Soooo pretty

Hillary Ann has been doing some beautiful, Christmas treats; one every day for the twelve days of Christmas but a surprise wedding appeared so she's ditched day 12 and exchanged it for a give-away - yay!

The princess fabrics are so gorgeous.  Grace would absolutely love them.

Christmas catch-up

It's hard to know where to start to catch up with all the news.  I think I'll just pick out the big bits of news and gloss over the rest:

1.  I crashed my car!!!

It wasn't my fault - honestly - I wasn't doing anything silly and I didn't do anything wrong but I did crash into the back of somebody and legally that means I'm to blame - damn!

As if it wasn't bad enough being without my car for a week and having to pay the £250 excess, I'm being sued for negligence!!!  (Sorry if any grammar police are out there, there may be an awful lot of exclamation marks in this post).  You have to ask yourself how it's possible that you can hit somebody at 20-25mph and within 6 hours they've contacted their solicitor to sue for "Extensive soft tissue damage to the neck and upper back" and "Headaches and travel anxiety".

There wasn't even a mark on her car.

2.  Mum was rushed to hospital 

I was out for dinner with people from work when I got a panicked text from big sister asking where Mum and I were.  I told her I was out for dinner but didn't know where mum was and then got a reply saying she had been rushed to hospital with chest pains and difficulty breathing.  Apparently she was ok but being kept in for observation until the morning.

So I came home and waited until morning, expecting a call to go and pick her up.  9am - nothing . . . . . 10am - nothing (call work and tell them I'll be in later) . . . . . 12pm - call the hospital to try and find out what's going on and they can't find her!  I called admissions - nothing, I called A&E - nothing, called the medical assessment unit - "Hmmm ... she was here but she was released ages ago."  By now it's 3pm and I'm really starting to panic because I have no idea where she is and I haven't been able to get through to big sister's mobile all day.

To cut a long story short she was picked up by big sister and is OK.  She'd picked up the nasty virus the twins had been suffering with and it had hit her heart but it isn't serious and with a handy tongue spray thingy she's doing fine.

3.  It hits minus 4 and we have no heating

The water board came to fit a water meter to the mains outside.  One man came and dug a big hole and then went away.  Two days later another man came and fitted the water meter and then went away.  It then snowed.

On Sunday we woke up to find that we had no water and the big hole outside has over a foot of snow in it.  So we called the water board and said that we had no water and we thought the main was frozen.  "That's not possible," the dumb lady on the other end of the phone said, "the mains are buried deep enough that they're protected from the cold."  We then spent a good 15 minutes (yes she was incredibly dumb) explaining that they'd dug a big hole to purposefully expose the mains and left it open.  "That's not possible" - grrr - "we would never do a thing like that.  It'll be internal.  Turn your heating off until the water comes back" - only clever thing she said, didn't realise that there was no water to be going through the radiators - "and thaw your pipes with a hairdryer."

Off went the heating and out came the hairdryer but all the pipes were warm to the touch - warmer than they should be if had water coming in from outside.  We called back and were promised that somebody would be out to have a look at it within a couple of hours.

5 hours pass.

We call back and are told that there is no record of us calling at all that day - double grrr.  Get the superviser and eventually extract a promise that somebody will be here within the hour.

Knock on the door.

The man from the water board has arrived - yay!  "The reason you have no water is that your main is frozen." Aaarrgggghhhh!!!!!!  We've now been without water for eight hours, without heat for six hours, it's minus four outside and the man is telling us that there is nothing he can do.  Then he comes up with the genius idea of boiling some kettles to see if he can thaw it out.  One problem - what are we supposed to put in the kettle - WE HAVE NO WATER!  Queue ridiculous scene of mum and I trying to boil snow.  We did manage in the end, the pipe was thawed, water returned to the house and all was well with the world (well my world anyway and when it's that cold and I'm that annoyed that's all I care about).

4. It's Christmas Eve Eve

So that's the last couple of disastrous weeks for you.  I'm now going to curl up with a big gin and tonic and try to forget that I have to work on Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas everyone x x x x