The beaver is a proud and noble animal

Woohoo!

It took me an hour, two computers, 4 browsers, 3 credit cards and untold amounts of swearing, but I have finally managed to book 2 tickets to go see Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, in October!

The show will be featuring a 72 piece symphony orchestra!

Katy is on the BB mailing list and was informed of a pre-registration seat sale for those who knew the magic word (that would be sent by email). It’s been an ordeal, let me tell you. The magical, mystical email was over a week late, but it finally came. The seat sale started today at noon, sharp. People had been advised to go to the Royal Albert ticketing website.

Which, at noon sharp, melted down.

It was chaos, I tell you. I was using both my laptop and desktop to try and get to the flippin’ form to book the tickets. Pages would timeout, the webserver would throw error pages left, right and center. At one point, I was informed that all the tickets had been already sold (about 5 minutes into the chaos). What probably happened is that tickets were reserved for a web session, but then the server failed and all the reservation locks weren’t reset and had to timeout. After about 30 minutes of swearing at both computers, I’d finally gotten to a point where I had 4 tickets in my shopping cart and was ready to checkout. After a few more tense minutes, I had finally gotten to a form where I entered my credit card details.

Except that it wouldn’t validate any of the 3 credit cards I tried, probably because the CC validation server was also melting down.

At which point I gave up and went on the phone. 30 minutes later, I had a woman with a lovely phone voice selling me 2 tickets in no time (and no hassle) at all. We’re 8 rows from the stage, so I should be able to get a good view of the show :)

This makes me happy.

I’ve now informed Katy that, even if she has to give birth at the show, we’re going. Hell, it’s going to be filmed for a DVD so it would probably make the bonus features :D

Current Mood: Happy

Talk about the cure being worse than the disease…

Katy was put on antibiotics last week to get rid of a small boil in her armpit that was very sore. The first round of antibiotics almost, but not quite, got it sorted out so she went back to the docs and they precribed her another round of the same antibiotics. Katy never really reacts well to antibiotics – they tend to make her stomach go completely wonky. Which they did, but to an extent never seen before. She had killer heartburn and it got to the point where she couldn’t sleep on her side at night because the muscles were too tender. She spent Friday night and Saturday night sleeping propped up semi-upright in bed. Suffice it to say, she didn’t sleep well.

We went to the docs on Saturday morning to get something done about the stomach pains. They prescribed something more powerful than the Gavescon she was using up to now. It seemed to help, to a point, until she started having an allergic reaction to it. Nothing too dramatic, just two days of constant itching. Since she can’t take antihistamines, I had to cover her in cold, damp towels during the night to soothe most of the itching. Suffice it to say, she didn’t sleep well.

The midwife came on Sunday morning to check her blood pressure. It’s elevated, but given the weekend she’s had, it’s not as bad as it could be. The midwife thinks that Katy should take the week off and get as much bedrest as she can, so Katy’s off to the docs (again!) to get signed off as sick for the week.

It’s not all bad though. We managed to get a lot done this weekend. We did a good sorting out of the office, I built the last of the nursery furniture that we’d bought last weekend, I did a stupid number of loads of laundry, we sorted out all our clothing and gave away a bunch of unused stuff to charity and I installed Ubuntu on the home laptop while we had a Harry Potter marathon.

I’m at the office right now but I’m just grabbing some files that I need to work from home. I’m going back as soon as they’re burned on DVD.

Hopefully, things’ll start going more smoothly in the near future.

Current Mood: Tired