Whoopdedoo - I have a job for next week! Literally, just for next week, but anything is better than nothing. And it looks pretty cool - temporary Year 1 Teaching Assistant in a Primary School about 2 miles from our house. It's an 'inner city' school, so it'll be interesting to see the contrast between that and the 'nice' school I volunteer in last term.

Toby and Sammie are doing great. Toby is an amazing bunny. He's learnt how to jump up onto the sofa... and that's no mean feat when he's a small dwarf bunny, and we have slidy laminate wood flooring! It made Ben jump a mile the first time he did it - we were sitting chatting, and suddenly Toby sprung from the floor into his lap! He's wonderul - he follows us wherever we go around the house, and has recently taking to 'grooming' my trouser legs whenever I'm sitting down. He really makes our family complete. He's 6 months old today - happy half birthday Toby!

Only just over 4 months now until I start my PGCE. I'm starting to get urges to buy sparly pencils, coloured pens and 'good work' stickers....!

I've just done a big ol' geeky excel spreadsheet to calculate how long it will take me to pay back my student loan.... and assuming I take a few years off to have kids, then go back to work part time for a few years, then full time til retirement... i'll finish paying back my loan in 2039.... when i'm 58 and not long off retirement, when they wipe your loan anyway!

I half wish I was part of the top up fees generation, who get their debts wiped after 25 years. After 25 years I'm still going to owe about £15,000 (worth less than now though, cos of inflation)....

Nice. Maybe I should send my stats to Tony Blair, to show that those 'calculations' I've seen that demonstrate you'll pay off your loan in under 10 years are a load of old....

Well, it's been 6 weeks in the making... and it's finally here - my new design for icklesarah.co.uk!

I'm still no web-wonder-kid, but if you saw the first incarnation of icklesarah.co.uk (which I might put online one day) you'd see I've come a veeeeery long way in the past few yeas. I've done a lot of messing around to make it work in mozilla and i.e.... hope it works....

Well, it's been a while... over a week, anyway. You would've thought that being a 'lady of leisure' I'd have loads of time to spend on the net working on my website and updating, but alas, no - I've been a busy bunny! The house is definitely getting there - today I finished stripping the first layer of wallpaper in the (very large) living room, so am feeling quite satisfied with myself. Toby was helping me out by chewing on the paper at bunny height... awww.

I'm all set for jobs for the summer holiday now (got offered one at a YMCA playscheme, and have an interview for another in a couple of weeks) so now all I need is something for the next 3 months. The reason I quit my job was to spend some more time in schools, so even if I don't get the job I'm going for (ICT learning support assistant in what looks like a really nice school) I'm going to try to spend quite a bit of time volunteering in a variety of schools. I'm already missing being in school a lot. Still, only 5 months until the PGCE starts - then I'll have school stuff coming out of my ears... I can't wait!

Today, amongst other things, I painted the window frames in the study.... I've just finished the whole thing..... and realised I've done it in matt as opposed to silk paint.

OOOOOOOOPS........ :(

just before Easter I was messing around with new designs for my weblog, and changed the url for publishing my main weblog, to test some stuff out... and, yes, you've guessed it - i forgot to change it back! Hence my last few entries have been publishing to a hidden page, as opposed to my main one. Ah well, I'm back now!

Ben headed back to work today... without me! It's my first day as an unemployed housewife... and I'm being pretty damn productive. I'm still looking for stuff, and if nothing paiud comes my way, I'm going to do some volunteering in local schools - all good experience for next year! I've applied to a couple of playschemes around here, one of which looks really good, so hopefully I should at least have something for the summer holidays.

The past few weeks have been really lovely - we did lots of relaxing, a bit of decorating, lots of seeing our families, and a bit of visiting places... t'was really nice.