A bleary-eyed, very brief edition of "Luke's Corner"

Luke has been sleeping really badly - culminating in last night, where I was up every half an hour until 4am with him, while Nik was waking up everytime she did, so neither of us got much that resembled sleep... I certainly got less than an hour (between 4 and 5am). We're a little worried that he's a bit ill, so we'll be keeping an eye on what he's like and how he behaves over the weekend and working out whether a trip to the doctors is in order (hopefully not the one who had a go at him for peeing when she took his nappy off...)

It's a major reason in my lack of updates - and its not like there's nothing to say - we have an allotment now, and the first plants have gone in already, so we're very proud and rather excited!

The wonderful Stokke Xplory broke spectacularly last week with a mysterious fault - one of the back legs lost a screw and split open all the way down, and stopped the breaks working. Not sure how this happened - we don't even use it that much, and certainly don't do anything unusual or particularly wearing to it.

Seeing as its meant to be suitable from birth - 4 years, it's not very encouraging that so much can go wrong in the first 10 months of use... [the leg break isn't the only problem we've had - the parasol broke off when Luke gave it a tug (he managed to shear the metal, so either he's a lot stronger than anyone we know or there was a fault with it), the rubber coating on the inside of the rain hood is flaking off, and the dye in the material started to run, destroying some of his clothes - we're open-minded people, but a boy in a pink shirt isn't a good look. It looks terrible on men, let alone babies...]

I'm also moving posts in the division - from being responsible for Creative Industries, I'll be responsible for Arts policy from the 18 September (when I come back from holiday), which is exciting!

I'll come back over the weekend and give the allotment story!

Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you...

I have an alibi, I tell you...

From: http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-13536210,00.html

“…Officials said eastern Cuba's north coast and southern Florida should monitor the storm.
Chris disintegrated into a mass of thunderstorms when winds fell to 35 mph, below the 39-mph threshold for a tropical storm.
Experts had predicted Chris would be in the Gulf of Mexico, at the Texas-Mexico border, by Wednesday.
The storm's remnants were expected to drop up to two inches of rain across the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas and eastern Cuba.
Southeastern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands remained under tropical storm warnings.
Residents were told to prepare for bad weather arriving within 24 hours.
Experts have predicted another active Atlantic hurricane season. But nothing like the record 28 storms seen in 2005, when hurricanes Katrina and Rita swept into Louisiana and Texas.
They shut down a quarter of US crude output and sent oil prices to then record highs.”