We went away for Easter weekend with some old friends, up to Ocala. They were visiting Florida from the UK, enjoying the warmth and space. Bobby took this picture early on Saturday morning, before the sun was properly up.



The site was pretty enough, if you ignored the fact that it was awfully close to the highway. Our friends had booked it over the internet ... they'd tried for a state park (which are generally far nicer than the privately owned ones), but those were all fully booked. We stayed in little log cabins, which thrilled Sophie no end, as they were just like the one that Pa built in "Little House on the Prairie", even down to the latchstring that you could pull inside the cabin to secure it. Here's Bobby, setting up the chairs in the evening.



On Saturday, we went to the beach - not such a great beach, alas, but good enough for the kids to enjoy splashing.



And on Sunday, after the Easter bunny had been and gone, we visited Rainbow Springs, where we canoed up the river and swam in the spring. The water was cool and absolutely clear ... stunningly beautiful. Steve and Emily shared a canoe, and did very well. We saw lots of turtles, all lined up on their logs in the sun, and birds, and dabbled our fingers in the water to let the fish nibble them. It was lovely. Here's one of Sophie and me, just as the canoeing was ending.



I enjoyed the weekend very much. There's something immensely soothing about spending time with very old friends ... having a shared history makes for such easy communication.

So, the weekend was a relaxing, much-needed, break from real life.

It was back to real life with a vengeance, though, when I got back home to a find a message from our endocrinologist on the answering machine, saying that Emily needed to have another stim. test done because she had low cortisol levels. Which is precisely why she said we had to have the second test done. I called to query this, and when she finally returned my call, it took about ten minutes of very confusing conversation before I figured out that she had no record of the last stim test having been done. And I wouldn't have been able to work out what was going on if a friend from the homeschool group hadn't advised me to get a printout of all the test results. Because I had all the figures from the various tests in front of me, I was able to tell that she was referring to the test we had done last month. The doctor seemed pretty embarrassed when she realised her mistake - blamed it on "the computer system". Uh huh. It's always the computer, isn't it? She assured me that the second set of test results would be in by the time we see her on Friday. Not exactly confidence inspiring, that she appears to have no record of having scheduled or performed the last stim. test ...

In other news, I've been email-less since Thursday : the power adaptor thingy that I need to charge my iBook is broken. I'm using Steve's computer to update this blog. I've ordered a new power adaptor, but I don't think it'll arrive this week - so if I owe you email, I'm not ignoring you, I just haven't read it yet. I am finding that I'm getting a lot more done with my computer out of action ... there's no temptation to quickly check my email between tasks, or read a bit of news or check on someone's blog or whatever ... Once the iBook is back in action, I'm going to try to cut back on the amount of time I waste with it.