Woo hoo! Our DSL connection is finally live, so we can surf the internet at something other than snail speed.

Bobby says he saw the connect light flashing last night, so he called UK Online (our service provider) to see if we were connected. They said no, definitely not, we wouldn't be connected till Wednesday and that the light sometimes comes on for a bit but it doesn'tt mean anything. Bobby didn't believe them, fiddled around and voila, DSL.

Customer service people here are ... well, let's just say "service" is obviously a flexible concept.

In other good news, our house is finally starting to feel organised. The only boxes which need to be unpacked contain our CD's - not much incentive to get those out as we don't yet have a CD player - and all the board games. Oh, and some boxes of pictures. I rearranged the livingroom and the kitchen (moved the table in there; we'll eat there instead of in the main living area. The kitchen felt way too echoey and lonely without it; now the cook / washer up will have company.) I also rearranged our bedroom - it's quite nice in there now - and hung Sophie's pictures. If this were our house the weird splodgy badly patched paintwork would be seriously annoying me, but since it's not, I don't really care that the walls are both dirty and poorly painted.

Went for a long walk this evening while the kids indulged in online games for the first time since June. I wished we'd had the camera with us, but alas, it's in for repairs; the scenery was absolutely beautiful. It was a lovely sunny evening (how am I going to cope with dreary winter, when sunshine seems to be the only sure way to cheer me up?) We walked through the park that's just down the road from us, along a public footpath that cuts through a farm (where we saw a Shetland pony; it was very cute, round and solid and much more like a biggish dog than a horse) and up the hill through the gorse to a viewpoint that looked down over Reigate. There were rabbits hopping about in a story-book kind of way, and squirrels, and magpies (I think). And blackberries (I tasted one, you'd definitely want to turn these ones into jam, way too sour to eat on their own). Oh, and stinging nettles. Bobby will definitely know those next time.

I am trying not to think about the whole school fiasco, though I do seem to be having recurrent violent thoughts about stupid brainless rude incompetent civil servants whose mindless adherence to outdated ridiculous inefficient systems inconveniences innocent parents and children.