Plenty to think about

Today I spoke to my mother in Cardiff, my son in Sydney and my daughter in law and her parents in Beijing (some of this in Chinese) and had an email from London about the place where my grandson is going to start school. My second grandson will be born any day now, as is evident from the photo of my daughter also sent to me today. Shopping and clearing up took most of the morning;  I'm expecting about seventeen people to come round for coffee, conversation and snacks on Thursday, without much preparation time left during the rest of the week. I read Greg Mortenson's book Stones into Schools compulsively over my breakfast and lunch and in the afternoon was at the Embassy of Afghanistan for a couple of hours listening with great admiration to Fatima Galiani, the woman who runs the Red Crescent in Kabul (more about this later). After meeting for supper in town, Chris and I just had time to play some Bach before he rushed off to teach for three hours at the groundschool. While doing my ironing this evening I watched the last half of Chariots of Fire and the first half of Lolita before remembering that I had to create some database printouts that will be needed at the committee meeting I have to attend tomorrow, after my Chinese lesson.