Happy 2008

It's going to be a good year. I've decided! :-)

I could have done without the BBC pundits telling me that 2008 was going to be the worst year for over a decade for redundancies, and that eveeryone was going to be letting staff go, but no-one wold be taking on. Thanks. I get to be the first statistic of the year then? Or perhaps I can sneak in there before they all realise:-) still, those same pundits have been giving dire warnings about the "credit crunch" and falling house prices for years, without the country seeming to actually turn any of it into actuality at all!

But all in all, I've had a pretty good lead up to 2008. Certainly it's shaping up better than 2007 was at the same point last year! Aggie is finally retired so we can make proper plans as to how we are going to be living in the future. It certainly means I have more options available work-wise, as I am not tied to school times any more. Money wise we will obviously be getting much less in (although more than when he was getting nothing!), but we have paid off almost all our debts except the mortgage, so we can budget what we do have better. As long as i get a job, we should survive! I'm going to have to relaly crack on with looking now the holidays are over.

The festive period has gone rather well really, even considering LMB's bloodied head - which she had near enough fogotten all about by the next morning anyway. I got a rather nice knife from Aggie which I can threaten him with all summer:-) We went off to the Crazie party on Thursday night and I recieved more books to read and a films to watch, and an unexpected gift from Naomi (Old Old Lady of the Hills) which was such a surprise and so doubly nice! I never really expected to make friends in the blogosphere, let alone make a "profit" out of it:-)

Then we spent the long weekend at my mother's in London. The kids were all well behaved. I had plenty of time to catch up with family news. I got called beautiful for the second time in just a few months by one of my mother's friends - which is nice, if a bit weird:-0 And my father decided to give away a small fortune as his Cristmas present to all his kids, wiping out the debt I still owe him from when we bought the car, and giving us enough of a lump sum to pay off our bank loan, and put enough aside to cover any unexpected major purchases that may come up. So when the car started playing up yesterday I just thought, "never mind, we'll have to get that sorted" rather than getting dead stressed about what we were going to do. It was a lovely feeling!

Also, my mother was rather nice to Aggie this weekend. Perhaps, after 15 years, she has finally decided to accept him:-) What is the world coming to? AND, we saw Aggie's brother and his family yesterday, and the chioldren lll played togethyer without problems, or even noise for a couploe of hours! This is amazing because despite the fact that Mstr A and boy cousin K are only a few weeks different in age, they are as bdifferent in temprement and outlook as possible, and previous metings have always ended in tears - from both boys and within minutes usually. Girl cousin K has always loved playing with the girls, but now they are old enough to be played with properly she was able to take them off and keep them occupied the whole time. Cool!

Last night we just stayed in with a couple of friends and drank a lot, played a stupid board game, drank a lot more, and stayed up much to late (well, early) . which was fine, but now it's morning, and the kids all want to do stuff;-( Bah!