Let’s not spend too much time looking back, eh? You all know what a bumpy ride 2007 has been for me, and my optimistic “2007 will be my year of getting things done” quickly became “2007 is my year of coping, badly at times.” So let’s look forward instead.

2008 will be the year when : Mum moves into the home, and gets the care she needs, Chris gets his wife back, I get my life back, and, as superbly summed up by my vicar, I stop being a carer and start being a daughter again.

I hope 2008 is a good, kind year to you all, and that in twelve months time, looking back brings a smile to all our faces.

xx

If you’ve read Paul’s blog you’ll know that I stumpied on getting us to church this morning - I wanted a lie in, so we’d agreed to aim for the later service, but arrived to find that there wasn’t one today. So we had coffee instead. And a biscuit.

Tescos next, then I zonked on the sofa while Paul and Chris headed off cacheing. I was warmer! Had a nice snooze, then sorted an early supper ahead of our going to La Quiz tonight.

One interesting comment from Mum today when I popped her shopping in - she said the week had been pretty boring apart from Christmas Day. She is SO ready for Longmoor Lodge, even if she doesn’t realise it sometimes; I really hope and pray things go our way this Thursday.

A lovely day down South, catching up with old friends, only marred by one thing - a teensy weensy phone call to social services, only to find out their blasted panel isn’t meeting this week after all. So in limbo land til next Thursday at the earliest. This is not good for my nerves!!!

Panel meets again tomorrow. We’re still up against a higher than usual hospital discharge rate, owing to the holiday season, but hopefully not as bad as pre-Christmas. And I have to drive down to Southampton with my fingers, legs and eyes crossed. Hmmm. Could be interesting…

In other news, hit the sales with Chris today, M&S and HMV were the targets, and were successfully hit without too much credit card damage. We also picked up some bargain throws to cheer our sofas up a bit (we were going to look at new sofas, but not while Mum’s cat Bones aka Puke-Meister is still with us!).We’ve also spent some time attacking the spare room to make it habitable for a certain Mr Duell from Saturday. And Chris tonight if his cold is still making him snore like he was last night…!

Actually no - that’s the ringing in my ears!

Aside from many wonderful presents, I had one early one - an inner ear infection, courtesy of my blasted cold. So, antibiotics, and NO alcohol. Bah bloody humbug!!!

Hope you all had a lovely Christmas!

Throat : marginally better.

Green stuff : ditto.

But I’ve gone about 80% deaf in my right ear, and when I tried the old pinch your nose and blow remedy, knackered leftie a bit as well. The pressure is huge, the pain so-so and the rushing noise downright bloody annoying.

On the plus side, we have a tree AND it’s decorated! We’ve also just bought half of Tescos and managed to stow it all away in the cupboards in the kitchen which aren’t already full of the results of last weekend’s tidying session. 48 hours to go…

Didn’t get through the funding panel this time around - not unexpected, but disappointing nevertheless.

We understand that the panel will meet again between Christmas and New Year, possibly next Friday.

So it’s a further uncomfortable seven days of finger/toe/leg/eye etc crossing. Sorry!

Oh, and I have a stinking cold, painful throat and I ache all over. Bah

Everything, fingers, toes, eyes, arms…I don’t care how difficult it makes ordinary life, your blogger needs you!

Meeting with Social Services tomorrow morning to do half a tonne of paperwork, then Mum’s case goes to their Panel for funding approval on Thursday. Sometimes things go through first time, sometimes they don’t. We’re in their hands.

A little light relief - you deserve a break! BTW, I’ll be on the phone to social services at 9.01 on Monday morning…she liked the room, we are all systems GO!

1. Schizophrenia - Do You Hear What I Hear, the Voices, the Voices?

2. Amnesia - I Don’t Remember If I’ll Be Home for Christmas

3. Narcissistic - Hark the Herald Angels Sing About Me

4. Manic - Deck The Halls and Walls and House and Lawn and Streets and Stores and Office and Town and Cars and Buses and Trucks and Trees and Fire Hydrants and………..

5. Multiple Personality Disorder - We Three Queens Disoriented Are

6. Paranoid - Santa Claus Is Coming to Get Us

7. Borderline Personality Disorder - You Better Watch Out, You Better Not Shout, I’m Gonna Cry, and I’m Not Telling You Why

8. Full Personality Disorder - Thoughts of Roasting You On an Open Fire

9. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells

10. Agoraphobia - I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day But Wouldn’t Leave My House

11. Senile Dementia - Walking In a Winter Wonderland Miles from My House in My Slippers and Robe

12. Oppositional Defiant Disorder - I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus So I Burned Down the House

13. Social Anxiety Disorder - Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas While I Sit Here and Hyperventilate

14. Attention Deficit Disorder - We Wish You……Hey Look!! It’s Snowing!!!

It’s all OK.

She listened carefully to what was what, made some of her own observations (mostly positive), and is happy to go and see the room tomorrow (already arranged) with a view to moving in mid January, which should give Social Services (who I can’t speak to til Monday) time to do their thing.

It really is all OK.

Pinch me, I must be dreaming. I feel calm. I haven’t felt like this for a long, long time.

Please God it lasts.

I rang the home today, to thank them again for Tuesday, and to let them know that we would be starting the necessary balls rolling for Mum to join them. We then talked timescales.

They showed Mum three rooms on Tuesday : a large single (which she can’t afford), a smaller room, and a medium room, the likes of which Mum said she would want when she goes there.

Trouble is, there’s only a few of these medium rooms, and the one they showed Mum is available as from next week. She hadn’t twigged that, and I hadn’t known at all. Being a business, they like/need to fill rooms asap, and would only be able to hold it for a couple of weeks whilst Social Services did their paperwork thing. Eeek.

Why Eeek you ask? ‘Cos Mum said last night she didn’t want to rush anything, and was baulking slightly at my anytime from February onwards plan - I can’t be off work forever, and would like some chill time between sorting her out and returning to the fray. The chances of her agreeing to this? Slim. The chances of another of these rooms coming available in the next couple of months? Even slimmer. It could be one month, it could be 6, it could 12 or even more. I don’t have that luxury. I have to convince her to do this.

There’s no such thing as a stress-free 24 hours in my world.

She has decided. And thankfully, she has decided that going to the home would be the best thing for her.

Thank God.

Now the really hard work begins…

Considering her current mental state, today went about as well as could be expected. Mum found it quite difficult being in the thick of it, as it were, for the whole day, but admitted it would be easier if she lived there, because she’d have her own room to take refuge in. Let’s face it, in a low, she’d feel rotten anywhere, a fact she conceded.

She liked the food, she liked the staff, she liked the overall ambience. She especially liked the Pat the Dog visiting hound! She was pleased that they organise a lot of things for the residents, like trips out to town, the local garden centre, and restaurants. Half the residents were over the road at the pub today for their Christmas lunch.

She didn’t like the fact that some of the residents were obviously ga-ga, and she thought the bedrooms were a bit small. They are in the process of converting some former twins into large singles (Mum saw one and liked it), but at a premium, which I’m not sure is affordable. On the residents side, she did manage to strike up a conversation or two with some who still had their full complement of marbles, so again, socially she’d be better off than she is now.

She has promised to give it proper consideration - I’ve promised not to try and bounce her into a decision, but have stated that the clock is ticking - I will be umemployed by the end of the month, and need to know if I should be looking for less hours to fit around her staying in the flat, or what. I’d like to get the ball rolling this side of Christmas if at all possible.

The next 24/48 hours promise to be nail biting.

D for decision.

Tomorrow, Mum has her trial day at the home we’ve earmarked for her.

There is so much riding on this…and she’s not in the best mental state to say the least…eek…

I’ve just done the life expectancy questionnaire in Rich’s blog : http://rich.marchhouse.net/ (bet the link doesn’t work!)

Everything was going swimmingly until I got to the bit about stress, family history of depression and use of prescription drugs…

Apparently, I am 6 years older than my biological age, and can expect to pop my clogs at 69, as opposed to the average life expectancy of 75. Chris, on the other hand, is only 4 years older, and will live to over 70. And he smokes!!!

I’ve made a mental note to do the questionnaire again in a year’s time, when hopefully a lot of the stress and drug use will have gone away. If it’s no better, I may take up smoking!!!

Anyhow, I made a good start to having more fun today - lunch with two friends who I was meeting for the first time (cyber friends turned real!), and hugely enjoyable it was too. Great company, good food and chocolate pudding. Damn, that sort of thing won’t bode well for the dietary part of the questionnaire…

When we named Pickle, we had no idea just how apt that name would turn out to be. She is the ultimate little Pickle, and her latest piece of mischief just serves to endorse the name even further.

I could hear her last night, as I sat here in the sitting room, tapping away on my lappy. She was playing in the kitchen, with, I assumed, one of her scrunched up bits of paper.

WRONG!!!

When I went out a bit later, there was my blusher brush in the middle of the kitchen floor. Not too strange, but when I’d seen it last, it was in my zipped up make up bag…Sure enough, upstairs in the bathroom, said bag was lying on its side on the floor, half unzipped, and spewing eye liners and lipsticks all over the place.

Fast forward to this morning - and, as I wasn’t in work today, I had a lie in while Chris got ready for work. Just as he’s leaving, he tells me he’s rescued my blusher brush and eyeliner from the landing - he’d put them back in the bathroom - but that he’d found my make up bag under the dining room table…

Maybe I should get her one of her own for Christmas!

I think there’s a few of you out there who’ll just love this…!

http://www.fluffytails.ca/christmas.asp

(Edit : no, I don’t know why the link doesn’t work. Computers hate me. But it’s well worth pasting into your tool bar, trust me!)

Maris Piper tagged me. (I’ll have to get Gottle to sort out the linky thing, I’m not clever enough!)

Rules: Link to the tagger and post these rules on your blog. Share 5 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird. Tag 5 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog

1. I have two favourite party pieces : gargling any tune of choice, and doing the Whigfield to any piece of music. Including Ace of Spades. Which nearly killed me.

2. I am sure that somewhere deep down inside me there is a tidy person, struggling to get out, but being continually thwarted by four cats, a husband who has tea stain & crumb blindness, accummulated parental detritus and inherrent laziness.

3. I love driving. On my own. Especially on motorways, late at night, when it’s quiet. I find it very theraputic, but the stereo has to be LOUD

4. Guilty pleasure? Watching Neighbours. Sorry.

5. I have something like 250+ cat ornaments, some around the house, some in boxes, ‘cos our house ain’t that big! Yes, I am obsessed. Miaow!

Paul
Marie
Sarah C
Rockin’ Rob
Fluffy

I’m sorry you’ve had to wait two weeks for this, but as I’m sure you will appreciate, it was a case of hitting the deck running when we got back, and this is (almost) the first chance I’ve had to put anything together…the advantage of this, dear reader, is you get the potted summary plus some pretty pictures, instead of a long, rambling blog which goes into far too much detail! Read on…

Day 1 - eighteen hours! EIGHTEEN HOURS!!! That’s how long it took to get to Taba Heights. Take a flight from Manchester, via Gatwick, one knackered plane, one standby plane, one standby crew (’cos the delay meant old crew would have gone over their hours), one thick catering crew who forgot to transfer over the cutlery as well as the food from one plane to the other), a malfunctioning fire alarm in the toilets (which went off just as we were about to take off) and a total of five and a half hours spent on the ground at Gatwick…and you get an eighteen hour trip. When you also factor in I’d stayed up the night before, to make sure Chris woke up from his snooze (we were driving through the night to Manchester), you’ll understand how I had been up for forty hours on 20 minutes sleep when we FINALLY zonked out in our hotel room…did manage to notice how pretty everything looked though, even in the dark…

Day 2 - sunshine! Not a cloud in the sky! This is more like it! After a small bathroom incident (it’s a Belgian hotel - c on the taps means chaud/hot, NOT cold…), we have a leisurely late breakfast, and settle down by the pool…

Is it just Chris, or do the folded parasols remind you of Queen Victoria?

The welcome meeting, held in the afternoon, after a weary travellers’ rebellion the previous night, saw us booking two trips : Jerusalem & the Dead Sea, and a day’s snorkelling. Would have booked for Petra as well, but it’s a bit much to fit in a week. Next time!

Day 3 -more sunshine! Pool again. On book 2 already. Hotel is lovely, staff are great, weather is fab, food is good & plentiful - I could get used ot this…

Day 4 - it’s sunny again! Spend morning by pool, and afternoon on the beach. The hotel itself is set up on the hill, but there’s regular, free shuttles down to the beach - it’s even hotter here, almost too hot…but gorgeous!

Paradise!

Day 5 - it’s DARK! Today is the day of our trip to Jerulsalem & the Dead Sea, and our pick up from the hotel is a yawn inducing 04.30…could I sleep the night before? Could I gerbils. Never mind, excitement kicks in as we collect our (rather grotty) boxed breakfast and board the coach. Our first adventure is Israeli border control, (we’re only 9kms from the border at Eilat) as we’re driving to the Dead Sea, before heading off to Jerusalem. It takes SO LONG!!! Still we’re all in good humour, and after about an hour and a half (yes!) we’re through and back on the road. It’s about 2 hours to the Dead Sea, and we pass various sites such as Soddom and Gomorrah, and Lot’s Wife (the pillar of salt), all of which is fascinating. We have about 45 minutes at the Dead Sea - not nearly long enough, but we all manage a quick float -

That’s Chris waving!

It’s so WEIRD. By the time you’re up to your knees, you can sit back and not scrape your ostrich on the (very rough) seabed. You bob along quite happily, and then when you try to get up, the problems start. You can’t! Not without a lot of effort anyway. Definitely an experience! And then you have to shower and wash off very thoroughly because of all the salt. More than a tad soggy, we all manage to get back to the coach on time, and then it’s another hour and a bit to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem. What can I say? After a tour round in the coach, and a walk down the Mount of Olives, we start a walking tour of the old city. It’s VILE. This is meant to be the holiest place for a total of about 4 billion people across different faiths, you really think it would be better looked after. It’s dirty, smelly, tatty - downright unkempt, and not in a quaint, full of character way. The designated loo sites are the WORST I have ever experienced, and that includes portaloos at Knebworth, shared with 275,000 other people. Grossness aside, it is fascinating walking through the city, and seeing where places in the Bible are supposed to be - the 14 stations of the cross, the wailing wall, the room of the last supper, and what is said to be the final resting place of Christ, although the latter, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was SO overcrowded, and SO manic, and SO…just SO, it didn’t feel anywhere near as holy or special as I had thought it would. Never mind, our guide was excellent, and although tiring, I wouldn’t have missed it.

Wailing Wall & the famous Golden Dome

There were some compensations in a grubby city!

As darkness fell, we headed back to the coach, and onto Ben Gurion airport to fly back to Eilat. Israeli airport security - joy!! Just as nightmarish. They don’t like our surname, and are convinced another member of the group isn’t British as his passport states! The flight (eventually!) only takes 35 minutes, the landing is terrifying (Eilat airport is quite literally in the middle of town & surround by highrise hotels), and then joy! - Israeli border control once more. By the time we get back to the hotel, is 10.30pm and we are KNACKERED. No more trouble sleeping!

Day 6 - glorious sunshine! Vegetate by pool. Chris has got into the daily water polo match (where pretty much anything goes and cheating is positively encouraged!), and I end up unofficial ball girl. Tip : when footie tackling the water polo ball with a member of the opposing team who’s trying to gain possession, DO NOT kick wall instead of ball with bare feet. It’s not good for the toes…

Day 7 - yup, sunshine! Today is snorkelling day, Chris really has taken to snorkelling, and was very keen to try it again. This time we’re a big group (in March we had the luxuary of a huge boat between 10 of us!), and the boat is actually a replica pirate ship. YARRRRRR!! We go up the coast in the general direction of Eilat, with Jordan and Saudi Arabia on the opposite shore, and anchor off an island built as part of Egypt’s defences against the Crusaders.

- we’re not allowed on the island itself, but have fun swimming around it, and seeing the crazily coloured marine life that inhabit the Red Sea.

Not an alien, it’s Chris in his snorkelling gear!)

The day is spent sunbathing, snorkelling, and sunbathing some more. When it’s finally time to go home, the sails are unfurled and we speed back over the water. This is GREAT!

Our last night (already?!) back at the hotel is huge fun, we have a good joke with our two favourite waiters Abdul & Shehata -

- and the hotel’s excellent dessert chef Hosny (he is seriously GOOD) has made me a special mini pot of rice pudding. You ain’t had rice pudding til you try this. It’s YUM!!

Day 8 part 1 - and we end on a sunny note! We have been so lucky, wall to wall sunshine, and temperatures of around 30 every day. Having done most of our packing the night before, and arranged a late check out, we can spend a final morning by the pool. Chris is suffering a bit with a bad tum, but still heroically managed one last game of water polo. All too soon it’s time to finish packing, checkout, and board the coach for the airport…

Day 8 part 2 - fifteen - FIFTEEN hours!! - to get back home. No knackered plane this time, but a slight delay on leaving Taba, caused by a delayed inbound flight, and the the delight that is Manchester Baggage Handling. They take OVER AN HOUR to get our luggage from the plane to the terminal (it’s not that busy either!) - we honestly thought they’d offloaded our bags by mistake on the return Gatwick stop - then the conveyor breaks down!!! Chris’ tum (he’s not had a good flight bless him) means we miss one airparks coach, and have to wait about 20 minutes for another - seems like longer when you’re cold and wet and knackered! - but the drive home is quick, if trying - Chris is really tired and the weather is foul. He heads straight for bed, and I try and make friends with four cats who are disgusted we’ve abandoned them for a week, and only brought round with much love. And tuna.

So there you go, not too rambling (I hope!) - we had such a lovely time; quieter than Sharm el Sheik, which is exactly what we wanted. As soon as I’m back in the land of the properly employed, I’m starting saving for the return trip…

Tanned and Happy!

Our dinner tonight included fried eggs.

I’m not very good at fried eggs.

Let’s just say that whilst a major clean up operation was not in order, it’s just as well points weren’t being given out for presentation.