Fly-By-Night

I know many of my readers could easily come to the conclusion that I'm living the life of Riley here (whoever he is!) and that nothing ever goes wrong. And I have to admit, that from my own perspective, things are, indeed, pretty good.
Unfortunately this laissez-faire does not, for some reason, extend to Mr O. As you know, he still goes out to work every day and when we moved here they made redundancies within the company. He survived those, but they've recently had another round of redundancies, and this time Mr O's job was just as vulnerable as everyone else's. We prayed and prayed, and Mr O's job is safe (for the time-being) but as Work's Manager, he still had the unpleasant task of telling certain people that they no longer had a job, not exactly thrilling.
Then it transpired that one of the guys they'd kept on was diagnosed with cancer and given only a few months to live. Mr O has been struggling to come to terms with this, plus the whole saga of Zak's gastroscopy, don't forget, when I received an email via facebook from Mr O's niece saying that her dad, Mr O's brother, was very ill in hospital.
Mr O has rung him and it transpires that he, too, has cancer, and only has a couple of month's left. We knew he had bowel cancer a couple of years ago, but thought everything was fine. It turns out it sent spores into his spine before they detected it, and now he is paralysed from the waist down.
The biggest problem of all this is that Mr O's brother lives in Germany. We have been running round trying to find a flight that a) we could afford, as most of them cost around five hundred pounds and b) that goes to an airport near where he lives. You'd be amazed at what a task this has been, as Mr O wants to drive to Manchester, pick his eldest brother up and fly from Manchester airport.
Then, to cap it all, Mr O's youngest brother, who was supposed to be going with them, had a heart attack at work yesterday.
Honestly, can anything else go wrong? I don't know how Mr O is bearing up under the strain. When he told his boss he would like some time off to fly to Germany, his boss said, "Well, I'm off Friday and Monday - work round that!" Marvellous.
So now Mr O is driving to his brother's house and they will catch a plane at 8pm. They are flying to Paderborn, which is quite near to where his brother lives. They are being met by Mr O's youngest niece, who doesn't speak any english. The irony of this is that I speak fluent German, but can't go because I am holding the fort here while Missis is in America. Good grief.
So I am going to think calming thoughts for a while, so that it doesn't all get on top of me. Look on the bright side - I can craft to my heart's content and let 'Er Indoors sleep on the bed (something I'll probably regret later) but it's not the same, is it? If you are of the praying persuasion, please say one for Mr O, he needs all the help he can get right now.

I have been doing a fair bit of crafting this week. These are the cards I made:



These papers were free with my magazine, and they're absolutely beautiful. I thoroughly enjoyed making this one.



I made this one to use up some 'new baby' toppers I've had for ages. I loved using my 'deckle edged' scissors on the white paper (didn't realise that's what they were!) and inking the edges before layering this up.
I'm getting loads of inspiration from library books I picked up on Saturday, some on card making and some on scrapbooking. I should finish a little cross stitch any time soon, too, so there's plenty more where this came from.
Well I think I'll go for a ride, to cheer myself up and blow the cobwebs away.
Speak soon everyone
Mrs O (the one putting the brave face on it!)