Carnival Time! and other announcements

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to make a few announcements. Are you sitting comfortably?

First, I am honoured and proud that a recent Nobby and Me post has made it onto the Best of the Expat Mums Blogging Carnival . Please drop by for a visit, where you will find out that it's not just me ranting into the ether about this roller coaster life we call expat mothering. Brit In Bosnia is also missing all the Sports coverage (except her hubby prefers the cricket), Nappy Valley Girl is finding there is more to Long Island than nice iced tea, and Expat Mum has been meeting up with fellow 'Brits Abroad' Bloggers for moral support.

Secondly, I heard back from the University of Sunderland that I have been accepted onto the PGCE Teaching course I applied for. I am now a student again! Hurrah to that and let's go down the Student's Union and get plastered! What? Distance Learning doesn't provide cheap beer and pin-ball machines and weekly gigs by rubbish bands to take your mind off the four hours you spent taking copious notes in lectures and the couple more in the library slaving over a hot text book?? Oh. I knew I should have read the small print.

Thirdly, and no less proudly, I can announce that this very day I handed to Nobby not one, not two but three buckets of home-made compost, thereby dispelling years of crushing sarcasm from the unbeliever. We've lived together for over ten years and I have always had a composter in the garden and diligently plonked in my veg peelings, grass cuttings and other garden rubbish, and he has consistently derisively laughed at my efforts as a total waste of time, moaning that I have never produced so much as a crumb of compost.

Well it doesn't help that during those years we have relocated four times and I haven't yet found a removal company that will take your heap of rotting foliage along in the back of the truck. But after a particularly cruel ribbing after he found my latest new compost bin hiding behind the bushes at the end of the garden here in Budapest after strictly forbidding me from buying one (yeah, right) I was determined to do it all right this time and make him eat his words. So I have aerated, stirred and tended this latest pile of rot for over six months and today was the day I extracted the results. Three buckets-worth. Me and my little grubs, worms and maggots are dead proud.

Nobby merely shook his head, smiling. But silent. Now that's all I wanted.