A brief holiday, apparently

I seem to have entered a period of "bored with the sound of my own voice", which will revert to the normal spouting gibberish within... ooh. Hours, I'm sure.

Oddly, there's quite a lot of stuff I'd like to talk about including:

-The ethical consumer conundrums: a) The kettle b) Is it possible to source ethical leather shoes, if you're a vegetarian (to reduce your carbon output)

...I've got a feeling I've done kettle before though. I am a creature of a small but intensely held series of thoughts

Family updates a go-go.

Meanwhile, I have a tale of surprising positivity where Ikea is concerned. James' dust allergy appears to be having far more outward symptoms these days, which is sad. He wakes up sounding like he has a heavy cold every day, and about 20 minutes in to leche / story time, he will suddenly sneeze, twice, necessitating the removal of an enormous amount of heavy duty, dark green mottled snot. He's been breathing in dust all night, see. not to mention the red eyes and constant rubbing in the evenings.

So. Children's' stuff tends to be dust-trap-a-go-go, so after extensive research I found that Ikea's "Trofast" system comes with the potential for lids for all its bucket-like plastic slot-in shelving er... bits. Reducing available surfaces to flat, hooverable cover ups is far, far preferable to a random surfaced clump of god knows what ie: a load of old junk piled up in a corner or something.

Astonishingly, I found myself deciding to go to Ikea on a Saturday night, after the kids had finally gone to sleep and managed to get there at 10pm, 1 hour before closure. After racing (as much as you can do whilst pushing a huge wheely trolley) through the store, finding a total lack of colour choice and thus ending up filching as many plastic buckets (of varying sizes) from the displays as I could, afterwards  negotiating the utterly frustrating crap of dragging your arse through the 'market place' to get to the not exactly awful but nevertheless extremely tiring business of dragging enormous cardboard covered packages on to your trolley. On your own. At 10.40 at night... I did indeed manage to purchase our entire shelving solution. Sans lids! Not a single bloody lid in the place! The whole point: the very reason I'd chosen this system in the first place was missing. They'd all been gonded by shoppers braving the Sat afternoon scrum.

Two things happened subsequent to standing in the till queue at 10.50 on Saturday night:

1) They delivered all the goods at 7.45am the following morning. Less than 12 hours after I'd bought the stuff. Now that, I respect, I have to say. There is much wrong with the Ikea experience, so it's surprising to write something positive about them.

2) You can get the lids online! Wooo!

So, hopefully we should be able to organise the kid-crud, and maybe reduce James' symptoms. I hope so.

Oh, bugger. That's a post, isn't it! Well, er... it'll be ages till the next one, just you wait.