Well today was the first day of my school holidays... and where was I...? in school. Long gone are the days when teachers shut the door on the last day of term and spent the next x weeks relaxing. I can see me being in school for at least another 2 days this week before I have to start getting ready for the arrival of the Bishop of Tirunelvelli and his wife on their weeks visit to Edinburgh pre-pre-Lambeth! they are spending 4 days with me and 4 with our rector and his wife, which means they won't be with me on my birthday. Not that they aren't very nice but i would prefer to relax on my birthday and have a day with family.
I've been busy arranging things for them to do, so far they are meeting with the Bishop here, with the moderator, Colin was able to oil the wheels on that one, going to bible World, I thought I'd take them on either the Forth cruise or the trip to InchColm, weather permitting too. Sadly they leave the day before our Ultreya at St C's with the Bishop of Texas.
I'm starting to get the packing organised now, I seem to have a day between times away and weddings so not much time to get ourselves organised for being away. This summer will disappear in no time, I think every minute of it is accounted for and that starts with Reunion this evening.
Ali has managed to land herself a job she loves at the Orocco pier in S Queensferry, she's just finished her first week and apart from sair feet just loves it. Good pay and tips as well as posh food for her lunch break what more could she want!

The garden is looking good just now, we've finally had our fence replaced after our neighbours roof blew off during the gales in January and demolished it. Apparently it was an act of God though and so has to come off our insurance and not theirs... seems a bit unfair, just as well there was no old testament prophet about or he might have got the blame for the whole event. Wonder whose insurance that would have been? Still the fence looks good and we just have to encourage the plants to grow again now! all this rain helps though, I'm saving hours each evening NOT watering the garden!

Well tomorrow is the longest day and I have to say that these late light nights are beautiful, if only they were warm as well. One of the things I noticed in India was the lack of twilight, there it changes from light to dark in a measurably short period. My friends there cannot understand the idea of light nights... How do you get the children (and you) to sleep? they ask. How indeed! Hard to believe though that after tomorrow we begin the countdown to Winter though.

I've been taking some lovely shots of skies and views in SE Scotland recently. The first is North Berwick on a school outing last week, it was not as warm as it looks!,
 
The second lot, Colin and I took when driving back last weekend via Silverknowes, a fab rainbow if you can spot it over Portie! The clouds were just amazing.

The next  was taken at 11.30pm driving through Edinburgh tonight after picking up daughter #2. What a kind mummy I am!
We couldn't believe the colours, we got some really surreal shots of car lights too. Some of them had us wondering if we had drink taken when we looked at them!

The last is a skyline last week from our back garden at 11.45pm.

We're off down to North Berwick again tomorrow for a Cursillo event including a soup lunch, thanks to George and those at St Baldred's for that! There are fab charity shops in North Berwick so we're going down early.

It's been a while and I guess you could say I've settled back in now to my life at RBS and in Edinburgh! School is into its last two weeks now and you can feel the buzz of excitement. End of term concerts, outings and just general summer time joys. Only hitch is the weather which seems to think that April temperatures are ok for June... NOT! We had an outing to North Berwick last week which was a lot of fun but the wind blew. We visited the local fish and chip shop and were glad to be indoors.
Ali is now home for the summer which is nice and frantically searching for a job, so if anyone out there has a vacancy for an able 18 year old, do get in touch.
My eyes were playing up this week, since Saturday, by the time evening comes around I've felt as if I had a rock in my right one so today visited the GP who sent me to the eye pavilion who had a vacant slot so long as I made it within 30 minutes... I did. It looks as if it is just dry eyes though so I've some lubricant drops to try and see if they fix it. In the process though, as well as having my eye lid rolled out the way over a swab, ouch!, I had some drops put in which react and turn the eye fluid bright yellow... it is not recommended that one visit the supermarket on the way home unless one wishes to be mistaken for Hannibal!
Noticed that my local petrol station, not Shel but Ess, has run out of all fuel! Thought Shel was the problem and that they were back to work. Colin has realised that it is costing him less than half the cost of driving to get a train down at the weekends just now so has booked things up for the next few weeks and will leave the car in Aberdeen.