Doggies!!

It's our second-to-last James weekend before the big move. Woohoo!!

One of my chores today was to finish making the tabs for the curtains that I'm Freda's making for the living room. The only spare piece of fabric we had was a long strip down the side (that we'd earmarked for the tabs), so I decided that rather than sew 14 individual tabs (7 for each curtain), I'd just sew the whole thing in to a long tube. AND I had a stroke of genius - I needed the finished tabs to be 2" across, but my sewing machine doesn't have many guide marks on it. So I took one of the sticky flags that I have for marking pieces in music books and put it 2" from the needle, on the sewing machine. And boom - a 3 meter long, very straight seam, exactly in the right spot. Oh the thrill of it.

And then I had to turn all 3 meters of it. I'm horrible at turning...it just takes forever. I came into the living room where the boys were computing (James has discovered Solitaire), and realized that James' fingers were just the right size to help turn the long tube. He thought it was a fantasic game - he kept shouting about how much he'd gotten this time!! I love it...I'll have him crafting soon. Oh, and his grandma (on the other side...not terribly predisposed to liking me, but a v. sweet lady nonetheless) thought that his lego bag was rockin'. Indeed.

We also repotted my aloe plant- I got it at Lidl for £1.95 and it's thrilled to be in a bigger pot and closer to the window. The weeping fig has been repotted too, but it may have had one forgotten watering too many. We'll see.

We stumbled on Crufts on TV on Thursday night and have been hooked. It's the biggest dog show in the UK and one of the biggest in the world. As a v. doggy person (if you haven't seen Best In Show, go get it), I'm now completely obsessed with it. Tomorrow night we may have to give James special school-night bedtime dispensation so he can stay up at watch it.

We were all cheering madly for the dog & tennis ball relays - teams of 4 dogs (mostly collies) have to jump over 4 hurdles, hit a target to launch a tennis ball, catch the ball, and hurtle back over the hurdles to their human. It was unbelievable how fast they were, and really funny when some of them got SO excited that they abandoned the hurdles entirely and just ran back with the tennis balls. Rrufus has missed his calling.