A few cards, and lots of heating problems!

One rotten side effect of having a bug at the start of the year is that all the good intentions you had stored up for "new Year" get sidelined. It's hard to stay psyched up for them.

Hence, my intention to lose weight was put off with "not while I have a cold, I'm going to treat myself!" The one about tidying up and re-organising much of the house had to be dropped and the one about crafting and writing seems a long time ago now!

But the calendar keeps pushing forward and new, important dates come around... 4 birthdays this week! Here are two cards I managed to make last night, one for my mum, the other for a friend I made in an online depression support group 9 years ago (good grief! NINE years???? It can't be!)

I used the last of the papers Julie sent me in the one for my mum (above). I like the ribbon- I'd seen something similar in craft shops but it was very expensive. This one was 90p a metre (about $1.75 for 40 inches) at a traditional haberdasher's shop in Colchester.
I decorated the envelopes and the insides this time, too...

-I haven't met Donna (yet?) but she has been a great friend over the years. She has MS and has ups and downs with that. At the moment she isn't too well. Her husband, John, is a vet and they have adopted lots of animals- 11 dogs at the last count, lots of semi-feral cats out in a barn, plus a family of gliders (google them, they're really cute!).

Luvbug bought me these metallic watercolours for Christmas:-he let me have them early so that I could do these cards, one for his mum, one for mine :)
I only started making cards last August, so I've done mainly Christmas cards. I'm feeling a bit lost now I'm to make 'normal' ones. I suppose there is Valentine's and Easter coming up though.... I have been visiting a few crafty sites (see list, left) for inspiration and to get back into the mood. Seeing what others are doing, I feel more left behind than ever!

The study/craft room, where I organised all my arty stuff, is as cold as the garage. I made these sprawled across the living-room floor, in front of the fire! Remember the heating engineer that came and went? He left us with one working radiator, out of nine. Unfortunately it wasn't one of the downstairs ones.

As an experiment, I left a plug-in radiator switched on in the study last night. I went in there today around noon. The heater had been on its highest setting for about eleven hours, and had barely made any impression at all; still too cold to work in there, even with fingerless gloves. OK, I can put on extra layers, but I would still be breathing in cold air. With asthma, that isn't a good idea!

It's really frustrating to have parts of the house you can't use. It starts to affect how tidy the rest of the place is- you know where things need to go, but put off taking them there because it means opening doors to draughts and freezing cold rooms.

We've put our heating problems on the 'rated people' site, hoping for a few quotes from engineers. Hope we can get it sorted soon.

I want to get stuck into things before long, as I am starting to feel the year slipping away from me. I want to shout, "Wait for me! Come back!" but I need some damn heating, and to shift this cold/bug once and for all, first. I'm wary of getting bored, as boredom really does lead to depression.

Soooo frustrating....