I'm home from school. I've struggled all week with very little voice, the volume of which just hasn't improved, so the only thing to do is to totally rest my voice. And that's easy at home as there's only me here and my purryfurrypusscat here, and he just demands cuddles ... and I need to recover my voice as it is now less than a week before I fly over to Northern Ireland for the launch of the books, information panels and my bookreading to assorted school children.

It's been a crazy kind of week. If it wasn't so crazy, I'd not have gone into school ... reports are due by the end of next week, and they can stay in school until then, maybe ...I'll have to arrange to pop in on Monday to get the reports/files and do them at home if my voice isn't back... Wednesday was key skills day and I went to a country park by the name of Parc Cwm Darran to work on the Environmental Sculpture activity there. I was told a countryside ranger would be there to lead the activity, but they weren't so I ended up doing it. Fortunately I'd asked for extra staff there due to my lack of voice, and it all worked out really well ... it was a very mellow, chilled out kind of team-work activity. The challenge was to make, in around 35mins, a free-standing or hanging sculpture from materials found in the area around the trees ... The first group found it harder than the others because they had nothing to look at to inspire them, and I'd not really thought about it all as I thought I'd just be on hand to help! I had thought on my way there that books containing work by Andy Goldsworthy or Chris Drury, or similar artists (or, rather, photocopies of some of their work from them) may have been helpful, but it was too late to have that thought ... but in the future ... I know I enjoyed my morning doing this before I disappeared to my Wednesday appointment.

I had to buy a new computer this week ... the hard-drive on my old one was clunking and clicking and returning more bad sectors and damaged files each time I fired it up. I managed to get all the documents/files that I needed from it onto CDs (the bonus of that is that they have a hard backup), including the final files for all the writing and info panels, but not the ones that led up to them, which isn't a problem really. I didn't go for a superdooperhighpricedgamingmachine. Tresco's had a little Compaq puter with a 20" flat screen and windows xp pre-loaded for £284. It has just 1G ram, but that can be upgraded easily. It's a heckovalot faster than my old puter, even if it has an intel atom chipset in it. The wireless broadband router works with it too, and so I now have really fast broadband! So some of the money from the writing has been put to good use. I'm considering getting a netbook when my last payment arrives - simply because I'd use a lil puter for writing on when I'm out and about ... rather than paper/pen, though I'm happy with paper/pen, but when I type I can look around and view the world and record my thoughts without missing anything - one of the advantages of being a touch-typist (though that was originally typed as touchy-typist!).

I intend to spend some of today working on a special story for NI next week. it's partly done ... I reckon I need it to be around 15 to 20 mins, max, when I read it out. It needs to be a kind of prequel to the tale in Digging Down and to lead into the book just a little ... and to bring out some things that aren't mentioned in the book.

I also want to get some bits of art finished that I've been doing and to play with eitehr textiles or polymer clay or both ... I've not done any textile art for aaaaaaaaaaages, and I have one based on Onions that I started nearly a year ago to finish.