Monday 28 February 2011

Raining trouble

I knew this week was going to be a busy one.  Due to exceptionally bad planning (or perhaps a lack of planning whatsoever..?) on our part, two of our children have birthdays a week apart. Oh, it gets worse. The five year old wants a sixth birthday party, so on the Saturday between the birthdays, we have a party to plan. And, of course, there has to be a cake for the party as well as one on the day itself.

The day before the party is also Ste's gorgeous sister's 30th birthday. Oh, and my Mum's 67th (sorry, Mum).   My Mum is diabetic and has to look on with envious eyes while we tuck into cake, so for her birthday I've been meaning to bake up a batch of scones, which counts for a treat, apparently, in Mumsville.  Busy? You could say.

Then, niggling away at the back of my mind, I know that next week, between the premature party and the birthday girl's big day, the head teacher is observing me teach, and we have a parent's night, which will be a late one.  So I have been regretfully coming to the conclusion that the writing will be taking a back seat for a fortnight.

But it's true that it never rains but it pours;  I thought this was quite a storm already, and have been trying to take deep breaths and remind myself to ENJOY the birthday whirl - they won't want me to celebrate with them in a few years  - when I got a phone call this morning.  It was my Extremely Efficient Colleague.
"We've had The Phone Call," she said. (Sorry for all the capitalisation, but I need it).
"THE Phone Call?" I said.
Apparently, it was. We have forty eight hours to ready ourselves for an OFSTED inspection.  (Nearer twenty eight now). So my day off became a morning of buzzing around like the proverbial blue-bottomed insect, and an afternoon of grafting at work, and then I will give up another day off on Thursday.  I don't think there is any hope of writing time at all this week...but you never know.

The only good thing is that, while doing my impression of a fly this morning, I posted two Important Things:  the ghost story I'm entering in a competition, and a story that was rejected from one magazine went winging its way hopefully to another magazine.  And I don't even have time to dwell on their fates.  Now, if I could just find an umbrella to hold off the downpour....

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