She's ba-ack....

Hi all my loyal and faithful readers... sorry to leave you so unexpectedly, but you know, life happens like that. *skips* motherboard died on us, so I'm working on a half cobbled together pc. I have my hard-drive with all the important goodies on it, but I'm using his monitor and mouse/keyboard which is taking some getting used to. I'm currently without a dvd burner, but I think we're going to have to renegotiate that for back-up purposes. :(

So, what did you miss?

Friday's great IKEA visit!! It went so well. I was soooo sick to my stomach driving to the store. We had to take a trailer because our shopping list included some large furniture items. Would it rain? (it had rained for pretty well the WHOLE week) Would it be packed? Would we even get a park? Would they have (one day after they opened lol) sold out of all the stuff we wanted? I have been an Ikea fan for years. I have catalogues dating back to 2002. But I've never been into an Ikea store - EVER and I was really excited. We got there an hour before the store opened, and that was a GOOD idea. The queue was only about 4 or 5 family groups long at that point, we got a great park right near the loading area etc etc... stress over. The boys and I sat on the concrete verandah in the queue and did Sudoku puzzles to amuse ourselves for the hour wait. By the time the store opened, the queue was HUGE.... it was very crowded moving around the showrooms, but we survived somehow. The kids didn't get lost once, and we got almost everything we wanted, but most especially we got all the big things that we took the trailer down for. I'm planning a follow up visit in a week or so, and anything I get then will be simple small stuff. In fact, the trip was so efficient that after the store opened at 10, we had loaded the car and trailer, tied it all down etc, and were driving off by 12. By 8 pm that night, everything had been put together. What a wonderful feeling.

So, you wanna see??

The piles of stuff!! The blue bag has lights, frypans, teatowels... fun stuff :)
The boxes have 2 desks, a bookcase, wall unit & drawer unit.

Our favourite item.

I'll have to clean off the new desks etc to show you them - they are against the wall behind where *skip* is standing in the last photo.

So, what else?? School holidays continue apace. The boys are alternately best friends and worst enemies. However, things have gotten a bit worse today because I have woken up with a proper sinus infection... not just the severe sinus headaches that I have been battling for weeks. So I ran off to the healthfood store and got some Sinus tissue salts and I'm desperately popping them, trying to get on top of this. Ick... and OUCH in fact. It's really sore.

Preparations for the Baby Shower are travelling apace. I'm making an altered PAPER scrapbooking item for a present, as well as whatever else I'm giving her. Probably a sheet set. So there's paint and paper and flowers and ribbons all over the house as I'm rushing to put it together so I can move on. Less than 2 weeks to go, so I've got a lot to do.

And in other news, congratulations to Amy on one year of selling her designs.... and here's to many more. She is just the greatest. Luv ya babe!

Finally, you should mosey on over to Ash's new store.

http://ashscraps.com/ashscrapsshoppe/

She's been mastering Zencart and all sorts of other fun things to set up her first shop, and it's looking good! I've got all the new papers and hopefully my head will let me come up with some funky new layouts asap. And currently, she's offering a free gold clip alpha with any purchase - so go purchase something cos these clip alphas are just the bestest!

Ok, so that's a quick update. I'll try to catch up on emails, blogs etc etc real soon. I'm sharing a pc with *skip* from now on which basically means that I'm mainly online during the day - he's got the pc after dinner for work stuff, and for most of the weekend *pout*... Oh well, can't have everything!