Well, it's been a month of changes and no mistake.

Mum and I have been talking about her selling her flat and moving up here with me since last year, when she realised she was going to have to sell up due to her lack of earnings while she was looking after Grandma.

She received an offer on her flat just before Christmas, but there have been really ridiculous delays on the completion, mainly because the solictor for the buyer at the bottom of the chain was about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

The week after Grandma's funeral, we finally got notice that the sale was going through, but without much notice: completion date was just 5 days' time!

So whilst Mum was in a frenzy of packing, I went into work the next day and gave my notice in, the plan being for Mum to support me for a couple of months with the leftover money from her sale, until I get something a lot more to my taste.

My boss, being eager to get rid of me, agreed to release me that Friday, which was very handy with Mum arriving the following Monday!

There were, of course, last minute unpleasantnesses with my unpleasant boss, including her spitefully removing my systems access completely on the Thursday - which meant that I arrived on the Friday, having caught two buses to work (since my car was being fixed) to find I had nothing I could do, and that of course I couldn't salvage any of my spreadsheets which I'd produced and send them to myself at home for future use. (All resource planners do this when quitting a job. When you've spent nigh on 15 hours crafting a macro or pivot table from scratch, believe you me, you want to get all of the use out of it that you can!)

Anyway, nuts to all that, I'm free, free, free! Goodbye Otto with your stupid, stuck-in-the-seventies ideas about call centre management! Goodbye Evil BitchBoss, with your witless shoe-and-handbag fetish! Hahahaha!

Anyway, as I was saying, Mum arrived on the following Monday, and for the last two weeks, we've been settling in nicely, getting all Mum's stuff unpacked (well, most of it - we haven't got room to unpack it all.) We've had to go pretty slowly, because Mum had a really dreadful cough and cold when she arrived, which of course she then passed on to me, so we've both been hacking and sneezing and using masses of tissues, cough sweets and Night Nurse.

Mum tried to persuade me to sell all my comics as a job lot, but I refused, so we managed to find some better storage options for them, and at present I'm re-cataloging and indexing them, and will be listing a goodly bulk on eBay again, but definitely retaining a good number that I just refuse to ever sell. I suppose in some ways I'm a bit silly, because (for example) all of the Sandman comics, I've got in trade paperback collections. But at the same time, I can't bear the thought of letting them go, and not just because the value's going up, either. They're part of me, part of the person I was then, on my way to who I am now.

I've had a few nice surprises as I've gone through, too. A few older first editions, nothing spectacular, but certainly worth a few quid. And some things I'd completely forgotten about: an old copy of Sandman 23 which Simon Smith and I, in a fit of boredom one evening, decided to edit with our own wording for every other character but Morpheus. (The cover had got ripped, and we both already had another pristine copy.) I might have to upload some scans of some of the more inspired pages; I reckon the Fair Use clause on satire should allow me to print a few panels without enraging the copyright gods.

It's been nice having Mum here - it's horrible being on your own when you're ill. Although of course she gave me the bloody thing in the first place, so perhaps that evens out, LOL. But it IS nice having her here; I know she will push me to get out and get some exercise more, which should help with the weightloss thing (which is still going well; 15lbs lost now.)

The cats have definitely got used to Mum and are enjoying having someone around who sits on the sofa more often, although neither of them are really lap cats.

Mum has given both me and our Lucy a bit of money as a present, so I have blown mine (and some of me own money) on a new PC, which should arrive next week. It's a custom job, with 4gb RAM, a dual-core 2.3ghz processor, two HDDs, a lightscribe DVD writer, a TV card, internal card reader, AND a new TFT widescreen monitor. GEEKGASM!