Month: July 2007

A nice week

The house warming already seems ages ago, so time for an update.

The Raine Drops stayed with us after the house warming and we tucked them away in the guest wing ;-). One advantage of the new house is enough space to have people to stay without it being a major hassle, particularly such lovely company who bring such yummy chocolate brownies. A week of extended playing happened, which was great for everyone.

We carted most of the RDs off to church with the promise of the band and Sunday School but neither happened (Sunday School is on school holiday). The children gathered at the back colouring, doing word searches etc, and no-one seemed to mind the extra noise or the smaller ones going to find Mum and coming back (lots of times!). During coffee after the service lots of v. smartly dressed people started to mill about, whom I hadn’t seen in the service. It turns out that the Anglican church just across the road has nowhere to chat over tea and biscuits, and so wander over and they had had a Sea Service, so lots of mayor-types and current and former service personnel with impressive uniforms and/or ironmongery on their chests.

On Monday the local Home Ed. group had organised a trip to Duxford for a workshop on flying which apparently was very good, followed by a mosey around the museum. The other day of doing stuff was a 3 museum trip (Arch and Anth, Earth Sciences, History of Science). The History of Science Museum has improved since the last time I went there, and B & J sent Morse Code to each other and tried to make their own Zoetrope. After all that they weren’t too tired, so we introduced the Raine Drops and our children to punting – no-one fell in and B, B & C were very good.

One evening they introduced us to Risk and our marriage has survived so far 🙂 We did the full grown-up evening and tried the local Chinese takeaway for the first time, which makes very tasty and interesting stuff indeed (tempura veg 🙂 )

It was C’s birthday while he was with us and so an unusual cake was baked for him (that still involved chocolate and so was consumed quickly), which was just about big enough for all the candles ;-).

Then of course there was the Beans’ Castle party. Cue a nice garden and sunny weather, fancy dress for the children, and many photo opportunities for the parents – so much so that I thought that a camera was a requirement for being let in. Much lovely food and drink, children having a whale of a time, and adults having a relax in nice company. Thank you very much Chris and Helen. A had a long and involved chat with Jax, and giggled over Karen (which I managed to capture a bit on my phone’s crummy video camera).

We still hadn’t managed to evict the Raine Drops this morning 😉 so it was off to church again, this time with the band (v. good) then back home for lunch and the Raine Drops headed off. Only a few hours later the Frabjous Days posse arrived and the two blokes went off to be manly hunter-gatherers (at the local chippy) followed by fantastic cake (you know you can come again without providing yummy calories – but it is always appreciated!). A tried out her Bumbo for the first time, which went OK, but she won’t be zooming around the house on it any time soon!

Warmed despite the rain!

Thanks to everyone who came to our housewarming party. It was great to see you all, and thanks for all the food, drink and general mucking in that helped make it even nicer.

I’m sorry that parking was tricky, but glad you found us in the end. Sorry we didn’t get to talk to everyone properly – there were too many people to get round to everyone. You’ll just have to visit again, one family at a time!

I’m digging it round cos I don’t want it square

Bernard Cribbins – genius.

When we had the soakaways put in they dug up a lot of earth to put in the pipes and so on, and not much of it went back in again, so we have two large piles of earth cunningly dumped by the builders to breach the damp-proof course and also reduce the amount of parking we have. Katy had the bright idea of killing two birds with one stone, and dump it all in trugs (big plastic bucket things) and grow things in them. We’ve got some on order from a shop on eBay, so tomorrow night’s job is being a navvy, but we also got one each for the older three to definitely have as theirs and of course they had to help fill them with earth. They do each have a little trowel and fork but these are all in a random box and so they were trying to use my shovel and spade, which caused fewer accidents than I expected!

We finally submitted the report to the LA about J, and they also know about K now so we had to fill out their standard and slightly irritating form. Flickr to the rescue – we bombarded them with lots of printed out photos. Thanks Michelle for your help.

At the weekend I took J to his last mini-football session of the term in his new groovy trainers, and K and L tagged along too. Afterwards I took them to the Zoology museum as they were having a special day about forests which was good, and I had to drag them away from making butterflies and snakes (things stuck on paper) to get some lunch.

Multi-purpose title to this post because I had a random thought in the shower today. The excellent Kids in America by Kim Wilde has the line “Everybody live for the music-go-round”. I think that with the arrival of iPods based on flash drives rather than hard disks, music won’t go round any more. Hard disks, CDs, tapes, records, reel-to-reel – all recorded music that I could think of always went round when you played it. Now it just goes click.

Finally, two videos that should make you smile: 1, 2
Oh, and I don’t think Jesus needed additives, but it looks fun.

You have been eaten by a grue

Sometimes I love Wikipedia. A colleague of mine was complaining that her husband was rubbish at saying when something was blue or green (unless it was really blue or really green) and I said that there’s a word in Welsh that means both blue and green. Aha! Her husband in Welsh. I searched on Google and Wikipedia came up with a lovely page that says this blue/green blending is common and that that’s sometimes referred to in English as grue.

According to Wikipedia and another nice page, this term actually came from philosophy, where it is used to illustrate the problem of making general statements such as “all emeralds are green” rather than the more limited “all emeralds I have seen so far are green”. That reminded me of the surreal conversation I had at Kessingland with Grant about his PhD thesis (How the natural sciences do or don’t provide a basis for terms from ethics like ought, should and so on). It was standard brain-bending philosophical stuff that I could just about keep up with, but what made it surreal was that I was holding the washing up I was about to do, and he held the smelly potty he was about to empty.

And of course Wikipedia also contains a page about the meaning of the word grue that you’d get from reading geek things like User Friendly: a dark-loving monster in the text adventure Zork.

More education at the dinner table: last night we talked about primary colours, and how light and pigment have different sets (must get some torches and coloured cellophane for them to play with), which somehow led on to tides and the moon. (Sounds a bit like describing a dream!) Tonight Katy found some Alphabite like things in the freezer (like oven chips, but in the shape of a letter) and K did some spelling. Oh and J said he wanted to go and see the Moscow State Circus because there was an advert for it on the table – which country is it the capital of?

Housewarming!

Come along any time between 10am and 8pm on Saturday 21st July and help us celebrate our new home :cheer:

The sofabed is already booked, but we should be able to find some floor space if needed for those coming from further afield – there are still plenty of cardboard boxes if all else fails :frog:

Contributions of food/drink :champers: welcome but not essential; it’s your company we’re after really :cheers:
Similarly, it would help us to know if you’re coming but we’d rather see you unexpectedly than not at all!

:mexicanwave:

Sociable weekend

Yesterday was B&L’s joint birthday party, which was great. The magician who’d been hired kept the children enthralled for an hour, but then he did used to work with Lenny Henry. The weather was lovely and everyone enjoyed themselves and consumed far too many sherbet flying saucers. It featured a unique a capella version of Pass The Parcel, and a guest appearance of Tidy Your Room! We dragged them away with the promise of buying (rubber) ducks to race today at the town fête thing, but unfortunately the recent rain meant that the river was flowing too fast (rubber ducks have a maximum speed?) and so the race was cancelled. In the evening I mostly shifted boxes to make more room in the house. No unpacking to speak of, though!

Our second visit to our new local church went well, and then back for getting the house ready for a nice long visit from K&R and family (not the authors of the standard book on C), plus bonus visit from F and children who happened to be passing by. Some more going to the fête, lots of eating, computer games playing, running about loons, and having a nice time. Next to the fête was a community room which turns itself into a local history museum on summer weekends, and I popped in searching for a French Market that we thought was part of the fête but is next week. Mmmm brioche. Anyway, the museum was small and I was due back to child mind, but I did manage to see the Roman pots, the skull and the fact that there were lots of things to read another time and take the children to.

Also this week I managed to finally read Peepo to the children (supposedly L, but the boys joined in too) when they were in the right mood to talk about its history. We went through the pictures comparing their house to ours, the main character to A, and I said that it could have been about their grandfather.

Katy is trying to reassert normality on the home education front after the huge hiatus of moving house and then going away for a fortnight, which has met with more resistance than it should have done, but has started to bear fruit (and should meet with less resistance next week).

This summer I shall be mostly wearing waders (and a cloak)…

We left Kentwell later than we’d hoped, and so didn’t arrive at the camp site for Muddle Puddle until 10.30! It was dark, raining, very windy and generally unpleasant. Fortunately Merry was about doing her pot-holer impersonation with her head torch, rounded up Nic and between us we tried and failed to put up a couple of small tent’s of Merry’s that we thought would be easier than putting up our big tent. No, I managed to rip one fatally, so Merry took further pity on us and put up a party of refugees from 1584 in her lovely cathedral of a tent.

The wind, rain and nice people pretty much summed up the rest of the week. The camp site turned into a bog in places, cars got stuck and tents submerged and so were lifted up and re-sited on drier ground. I still had no coat and so had to use my Kentwell cloak to Nic’s amusement. More than once during the week we thought “Let’s go home” particularly as this was by then our second week of camping and so we were all starting to fray around the edges. But then this turned to “We’ll leave tomorrow unless the weather improves” and we limped through the week like that – the bad weather being outweighed by the nice people.

There was the customary trip to Africa Alive, which was nice as ever (plus had the added attraction of being less boggy than the camp site). There was also the customary tie-dying (the weather held off just long enough) which was also good.

On a couple of nights the rain was joined by very strong winds. One of these nights produced a hole in the tent! We had a folding-up set of metal shelves to put food on, and the wind blew the side of the tent inwards so much and so hard that it impaled itself on a bolt holding the shelves together. The ever-helpful Beans produced a set of patches in the morning, which made us water-tight again.

The cabaret / talent show had the usual good efforts from the children. Our boys did some jokes, L sang Je Peux Frapper with some help from me and Jan sang a very appropriate song from Flanders and Swann (solo and a capella, which was very impressive).

We left a day early to avoid bad weather forecast for the final day, and fortunately the rain at the start of the day was blown off by the wind later so we packed a dry tent. There had been less milling about in a friendly sort of way by children and adults than last year, but it was worth enduring. Time for a better-drained camp site next year, I think though! Despite the weather we managed to take some photos – on Flickr as ever.

UPDATE: I added a bit to the title to make it more accurate!