'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Two more tealights - though the older one has just burnt itself out as I'm typing this. And another origami surprise from the mystery calendar!



I've also got a Jacquie Lawson Edinburgh advent calendar that my mum sent me - on that, today's treat was a tartan designer. So I came up with this:



As it happens there is an actual tartan for my surname. That's not it - the tartan is rather obscure and hard to track down, and I couldn't find a reference for it. So instead that's an approximation of the Gunn clan tartan, which is linked to my family as my surname is a sept of the Gunn clan. There you go, a bit of family history trivia for you!

The last few days were supposed to be a holiday...

Yesterday my grandmother suffered a stroke and had to be rushed to hospital (which thanks to the many NHS cutbacks and consolidations over the years is now a good 40 minutes away). Fortunately my uncle and a cousin were round at the grandparents' flat at the time so they were able to help my grandfather with this. Unfortunately, my uncle also received bad news about his mother-in-law and had to head off to cope with that. Fortunately my parents live near to my grandparents so they were able to take over.

The current news on my grandmother is that her left-hand side is affected and she's somewhat out of it (the latter possibly due to the medicines they've given her), but she is able to talk clearly and understand people. She's had some clot-busting drug so we're now in the wait-and-see stage of things.

As Charles (the aforementioned cousin) said, "bit of a bad day all round for grandmothers, isn't it?"