Ups and downs.

We had hoped that the kitchen and most of the building work (we're waiting on Severn Trent to do their thing) would be done by this weekend.  Unfortunately, a botch by the makers of the worktops, mean that we're waiting for a replacement for one of the pieces - they made one of the pieces from a different batch from the others and it's really rather noticeable.

The two sections.

We're also waiting for the part where the sink is, as the kitchen bloke for that part got the measurements wrong, so we're using the utility room sink for the moment, which is a bit of a pain in the bum, but ho hum.

Most of the kitchen is, however, finished enough to use, so I spent quite a lot of Friday moving things into cupboards and drawers.  I also did my first lot of baking in the new oven, for a cake sale to raise money for LLL Nottingham on Saturday morning.  One of the local churches, which has ballet lessons in various of their rooms, offers charities the chance to do the teas and coffees from 9am-12, with the option to make cakes to sell (and have other stalls if they want).  They ask for £15 (they provide the tea, coffee and squash, as well as the hall), and we get to keep the rest.  There were five of us who made cakes and four of us who were there on the day, along with some children to help, including K & M, and we made over £100!  We think that we can do this every six months or so and will definitely ben doing it again.

First cakes.

K & M helped out selling the cakes along with another of the Leaders' daughter, and K found another bit of maths in the kitchen, which had a sign on the cupboard door saying that they all opened only to 90 degrees and she established that actually they opened to slightly more than that.

I am feeling rather proud of myself, having finished another crochet project, and M has continued with her crocheting too.  She has done a few things with a made up stitch not dissimilar to a double crochet and also been having a go at doing some actually double crochet.

My sort of basket.

Today we had a trip into town, as M managed to get the mouthpiece of her French horn stuck in the instrument.  Fortunately Windblowers has a handy gadget that can get them out without damaging the instrument and while we were there we also bought a music stand and a bob strap (something to help support the horn so she's not taking so much weight on her little finger).  We also popped to see an old friend of ours who used to work in the now sadly closed local bookshop, in Staples where she now works and to get me some more yarn and some stitch markers (much easier to work with than the safety pin I had been using).

It was also Asfordby with a bring and swap session.  Both K & M have been having a big sort out of their bedrooms and had found a lot of stuff that they were willing to part with.  This is a new development and I had been anticipating that we'd end up bringing quite a lot of things to replace it back home with us, but I'm happy to say that that wasn't the case at all.  They did choose one arm puppet to share and someone was getting rid of a couple of photo albums, something that we'd been planning on buying anyway, but that was it!  We had planned to go back to E, C, L & J's as we've been doing regularly after Asfordby lately, but unfortunately L was sick on the way back to theirs, so we didn't stop today.

After tea it was Brownies for M at the local country park rather than the usual church social centre, so rather than dropping her off, coming home and then having to leave about 3/4 hour later, K & I stayed there too.  We spent some of the time just the two of us, but met up with the Brownies at times too.  It really was a beautiful evening.

K in the country park.