Weekend to go

This weekend was a "girls' weekend" but one of Natalie's friends had tickets for Crufts on Saturday (Terrier & Hounds day, apparently) so she was off down to Brummigham on Friday and had to be back late Saturday to get ready for a guitar recital today. What a hectic life!

We gave Blythe the option of coming as normal, but on her own; or shifting the weekend back so they could both come together next weekend. She elected to come on her own :o) I think that was a good decision because (a) we had a lot of fun and (b) in another few months Nat will be off to Uni and there'll be just the three of us at weekends any way, so this was like a "dry run" for this coming October.

What I hadn't told either of them was that we were planning to visit my Mum today. It's her birthday tomorrow so we were off to take her present/card and catch up with all the goss. I imagine Nat will be relieved to have "got away with it." My girls don't get to see much of their paternal grandmother and she misses them, but I also remember how bored I used to be when visiting my Gran so I try not to impose a visit on them too often. On the other hand I think it's good occasionally to have to do something out of "duty" - good for the character I mean - and I gave Blythe a day's notice that she'd need to bring some reading material (but not why).

It was a lovely day for a drive today: dry, sunny and fresh. We'd arranged to stop off at my mate Phil's place in Chesterfield to deliver our PVR that he's giving a new home to (we have a new one coming tomorrow! W00t!) , and have a narsecappatee. It was good to break the journey and catch up with him and Vicky, but we had to drag ourselves away to get to Mum's at a reasonable time. We eventually arrived there around 12.30. She was delighted to see Blythe and I told her later that she'd "made an old lady very happy" lol, but I don't think I'll drop a surprise visit on either of the girls again.

Conversations with my Mum are getting harder by the week. Her short-term memory is now so bad that she forgets something you said only ten minutes ago. We can have the same conversation three times in an hour and at the end she'd still have forgotten about it. I often wonder what the point is going into great detail relating all our news, knowing that she'll hardly retain any of it once we've left, but I know she enjoys the company and even the conversation while it's happening, so I persevere. I have to bite down on my irritation with her sometimes too, but that's a topic for a whole other blog!

We left shortly after 4pm to be sure of getting Blythe home at a reasonable time, and as we were driving along Longdendale Nikki suggested a pub meal might be a nice idea, so we stopped at one of our favourite pubs: The Gun Inn at Hollingworth. A pair of melts later we were on our way home replete and arrived just ten minutes too late to catch Annie, who was trying to deliver our newly-chipped XBox. A phone call soon sorted that out though, and within the hour we were marvelling at the stunning quality of its DVD-replay, the ease of file copying and loading games from the new larger (120GB!) hard drive and a host of other mouthwatering features. Since our new PVR doesn't have DVD record or playback facilities, the revamped XBox will be at the heart of the media experience in our living space from now on.