Wednesday

I stopped in at Zarraffas on the way home this afternoon (the lawn would not welcome another cut in the next couple of days) and spent a little time catching up with my mother on the telephone, and then did some blogging and some blog-hopping to other entrants in the Blogging A-Z Challenge. There are currently 1903 participants but this number is shrinking just a little at the co-ordinators discover sites that are not really blogs and remove them.

Pearl was a bit low-key when I arrived home - not even getting up and coming out to say hello. Tink was good though and came over to have a nuzzle and a pat before settling back on the driveway.

But no matter how low-key Pearl is, she could never be as low-key as Em was today when K came for her fortnightly visit. Em has taken to sleeping and/or just being in the litter tray of late and when K arrived, Em was there, and not moving. The first thing that K did was ring me - and she was quite upset - obviously trying to work out how to break it to me that Em had "gone" - but not so, because just as she was working out which words to use, Em moved!!!!! While we all know it will happen one day - and K says she can see that Em has definitely gone downhill in the last month or so - none of us want it to happen - and certainly we don't want it to happen "on our watch". S and I have talked about how long we will let her go on and certainly at the first sign that she is in pain or has given up, we will do the right thing by her. It won't be easy but we owe her that much - so that her passing is as good as we can make it for her, the same as we've tried to with the rest of her life with us.

The Great K called over again today - he'd had a busy yet non-productive day he said, and it seemed as though he just wanted to "hang out" - and he certainly picked the right place for it. He was still at Latimers when M and I arrived back from The Big House (there were cards to swipe for the Great Show Stopper promotion and a CSP table to get on to ... and I think The Great K would have enjoyed it if he had chosen to come with us!)

M managed to get to Brisbane today (she hitched a lift with Mi who was going up for a translating job) and did pick up her passport. Stage 1 done. She also managed to speak with the Russian embassy so knows the timing for them too. And she's sent scans of her and Mouse's passports so the production crew can issue their invitations - because it's only with them, and with paid travel tickets, that she will be able to apply for the visas. It all seems a bit Catch-22-y - so that makes it hard enough - without having the time constraint (including Easter holidays) being thrown into the mix as well. At this stage, M is talking about physically delivering the applications, invitations and passports to the embassy so she is on the ground and can troubleshoot any problems there rather than waiting for documents to go backwards and forwards by mail and/or courier - especially since mail apparently only leaves the Russian Embassy on a Thursday afternoon! Just over two weeks to go and counting ...