Sorry for the silence . . .

. . . I've been very very busy firstly at a veterinary practice clocking up work experience for when I apply to university. The practice I was at is really lovely, which is quite a blessing as the certainly aren't all.

I also had a baby hedgehog brought to me, which unfortunately died suddenly. This apparently isn't entirely unusual although it is obviously quite upsetting. The little fellow had been coming to the vets with me everyday as it needed regular feeding. About a day before it died we noticed some soreness around its bottom and phoned a large veterinary practice that does all the work for a big rescue centre in London and my vet followed the advice of the expert in London in terms of treatment. The baby suddenly went downhill that evening and I called a lot of local hedgehog people for advise, most of them weren't in or passed me onto somebody else and when I did eventually talk to somebody she wasn't all that helpful and told me I'd probably killed it with the medication I was giving it. All rather unfortunate and given that by the time I was off the phone the poor little thing had died not a great evening but it wasn't until I went back to the vets to continue my work experience that I realised just how rude and unhelpful this woman was. Apparently she stormed into the vets that Saturday and started shouting at the nurse on reception in front of the whole waiting room that she'd killed it and they should all know better. Luckily the people there are really nice and didn't blame me for the crazy shouting woman but I felt terrible. I didn't intentionally mention which vets it was as they were doing me a favour and didn't really deserve to get dragged into anything, they were after all following professional advise. Unfortunately there's basically nothing I can do as I can't even be 100% certain who actually went in and did the shouting as there's a little group of women here who all take in hedgehogs and work together, none of them live close to my vets (which annoys me even more because they clearly made a special trip to do the shouting) so it really could have been any of them. Sorry for the rant but I haven't really had anybody to talk to about this; the whole experience has really put me off and I now feel I can't take anymore hedgehogs to this particular vet.

In more positive news Apple finally got back to me after months and months and I have a job! It starts in a couple of weeks, which is great after nearly a year of basically no money. I should also be starting A Levels around that time so my life is going to suddenly get quite busy. The only slightly annoying thing is that I told the Job Centre people that I had a job and they said 'great but you still have to keep applying to places until you start even though you already have a job', so I have to waste my time and that of the companies' I'm apply to applying for jobs I don't want or need; it is frustrating and seems very silly.

I will be launching another Blog Challenge before the end of the week and put up some Artist Features so keep checking back for updates.