That was the week that was

It's been a disjointed week and this will probably be a disjointed post. On the plus side, we got the remortgage approved (I still don't know for what the house was valued, so I suspect they just said it is worth what we say it is).

On the down side, DH's mum phoned last Saturday evening, "can you take me to hospital?". She'd been vomiting blood. The doctor had prescribed her a long course of anti-inflamatory tablets and she was three weeks in. The drugs had caused a stomach ulcer. We spent four hours in A&E until they finally admitted her to hospital. Apparently her Hb was 5. They gave her two units of blood on the Sunday, a gastroscopy on the Monday and discharged her on the Wednesday. She is much better. Her colour is healthier than it was a month ago.

I spent Saturday night stress knitting while we waited. DH and I'd been getting ready to go to our first Prom Concert of the year when she called, so I had a sock in my bag ready to knit. It calmed me down and kept me waiting patiently.

The knitting had the "appointment effect", too. Have you ever noticed, when you're waiting for an appointment and just get settled into your knitting, they'll call you in faster? Even if you're 15 minutes early? Well, I didn't do more than two rows in succession without someone coming in to the bay to examine my MIL or take blood or give her medication.

I worked from home on Wednesday so that I could collect my MIL from hospital. This is the first time I've seriously tried to do it, plugging the work laptop into our broadband and getting on with the job. (The last time I tried working from home, it was back when I had no work to do.) An interesting experiment. I found that I spent less time on the internet than when I'm sitting in the office. Also that, even losing 2 hours to go to the hospital, I got quite a lot done. (No, I'm not counting the two loads of laundry that line-dried.) The connection to the server was actually faster than the one I have at Site.

There were down sides: not having all my files around was a big one. Not everything has been scanned and stored electronically. Also, being invisible - maybe it's my paranoia, but I think that if you work from home you need to have concrete achievements to show for it because people can't see you on the phone to the client answering questions. Wednesday was a bitty day, one of those that whilst I did a lot, didn't result in much concrete output.

- Pam