That was the week

It's been a bit of a week. Our lovely, kind Daughter 2 went down to London to visit her once-more-unemployed actor boyfriend (sigh) and gave me these tulips and daffodils before she left. While she was down there, she learnt that she (together with all apart from the most senior architects in in her office) is about to be made redundant because, with the slump, there is hardly any work for them. She'd seen it coming, but all architects are finding the same, so getting another job in this field will be very difficult. I'm so proud of the philosophical way she's taken it: sympathising with her bosses, thinking positively and telling them how much she's enjoyed working there. The boss that broke the news to her told her that she'd made him feel better at the end of his terrible day of sacking people by what she said to him when he phoned to tell her.

On the same day, our son-in-law's grandfather died.

Spring has come to the garden.

The office building near us that I wrote about the other week - the prizewinning one that was being demolished - now looks like this.

I visited my friend and her kittens again.

Our cats sat on our neighbours' garage roof.

Sirius lay in the sun.

We heard that our son has been offered a job (he's a junior doctor and there's a strange, rather random system for giving out jobs) for July onwards for the next two years, but it's not where he wants to be - and his girlfriend wasn't allocated one - so he's going to turn it down. There will be more jobs on offer at a later stage but who knows if there will be a suitable one? Or indeed two. They may decide to do locum work for a while.

My mother fell down on getting out of the bath twice this week and couldn't get up for a while. One of these nights, I was in the house with her but she didn't call out because she didn't want to bother me.

I went up to the U....r Hall this afternoon, walking past Edinburgh Castle, to rehearse for my choir's concert. I'm not putting the full name of the hall in case it comes out on Google because I took a couple of forbidden photos at the afternoon rehearsal. I'm such a rebel.

They're terrible photos but this is looking towards where the choir was about to sit, in the organ gallery.

This is our view looking out at the audience. Can't imagine what the ectoplasm is - the Big White Worm of the U....r Hall? The concert was this evening. Our choir is attached to the school that our children went to, and it was wonderful: beautiful music from the wind band and the orchestra, and then my adult choir and the massed young people's choirs sang "Carmina Burana". It was a fantastic experience.

So. A week of mixed emotions. One day, life will be plain sailing. You think?