasant and take it home to cook it. Luckily for me, we didn't see any more. I'm not really squeamish, but I wouldn't fancy plucking it, nor cooking something that had a tyretrack across it :-p

So it's been a really fun weekend, and I screamed so much on the rides that I was hoarse all day yesterday! Heehee :-)

Have just finished re-reading Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. Hopefully can now stop hearing Peter Starstedt's "Where Do You Go To My Lovely" in my head every time I pick the book up.

(Could have been worse I suppose... Could have been Fiddlers Dram's "Didn't we have a lovely time/the day we went to Bangor"...)

Working this weekend, so Simon is at Oona's house now being looked after by Oona and Sinead, and probably driving them round the twist and chasing the cats into exhaustion. He behaved nicely yesterday by all accounts - Sinead took him with her to this Adventure Scheme thing where she's working over the holidays. It's like an open access adventure playground with arts and crafts type stuff as well as some sports equipment (table tennis, pool, footie, hoops, etc.) He must have had fun because he's asked to go again next week, which will be very handy because I can take him over on Tuesday and leave him there while I get the majority of my packing done without him being underfoot. 

Work could be better, frankly - I found out last week that my boss is being shuffled sideways and I'll now be reporting to someone else... who I don't get on with very well. I really liked my old boss! He just let me get on with things in my own way but was very supportive when I needed backup. The new boss, from what I've seen, is a real politics player, and I just can't be having with that. Oh well, have to see how it goes, I suppose. 

Managed to get a new product packaged up and uploaded to Renderosity this week, so hopefully that will go through and be pulling the money in whilst I'm unable to earn due to not having internet. This is the only fly in the ointment with my move - I still don't have the phone number for the house, and I can't get broadband ordered until I have that. I can always access the net from work once I get back in but obviously I can't do any product testing from there. So the sooner I can get online, the better. 

Also there's a possibility that I may get a better deal ordering cable with TV/internet/phone all in one, but I can't check if that's available until I get the phone number either!