Some breathtaking aerial pictures

I picked this link up from Kathy Mexted's blog - some fantastic aerial photos of London at night. Our capital city is an amazing place - addictive, alluring, exciting and beautiful, but also frustrating, noisy, congested and exhausting. These pictures convey it all, I think. It's a wonderful city. If you haven't been to visit, do!

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/london_from_above_at_night.html

Tricky path ahead

Sorry I haven't posted in a while - we've just got back from a lovely, and very necessary break. We headed away to the coast and spent a wonderful, relaxing week a long way away from all the obvious stresses, including (mostly) the internet. My husband unfortunately had to check the Net every day to keep up with (the lack of) job opportunities. It does make you long for those halcyon days when recruitment was mostly dealt with via a weekly newspaper and that wonderfully slow medium, snail mail!

I had a very depressing appointment with my consultant before we went away about my fertility problems. It seems it's going to be a tricky path ahead, one I had hoped we'd manage to avoid, but to no avail. It just seems so wrong that something which should be so private and personal should become so clinical and public! I must admit I veer daily between extreme pessimism - it's never going to work, I'm infertile, etc - to being vaguely optimistic. Perhaps it's my hormones. Time will tell, as they say.

Every cloud has a silver lining

Here's a blog entry on an uncharacteristically (for now, at least) happy note.

There's only been one good thing to come out of my husband's airline collapse, but it's a wonderful thing - I finally get to see him properly! Just for this period of our lives (which I'm sure will be short) I'm able to experience the kind of life my colleagues manage to have with their 9-5 partners all the time - but better!

For example: I got home last night after a frazzling day at work. Normally I'd have walked into a messy house to a pile of post on the floor, a dog demanding food and attention and a dinner in front of the TV. Instead, my husband greeted me at the door with a hug, he'd tidied up the entire house, fed the dog and suggested dinner a deux in the conservatory! I love that, for a change, we can say yes to invitations to dinner. We're going off to visit some friends this weekend on the coast, which is something we'd never usually have the chance to do.

I know it's horribly hard on him. He's going slightly crazy being at home all the time, just sending off applications into the ether, but I know we're both trying to just make the most of what we have, and what's most important - being together.

Hopefully he'll find another job soon, and then this brief window of togetherness will be over - so I intend to enjoy this as much as I can, while it lasts!

Babushka

My best friend has just been to visit with her two little girls - one who's nearly two, and her new baby, who's just a month old.

I really wasn't sure how I was going to feel when I saw the baby. To tell you the truth, I had been putting off going to see her, aware that I might blub the minute I saw her, or worse, be resentful and jealous. That's one of the hardest things to deal with at the moment - I just feel irrationally jealous of pregnant women. I'm not proud of myself in the slightest, but it's quite hard to control. My husband is great and jokes with me about it - if I see a baby in the supermarket he usually says something like "If we took it home I'm sure they wouldn't notice..." which always makes me laugh!

Anyhow, when I actually saw the baby and gave it a cuddle, instead of feeling jealous I just felt in awe. It was so tiny, and so perfect, and it just looked at me with its big blue eyes and well, that was that really.

We hope we'll have one just like that one day. We're not giving up, anyway, not by a long shot.