Well I will sit down with the calendar and sort my schedule out. I keep promising myself that but it keeps not happening. Just when I think I have a handle on life it goes and breaks. Some days I wonder if I am just insane to keep trying, then I remember that were I tried to get a 'proper' job I didn't even get a reply.
The long and the short of it is that we have moved with all the joys, plus some more, that comes with that.
First up was the fact at we were only moving to be closer to my son's school. Cutting a long story short, my son was going to a school within walking distance from our house but they were unable to cope with his ADHD outbursts or meet his extra curriculum needs so he was transferred to an SRB. There was some shinangans over that. I was told when they asked me to sign the paperwork so they could apply for the transfer that I would be able to call a halt to the process if his behavior improved. Once the doctors had finally allowed him the ADHD medication his behavior did improve so I asked about leaving him in the school where he had made some friends, only to discover that as he already had an EHCP then I had no rights to call a halt on the transfer. I should have read the fine print... I would have done so if they had ever bothered to show me the fine print.
So the transfer went through, which meant I had to have him out of bed at six o'clock in the morning to have him ready for the taxi at seven twenty. Not cool. It was wearing him out and I'm not entirely sure I was human any more. Therefore we applied for the house move, which we duly received. We were supposed to be picking up the keys to the new house on the 3rd of March... and that was where the fun began.
Because we were all of five minutes over the Norfolk/Suffolk boarder Norfolk County Council promptly went 'he's no longer a Norfolk child and therefore is not our responsibility, you'll have to put him in a Suffolk school'. So we moved to be closer to the school and found that he could be moved to another school on the far side of Suffolk, immediately restarting the cycle. Therefore we had to start petitioning the relevant authorities to allow him to stay where he was. We wound up having a three way slug feist going on. Suffolk was saying that Norfolk had to contact Suffolk to ask Suffolk's permission for Norfolk to send them the paperwork. Norfolk was saying that it was the school's responsibility to do a NEW SRB placement application. The school was saying that they were quite happy for my son to finish his primary school education there, it was the responsibility of ONE of the councils to cough up the funding and the transport. Round and round it goes and were it stops nobody knows.
We had to push back the move date five weeks to try and give them time to sort it out but you are only allowed to postpone the move once so we couldn't move it back any further and the transport hadn't been sorted by the time our move in date arrived - on the twenty fourth of April. So thinking about it, we pushed it back more than five weeks and it still wasn't enough. Please excuse me while I go and laugh manically in the corner for a while.
As transport hadn't been arranged I had no choice but to try and book a taxi for the school days when I had no help. Have you ever had to try and book a lift during the school run times? It took me three hours to book taxi runs for two days and cost me about a hundred quid in fares and that was with me not bothering to head home after dropping him off. Instead I saw him safely through the school gates and then went and found a Greggs where I could hire a seat for the price of a coffee. It did give me the chance to catch up on some writing that with the house move had been seriously neglected. Unfortunately it meant that the house moving was neglected as I have yet to work out how to be in two places at once. A time turner would also be a great addition to my collection. I could be fighting my way through the house work and be catching up on my sleep at the same time.
The up swing of all this jerking around is that my collection of books are still in boxes, my shed that will house my studio is still in pieces and all my merchandise is still in storage. I can feel the edges of a hysterical scream bubbling up and I'm not sure I can keep a lid on it.
Despite this, I have been trying to work on my career. Keeping up with the emails has been a big part of it and I have managed to work on doing a new avatar for facebook. At the moment I have been using a photograph of myself but I have now drawn a self portrait and I also plan to upload it as a line on my Tee-springs store.
https://vjbartlett.creator-spring.com/
Now to do so I just have to find where the printer/scanner has gone. Can I cry yet?
