Day 749

Day 749...

We have reached the middle of the week and it has been another day of two halves.

My morning was spent in work and although my deputy was off work ill we still managed to get quite a bit of work done between us. The power of a Google drive and WhatsApp!!

This afternoon was spent back at home and it was pretty non-stop. I have a lot of companies to contact regarding my dad's passing and so this afternoon I picked a few to see how far I could get. I managed to contact four companies through a mixture of online chats and actual telephone calls and all seem to have gone relatively smoothly, although I was juggling multiple screens at one point! Still more to do but I'll aim to just get a few done each day I think.

I then had some laundry to get caught up on as we are away at the weekend and so wanted to make sure everything was up straight. Next it was time to bake; not something I do very often at all these days as being a low carb family cakes are a bit of a rarity. But as part of our fundraising week at pre-school we have decided to sell cakes and as stock was running low I got out the baking tins and made three dozen cakes all suitably Easter themed!

Just hope they taste okay!!

The afternoon has been a very multi-tasking few hours and I am now looking forward to a cup of tea, feet up and this weeks episode of Moon Knight!

See you tomorrow.
xx

Day 601

Day 601...

And we have a Tuesday and it was back to work after my four day weekend.

It was just a morning spent in work which was a mixture of the usual bits of admin, a few emails, a couple of phone calls and a catch-up with my deputy manager on the happenings over the last couple of days.

Arriving home at lunchtime I had a quick bite to eat, a coffee and a catch-up with Simon before taking a short walk to my local post box as I had some mail to send off on behalf of Molly.

Back home and it was an afternoon sat at the laptop catching up on more pre-school work. I had banking that I wanted to get on top of, plus I had a new parent to contact and then I wanted to look at our upcoming Christmas fundraising. Ordinarily in the past we have held a Christmas Fair along with other events throughout the year but the past eighteen months or so has put paid to all of that. And even though we could now host an in-person event we simply don't have enough families registered with us to make it worth our while. So instead we are hosting a 'virtual' raffle; we held one last year and again at Easter and they both worked really well. But hosting a raffle means we need prizes!

The staff have all put their hands in their pockets and contributed just shy of £15 each which will finance a children's Christmas hamper as well as a hamper aimed at the parents plus a gift voucher for a well known online retailer! But we need more goodies, so this afternoon armed with a few ideas I fired up the email and the google machine and sent out emails to various companies asking for support. I also filled out numerous contact forms on websites as well as contacting some of the smaller, local businesses via messenger...and within a couple of hours I'd already had a few responses so fingers crossed we manage to rustle up some prizes that will encourage the buying of raffle tickets.

I had a lovely chat with my very good friend, and podcast co-host, Michelle as we chatted about our days, caught up with our activities over the weekend and planned for a podcast recording session tomorrow. And while Simon went down our 'gym' I carried on with a little more work; my left shoulder has been bothering me the last few days and has been quite painful at times and although today is probably the best it has felt in a few days I didn't want to risk a gym session and make it worse. Hopefully by Thursday I'll be in a position to have a workout session.

Well there we have a Tuesday, so I will see you tomorrow.
xx

Day 477

Day 477...

And we have another Thursday as we get closer to what we hope will be the end of lockdown...although I fear that there will still remain some caveats in place and we may live under the 'threat' of 'needing' a lockdown later in the year. I truly hope that I am being pessimistic and that in a couple of weeks life will begin to look and feel more normal.

But this morning it was into work and the first job of the day was to chat with staff about our plans for September, the amended curriculum that we will be working with and our upcoming open days.

After that my morning was taken up with emails, banking, updating some posters for our room displays and completing an application to take part in a local carnival in September. With that all completed it was time to head home with a stop by a local supermarket to pick up a few bits and pieces that we were either running low on or that I knew were significantly cheaper there than where I have my weekly grocery shop from!

Back home and after a chat with a couple of my neighbours it was a quick turnaround to get the shopping packed away, get changed out of my work clothes, drink a coffee and then head out the door to take Molly for another drive. We were out for about fifty minutes and managed a round trip of 22 miles and yet again she is doing so well. We were on some new roads today, in fact roads that I have not driven in a very long while and so they were as new to me as they were to Molly but she handled everything with ease and confidence.

Home again and I came into a pot of coffee brewing (thanks Simon!) so I quickly reheated a slice of keto pizza that I had made yesterday and decided to sit outside to enjoy my coffee. Unfortunately this came to an end rather quickly as today seemed to be the day for ants to be out in force; ants with little wings attached to their backs - yuck! So I did want any sane person would do...boiled the kettle and drowned the horrid things, although I think in the end it took five kettle fulls to make any impact on them.

My next job was to then set up a Just Giving page for my pre-school. This past 18 months have been a tough time for us, we had only just moved into new premises in February of 2020 when we were forced to close because of the restrictions placed on us by the government as a result of the covid pandemic. Then because we operate out of a 'community hall' we were unable to open our doors until our deemed it safe; this meant we were closed from March until mid June last year. And when we did open we were only allowed to open to a vastly reduced number of children which was really sad as we were unable to say our proper 'goodbyes' to those children that were moving onto big school. 

Despite then being open fully from September and all the way through the subsequent lockdowns we have been unable to fundraise as we would normally do and have therefore lost a big chunk of our usual income. Small pre-school's like ours rely heavily on the extra income that we can generate through fundraising, the money sometimes goes to extra resources, sometimes to replace well used resources and sometimes simply to keep us operational. Normally around now we would have our biggest fundraiser of the year our Summer Fair but as we were unable, for the second year, to host this we decided to give a bit of crowd funding a go!

To finish the day it was time for a spot of home workout before a steak dinner and an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race Allstars - not a bad day at all.

See you tomorrow.
xx