Deb is in hospital at the moment after having had the operation to have the (benign) lump in her neck removed.

Even though we'd had this planned for some time, it made for quite a fraught day. She went in yesterday morning while I did the school run.

Then she was in theatre for a looooong time. I 'phoned the ward just about every hour; and she was brought back up about 14:30.

So we went in to see her last night and she was fine. Groggy but fine.

Hopefully she'll be home today. Alex can't stop saying how much he misses her.

Pictures from the top of Moel Famau and Moel Fenlli. We climbed both today! Hard work but great in the sun, although a bit chilly at the top in the wind.

Sitting on top of Moel Famau! Just finished our picnic and on our way down Bright sunshine but windy and quite cold.

Flippin' eck, that was some week at work. The project I'm working on just keeps accelerating, and add that to holding down the day job...

Still, hopefully the wheels haven't fallen off anything quite yet. I've planned that for next week ;-)

Good weather in prospect over the weekend so will hopefully get some walking done. We managed about 15 or 20 miles over Easter while I was off. Mostly in small bits, but with one of 5 miles around Hockenhull Platts. Short trip to Burnley, and a great time finding all the panopticons. Great fun standing on the hill next to the singing ringing tree. You'll have to search for it if I'm not making sense!

So where to now? I really want to do some longer stuff in the Clywdian range, but I'm not sure the kids are up for it yet. Particularly after getting lost on Moel Findeg last weekend.

Reading Byzantines again. It's a slow march through the Economic History of Byzantium, which is fascinating but hard work.

Walking our favourite walk in Cheshire again. We are currently sitting in the Summertrees cafe near Willington. There's a field here which once had llamas in. Jessica is now disappointed every time we pass that they aren't there any more.

Even so, it's our favourite walk. We must have done it 8 times over the last year. It's about 3 miles circular which is just perfect for a gentle stroll. The kids find 5 miles a bit more strenuous. We're working on them.

Long pause in blog posting to be explained later.

You can now keep an eye on what I'm reading via twitter and bkkeepr at http://bkkeepr.com/people/4harrisons

Quick blog. We've been told today that Alex has a place at the specialist school we wanted for him. Yippee!

Very slow day in work today.

Waiting for things to move on in the project I'm working on, but not much will happen now until tomorrow at the earliest.

Alex's statement review will go to the special needs panel on Thursday, so we're hoping for good news from that - hopefully they'll agree that he needs to move out of mainstream. That should give us the decision we need to get him into the school we want for next year. Deb has been speakin to the local authority staff, and we're hopeful. But you can never count your chickens until it's all done and dusted. Did I just mix my metaphors? I'll probably Twitter the result first - if only to encourage anyone reading to follow me on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand the whole Twitter thing as yet, but I'm trying. It might help if I had some friends :-(

You can now follow me on Twitter as @4harrisons.

Well narked with Virgin at the moment. They're my ISP - although potentially not for very much longer. I've been offline now for just over 2 weeks.

What seems to have happened is that they've upgraded the connection at the exchange to ADSL2. Now I can't access the internet. The router can't see the ADSL signal on the line. 4 calls now to Virgin and I'm no further forward. Each time I go through the same rigmarole, and they report it to an engineer. And it doesn't get fixed. It seems that the relevant work is contracted to Cable & Wireless, and they seem to think everything is working fine.

Well it isn't.

If they don't get it sorted soon, then I'll be looking for another ISP - particularly as Virgin weren't that good really anyway.

This was posted from my Palm using my 'phone as a dial up modem over Bluetooth. I'm suffering serious withdrawal symptoms without internet access!

On a different note, today I donated Platelets for the first time. I need to make a longer post about that another time. Giving blood is something I'm very committed too, but the process of giving platelets took a long time and was quite painful. This is going to take a bit of getting used to.