preamble

A wonderful day with lots of hard work from (in no particular order): The Carrot Cakes, Single Cookie and their parents. Ms Ginger Cake, my sister and entire family, Mr and Mrs Best Man and of course, Mr McMuffin. Rock Cake and Gypsy Tart had a wonderful day and we shall share some pics and say a little more as we get our energy levels back up to normal. In the meantime, Mr McMuffin and I plan to leave our clean, tidy and people-free home and catch a film. We shall then return for food, watch a little telly and then sleep for as long as we can, before we go back to work tomorrow.

PS The weather was a little cloudy, but warm with no rain. Well done, people.

we must be very wicked...

...because there's no rest for us. I can't believe we offered our home, garden, bedrooms for guests and to co-cater the whole event. We are bloody stupid. I can't even begin to describe how much work there is left to do. We're just about to eat and sit down for the first time since 7am. Simple pleasures.

five day forecast

Confident as I am in your abilities to send good vibes and sacrifice small animals for good weather on Saturday, I have still become addicted to the BBC Five Day Forecast. I check it all the time and since this morning, Saturday has become completely sunny and a whole degree warmer. I am sure it will be practically tropical by the end of the week.

I have been working like a mad thing today and indeed, am almost half crazed by the need to clean and tidy. I have spent all day working on the kitchen and bathroom alone and although there is hardly any difference to the untrained eye, I know that it is deep down clean. Gypsy Tart lent a hand and did a marvellous job of calming my frenzy-I can't help wondering why she is so bloody calm and how she does it. I shall keep a close watch on her from now on, I suspect drugs!

My Mum and Dad came over today and poor Dad got a bit confused when he made reference to his grandson to be and I told him he was going to have another granddaughter. He looked absolutely delighted and I realised that far from understanding that I was commenting on his annoying gender preference, he honestly thought I was telling him that I am having a girl! I had to disappoint him and tell him that I don't know and we'll find out next week. In the meantime, he's gone back to wanting a Grandson, as he's always been keen to have a few more males in the family, having spawned so many girls of his own.

I have become a bit more in awe of the whole baby growing process recently, as I've been feeling the baby move for a little while now. I wasn't sure at first, as at this stage I should have the sensation of the baby's movements like bubbles gently bursting apparently, instead I'm getting a good old bash. I can't help wondering if it's displaying its incredible dancing skills, or it's actually completely fed up with me and trying to tell me so. Perhaps I've been worrying about the wrong thing, wondering if I'll love my child, when the real question is, has it already taken agin me?

no wonder i'm exhausted

According to The Daily Mail (Satan's own tabloid) teams like mine all over the country are busy snatching children from parents who can care adequately for them. Let's not even get into how these maverick Social Workers persuade judges, overcome concerns raised by barristers (even QC's on occasion) and fly in the face of evidence, the Mail says it, so it must be true. Fortunately The Guardian represent the voice of reason, here's the response. Bless them. I must actually buy the paper now and then to show my support for them.

Please show your support for Gypsy Tart and Rock Cake and send requests to the powers that be for pleasant weather on Saturday. If it's as bad as it was today, we're going to have 80 people crammed into the house to escape the wind and the rain. McMuffin mansions may be a big house for two people, but let me tell you, it is not thatbig.

knocking up muck...

I am exhausted and every muscle in my body aches. I spent the day yesterday helping Mr Rock Cake lay concrete and doing other manly things to our garden. I now know how to knock up some muck. It took a little while for me to get the hang of this. I kept saying make up some muck which just showed my inexperience. By the end of the day, however, I was knocking up muck like I was born to it. The irony of it all is that I spent the whole day establishing my manly credentials only to end up weak as a kitten. At the end of the day, Ms Ginger Cake nipped home to make us all dinner. She made us her fantastic pesto lasagna with a potato and tomato salad and garlic and rosemary bread. It was just what the doctor ordered. Then we all got a little bit drunk and ended up playing Articulate. All in all it was a good day. Productive and fun. I just never want to have another one like it.

stuff...

Mr Rock Cake has been obsessing about the leaking pipe in our garden. He has come up with a cunning plan to cap it off, saving us nearly £500 having it fixed by the robbing b*stards that are Thames Water. Did I mention that they have a fixed fee for sorting this sort of thing, and they want the money to be paid up front. B*stards! Anyway, Mr Rock Cake has a cunning plan. It worked too...almost. The only problem is that the plastic pipe that he used, which had to be flexible enough so that he could expand it enough, using boiling water, to fit over the old lead pipe, is just a little bit too flexible. It has almost doubled in size under the constant pressure. It looks fantastic though. Never fear, Mr Rock Cake has another cunning plan, which involves using some sort of reinforced piping. I am getting just a little bit worried about him though. I had him knocking on my door at 8am the other morning with a screwdriver in hand because he had been worrying about whether he had fastened the jubilee clips tight enough.

Mostly this morning, I have been trying to salvage some of the stuff that I lost last week when my beloved Mac gave up the ghost and I had to reload everything. I've found this great little app called filesalvage which can find files on your hard drive even after it has been reformatted. So far it has retreived 37,000 files. I'm sure most of it is rubbish but if I only find the food shopping list for the wedding of the year I'll be very happy.

I've been playing at being a handyman too. I've taken the frame out from around the glass panel in the door and measured it all up in preparation for replacing it with a new piece of glass. We haven't had any glass in the door for about two years. I broke the little panel of glass one day when I locked myself out, and we managed to convince ourselves that we would just leave it because we were going to get a new door. Hopefully it will be good as new by the end of the morning.

countdown

No, not the show with Carol Vorderman, but the countdown to the wedding of the year. It is now eight days away and there is still so much to do. We shall probably be even quieter over the next week, or seek respite through prodigious levels of blogging. Either way it's going to be a dull ride ahead, but for anyone out there who is interested, I bought a lovely dress from Monsoon for the occasion. It was reduced by two thirds and fits over the bump just lovely, without being one of those vile maternity dresses that are designed for the week before you drop stage. Bless Monsoon for providing for the stage where the casual onlooker still has to wonder for a second if you have a flabby midriff. I still have to find a pair of shoes and a wrap/shrug type thing, but I'm just chuffed to have a dress.

director of the night...

I have been busy over the last couple of days preparing for an interview, which I had yesterday. Unfortunately, the interview went really badly. In fact, it was probably the worse interview that I have given in a long time. I refused to accept the telephone call last night from the chair of the interview panel because I just needed some time to get over the disappointment of not getting the job. Anyway, she phoned me today to tell me that I had got the job! I said to her that I was really surprised about that, and she said, you should be, you were really borderline. I met with her this afternoon for some feedback on the interview and for her to make sure that I would be prepared to allow her to manage me! I will now put all of that behind me. I am now the director of the night, or rather I am manager of the night time social work service for the London borough that I work in, which is nice. I must admit that I prefer to be known as the manager with a touch of the night about him. The best bit about the job is that I am now responsible for reviewing the service over the next six months and helping to decide the shape of the service for probably the next 10 or 15 years. Exciting, eh? The only thing I have to get past is the old people in the team leaving before I am ready to sack them, leaving me to manage the lot by myself. I'll keep you updated on that one.

bulldog...

My dearest reader

Bulldog is okay, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the helpline fella who refused to give me the settings I need and who insisted that I tell him what settings I have and he would tell if they were correct. It turned out that they had emailed me the settings anyway, although I couldn't get to them because I didn't have a connection to the internet. Clever, eh? I was then told that my username was "incorrect" and my password was "incorrect" too. Both of which were given to me by Bulldog only a couple of days ago. It was all a bit like a Monty Python sketch. The good news is that with a tiny bit of fiddling, we now have some full-on broadband. It doesn't reach anything like the dizzy speeds of "8 Megs" as they would claim, but it does move along very nicely somewhere between 2.5-6Mb which is the fastest connection that I've ever had. Even my 2Mb connection from BT rarely went beyond 1.5Mb. So, it's very fast, but...it ain't 8Mb. I will be complaining, of course. I've already looked even more closely at their site and, bless 'em, they have a forum where users complain like buggery about the service. I like that. It turns out that the small print says quite clearly that the connection will be up to 8Mb. I also found out something interesting, apparently some routers have a 4Mb restriction on them. So I updated my firmware, and suffered a couple of minutes of panic as I thought I had well and truly messed it all up.

God, this is even boring me as I write it...I'll stop now. Hope you are all well and having a wonderful weekend. I'll write again soon. Until then, take care...

With fondest regards, yours

Mr McMuffin

we're back

We had a little trouble yesterday with the Mac and have had to reload everything. Mr McMuffin was in my bad books for having two external hard drives and the inability to back anything up more than once every couple of months, oh, except for his music, of course. Ms Victoria Sponge came over to assist, while Ms Ginger Cake and I helpfully suggested that evil pixies had probably got in the computer through the internet and done bad things. It was as good an explanation as any others we heard. So I am a bit pissed off that we've probably lost some photos (unless we forgot to delete them from the camera and we're both too frightened to check) and Mr McMuffin is pissed off that he lost some work. Let's hope we'll learn good housekeeping from this little episode.

We've had a bit of a garden improvement weekend and thanks to Rock Cake and Gypsy Tart's hard work, we have been able to do some of the bigger jobs that have always seemed a bit much for the two of us. We are all shattered, except for Rock Cake, who is outside in the rain beavering away. So all we've got the energy for now is a hot bath, food and a few episodes of 24.