Month: September 2007

An eventful day

Today, while I was at work:

  • Katy took the children to visit a friend at the other end of town and got utterly soaked on the way back. Apparently this involved hail stones and possibly thunder and lightning (according to K). They got a bit lost cutting through a housing estate but discovered a playground near our house. Katy’s plan to do a map to get to the friend’s house may be well received ready for next time.
  • J and K had a how-large-can-I-write competition while doing the writing for Badgers about tarantulas and boa constrictors respectively. I learned that boa constrictors give birth to live young (unlike most snakes) and a tarantula bite is no worse than a wasp sting. There may be pictures tomorrow before I whisk them off after work.
  • A child sized accordion arrived courtesy of Freecycle. I love Freecycle. This thing is missing a couple of the buttons (as opposed to piano keys) but seems able to produce a racket fairly easily even for L. I need to talk to Dave and/or Beardie about controlling the racket in a harmonious way.
  • Maths and English.

I came home and Katy said that we had just got an email that the 2 goldfish on Freecycle are ours, so I’m picking them up tomorrow from work. J, K and L experimented with dangling a skipping rope down through the bannisters on the landing into the hall and then trying to pull each things / people back up. Lifting J wasn’t too successful, but a plastic bag holding books, a shoe and other essentials worked OK.

Tea was a team effort. L chopped up some (cooked) spaghetti left over from yesterday. K grated some cheese with a bit of my help, and J cracked some eggs. I turned them into a cheese and spaghetti omelette of which I managed to not make too much of a pig’s ear. Grammar pedant, moi? 🙂

Yesterday I had a 3.5 hour phone meeting with some German customers. For much of the first hour I browsed the web as someone else was doing the talking, but it was me for the last 2.5 hours. In the browsing I discovered a couple of nice web sites: groovy web site accessories and a way of getting even more images back from a web search. Oh, and an efficient way to compute the convex hull of a set of points, which I often find myself thinking would come in handy when changing nappies or doing the washing up ;).

Friends of friends in high places

I use LinkedIn, mostly to keep in touch with former colleagues who’ve gone to work elsewhere. (Yes I know it’s so last year, how very un-Facebook/MySpace of me, quel dinosaur.) Every so often I check if anyone I know has joined, and today I found an interesting name in the new friends of friends of friends list. A quick jump to his profile revealed his summary:

I am running for the Presidency of the United States of America, but this campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us – it must be about what we can do together. …

Not something you see every day, even on LinkedIn where the VPs of Sales go to preen. Yes, Barack Obama is a friend of a friend of a friend.

I went with the bigger three to the library today, so that the boys could borrow some books about their chosen animals for Badgers (boa constructor (sic) for K and tarantula for J) – we resisted the temptation of going straight to Google. On the way back K said that he thinks that there are two heavens – when you die you go to the first one, and then when you die there you’d go on to the second one. Logical, but not orthodox and it would need an infinite number of heavens.

I said that in heaven there is no death, no suffering, nothing to make you unhappy. So we launched into a list of things that there wouldn’t be, and one of K’s suggestions was “No President Bush trying to dig up Alaska”. Amen to that, my proto-revolutionary :).

Starting to say goodbye to the old place

Most of the people in the same office as me will be moving to the new office on Monday, so all this week there has been sorting out drawers and packing. (We move in a few weeks’ time.) There was some drink left over from the two(!) summer parties so a third party happened at the end of the day (supposedly to get rid of the drink 😉 ). Two colleagues chose this as their last day – it’s sad but understandable how many people have left. Our director might not be able to continue sneakily spending his discretionary money on free biscuits for the staff, so the stocks were reduced if not finished too! The unofficial wireless network won’t be moving to the new office, which is a shame and really silly – four people come to a meeting with laptops and then fight over the two network leads supplied.

The best event, which was sad in a way but carried out with such style was switching off a collection of re-commissioned i.e. nicked PCs. Whenever a PC became free in the office it would be disappeared by one of my colleagues and then reappear as a little Linux server, and most people in my department used them rather than the centrally administered machines as they did exactly what we needed them to do, and were quick too. A colleague of mine maintained them in his spare time, and because they weren’t centrally administered he was free to play and invent, and came up with some very useful programs. My sole contribution to the whole thing was to suggest that they be named after stations on the shipping forecast, oh and to listen to their fans and hard disks whirr away on the desk behind me all the time.

The office move was used as an opportunity by IT Services to clamp down, and the Linux boxes weren’t going to move with us. Instead we have some central machines that are supposedly big and fast enough – time will tell. Instead of just turning them off, the Linux admin and his mate did it properly. First of all, Sailing By starting playing from one of them. Then the mate started reading a shipping forecast he’d written, which was very funny, particularly as two colleagues’ surnames were the same as some machine names. As each name was mentioned the relevant PC would open and shut its CD drawer. After the last one, there were the beeps as in a time check on the radio, and then they turned themselves off. (Cron jobs are clever things in the hands of people as skilled as the Linux admin.)

Bye little Linux boxes. I won’t miss your noise, but thanks. All the names decommissioned, it’s a bit like Slow Train.

Mostly stormy, sunny periods later

Wednesday… not a good start! Plan was to do bookwork, then go to B-a-R and say hello, since we haven’t been for months and they always like to see how the children are getting on (we’ve been going since J was 4 months old!) and then get lunch in town and head over to a playdate out of town, after which we needed to get home for an early tea so the boys could get to their first Badgers session 🙂
Alas for the best laid plans…

L was up and about bright and early, as usual, but absolutely did not want to get dressed. K got up and dressed quite happily but was not so sure about breakfast. J got up, dressed and breakfasted but then procrastinated (and then some!) over maths and English. K eventually got on, had breakfast, faffed about a bit and finally did his two pages, L did some bookwork too, J continued to faff about. J had a good strop, stomp and shout and then went back to not doing Maths and English. K and L got bored waiting for him and started to push buttons so J and I both had a good shout 😳 By now we were too late to go to B-a-R 🙁
In the end I started to compose an email explaining why we had not been able to go to playdate. J and I raced to see if he could do his Maths before I could hit send. It turned out that he could 😉
Then there was more stropping. I had the phone in my hand to ring and cancel and suddenly he realised his English was easy (indeed, it took less than five minutes once he got down to it!) – by now we had not only missed B-a-R but were also half an hour late for the playdate (we had said we would be late, so this was not too bad; it was just the wrong reason for being late). Oh, and we still had nothing for lunch because had not been to shops as planned.
Grabbed cheese and crackers to eat in car, whizzed up tinned strawberries and a couple of ripe bananas with a pint or two from our milk lake (over-catered slightly for the christening 😆 ) to make milkshake and foil-wrapped remaining cheesy letters…
Ate lunch en route and with traffic being relatively kind to us made it at about the time we had expected, but without having done the things we had hoped beforehand 😕

Playdate was fun, visiting a fairly new CHEF family with 5 yr old DD2 and teenaged DS and DD1 (both away just now, hence playdate for little sis). The older children had a whale of a time exploring the gardens and building dens, then having a pretend water fight, since they were sternly warned that the weather was too cold for real water 😆 Meanwhile the younger ones did painting and collage in the barn, played with a bubble machine and then had great fun building things with magnetic tiles – and the adults had deep and meaningful discussions (no really – lots to think about and hopefully good things will come of it) about ways CHEF could work.

Suddenly realised it was rather later than we had thought so bundled children into car and arrived home with just enough time to nuke some hotdogs and stuff them into pitta with a little sweetcorn for tea before the boys and bob had to dash out again to Badgers. L had fallen asleep in the car so was full of beans at bedtime, so we girls all went to bed and read stories, then sang our (my!) way through a children’s songbook before reading a few more stories. Lovely snuggles and we enjoyed it immensely, but I’d nearly lost my voice by the time Bob got back!

Badgers was great, apparently, and the boys have homework to do for next time:find out about boa constrictors (K) and tarantulas (J). Late night though, as it finishes at J’s bedtime, so K was an hour late to bed by the time they got home.

Made for tired boys today, and we really struggled to leave the house in time to get to P & T. Then realised heavy traffic on A14 (could see lorries on bridge before we got to sliproad) so had to take slow route, phoning Bob on the way to ask him to get someone else to open up for us – just as well, as quite a few people there already by the time we arrived 15 minutes late! Spent lots of time talking slings and got my purple waves back 😀 (lent a MT to the same lady so she can try that instead – and we’re going to pop by tomorrow morning as she lives near the CO and J has an appointment) and lent Bob’s Mei Favorite (now no longer a favourite, as he likes the Connecta better) to another mum about to go on holiday but struggling with a mainstream carrier (cost her £55, only supposed to suit up to 12kg and actually doesn’t even suit a 4 month old!) – hopefully she’ll love it and buy it and that’ll fund Badgers for a term 😉 Certainly she was liking it a lot at toddlers and seemed to get the hang of it straight away 🙂

Gina did piano with the boys and then a pennant-making/pencil-decorating activity, which the older ones all seemed to enjoy. L and E had a bit of a bust-up and then made up again with very little adult intervention 🙂 Came back and had a quick lunch then Helen and little beans came over and we had a lovely afternoon chatting and eating yummy cake (and again for tea, with custard and it was lovely – thank you 🙂 ) while the children played.

Bob has gone for a “Dads’ night out” at the cinema (Bourne Ultimatum) which reminds me that I must organise another Mums’ night out soon…

Le plus ça change…

The lesson for today is from The Gospel according to Morrissey.

I’ve been struck by a few things in the last couple of days where I’m surprised that other people are surprised when history repeats itself.

The first was an article on an amazing invention that a colleague gave me from the Mail on Sunday. It’s a tabloid, so there was a big chance it would irritate me (snob? moi?) and yes it does on two counts. First is the bit “it violates almost every known law of physics”. I did less physics than many people, so I may well have got this wrong, but I think that the only law it violates is the first law of thermodynamics. Admittedly it’s a fairly fundamental law, but it’s not like it’s breaking the law of gravity, or the law of cause/effect and permitting time travel. Grrr…

The second way it annoys me is the overall tone of the article. It implies that scientists will have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new model of the world – oh dear, the sky is falling in, our beautiful tablets of stone are all wrong. Scientific arrogance really annoys me (I appreciate that there are both humble scientists and lay people who are scientifically arrogant). People thought that with Newton’s laws we’d pretty much got things sorted, and science just had to fill in a few gaps. Then – bang – quantum theory and relativity come along and suddenly Newton’s laws are shown to only be useful under certain (everyday) conditions. But we haven’t got it completely sorted now either – why shouldn’t something else come along and disrupt things again. And again… Just because we have iPhones and vacuum cleaning robots and Twitter doesn’t mean We Have Got There Now. I’m sure the Romans were pretty chuffed with their legions and surveying tools etc. and thought that their science was pretty groovy too.

The current international financial problems are another instance of history repeating itself. An unavoidable part of the capitalist system is greed – economists for some reason seem unhappy when things don’t grow. So if you give people enough power (like those in banks in the US) and new ways to be greedy, and surprise surprise, at least some of them will be greedy so much that it hurts other people. I don’t like the prospect of interest rates going up because of the mortgage, but I’m not surprised that there is a problem in Big Finance.

A slightly less depressing note, where someone other than me is doing the ranting, is a nice article about web things from Joel Spolsky.

Well…

… the day started okay, with J getting his Maths and English done pretty much straightaway so that he (and L) could watch some tv. K took ages to get round to doing anything much though, then complained that he hadn’t got to watch as much as they had (well, yeah, that’s how it works when you take ages and strop!) 🙄
Playing outside happened, as did snack, which was even educational with cheesy letters 😉
We did some of the Impossible Quiz (just can’t click fast enough to fire up those lasers!) and a bit of SotW (finished the Normans) then had a late lunch before walking down to the post office and then back via the park. Oh, and somewhere in there J had a massive tantrum and ended up going into the garden to shout and stomp and scare L and K. I dread to think what the neighbours thought, as he was really roaring at the top of his voice and in a nigh-on uncontrollable rage 🙁 When he’d calmed down he came back in and apologised to everyone (schizophrenic developmental stage again, I think, veering between tantrumming toddler and mature adult) and suggested that he should have something to eat and it may have been at least partly due to low blood sugar. He may have been right; it was certainly getting late by then and we hadn’t yet had lunch…
The park was lovely and we did a fun photoshoot when we got home, because PIL have been asking for a decent portrait photo of K, but apart from that it’s been a bit of a stormy afternoon. J read his new Beano and all the children had a go at blowing bubbles with an old tube of bubble/balloon stuff K found, but there were frequent clashes for no obvious reason, so I’m hoping it’s just tiredness and things will go better tomorrow.
Had some of J’s cake for tea – yummy! Might just have to have another slice for my supper 😉

Monday Monday…

CHEF sports today 🙂
Shame we didn’t get there until halfway through, thanks to hideous traffic on the A14 🙁 Should have gone the other way, but it looked clear right up until we hit the queues…

Anyway, we still managed to chat about plans for Latin etc and L enjoyed playing with SB and E, then we went to the park with Gina, E and J for a bit more chat (adults) and running around (children) 🙂

By the time we got back here L was sound asleep, to the extent that I transferred her from car to bed without waking her 😯 and she had a good forty winks while the boys pootled and we got lunch ready (leftovers from yesterday 😉 ).

J decided he wanted to make a cake for Bob and me, and we happened to have a Victoria sponge complete kit (just add eggs and butter; even jam included) I bought last time he said that so I pointed him in the right direction and let him get on with it 🙂 All I did was to put it in the hot oven and take it out when he told me the time was up. We haven’t tasted it yet, but it looks great – it’s even iced and decorated with “Best M and D” 😆

While he was busy cake making I made up some cheese straw dough, because they all went yesterday and the children felt cheated 😆 then while the cake was cooking J made cheesy letters – he’s learning to multitask! Meanwhile K did maths (slow because the current exercises have lots of reading to do too) and L did poissonrouge.

I had a chat with the children this morning about Melrose and they decided they want to go so much that they are willing to have token Christmas presents so that we can afford it, so a quick chat with Bob later the form and bank transfer were winging their way 😀 Now we just need to plan a journey in easy stages to make it bearable 😕 Still wondering if it should be just the children and me to preserve some of Bob’s holiday, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t just hide away all the time then 😳

Christening

The day started a bit too early, with an unhappy R, but fortunately none of the other children seem to have been woken up, so we were able to go back to sleep peacefully until a more respectable hour 🙂
The morning went quite smoothly, considering how many people were trying to get ready at once; the extra space (and extra bathroom) at this house a definite advantage there 😉 Mamgu decided the apples needed using up, so raided the larder for some mincemeat which also needed using up and made a vegan mincemeat and apple cake (which smelt divine as it cooked and tasted just as good as it smelt!) while B, L and I peeled and grated carrots, toasted pine nuts and crushed garlic (or Daleks) to make carottes rapees.

Somehow we managed to get ourselves and all the necessary things into cars and to the church with plenty of time to spare and tempers pretty much intact. Cups were put out and cakes arranged, the urn put on and readings allocated and practised. It was lovely to see the church filling up with families (there are normally between 2 and 12 children there; today there must have been nearer 40!) and to have a chance to say hello to friends and family – although there were some I know I missed and many I only just managed to say hello to in passing.

The service was lovely. We had requested the old service form, but with a prayer from the new (will get Bob to type it in later) and an advantage of this was that it was typed out rather than needing people to find the right page in a worship book. J read the second set reading (about Jesus blessing the children) and did it beautifully – slow and clear – I was so proud 😀 A received a thorough wetting (I have never seen an infant so well and truly baptised!) but accepted it gracefully (I just wish I had had a camera handy to catch her expression at each splash!) and smiled at Robert as he took her round the church to introduce her. When the children left after the ceremony and the second hymn the church felt a little bare and the Sunday school leaders were almost overwhelmed but rallied gamely 🙂

I handed A to one of her new godmothers and nipped out during the last hymn to get tea and coffee made but was still caught out by the first thirsty (and speedy) members of the congregation. Fortunately one of the first was a good friend who didn’t mind being co-opted to help, so she (wo)manned the teapot while I made coffee and hordes of helpful children handed out cake (no ulterior motives there, I’m sure 😉 ). It was bedlam, but in a friendly way 😆

Eventually we got everything more or less cleared away and those who were left were invited to come along to the local godparents’ house for lunch. Lots of lovely food appeared (thank you to all who brought things 🙂 ) and the children had a whale of a time in the garden enjoying what will apparently be the last sunny day for a while. It was a lovely relaxed afternoon and we ended the day feeling shattered, but deeply blessed that we know so many special people and are lucky enough to call them friends :cheers:
I think leaving the mess at someone else’s house helps too 😉

Phew!

It’s been a long but worthwhile weekend!

On Friday I woke up feeling lousy and with a large painful lump in my left breast, which strongly suggested impending mastitis 🙁 I got L to drain it as best she could, but it was still tender and lumpy and I was starting to feel suspiciously ‘fluey. In one of those strange “bad things which happen for the best” occurrences Bob should have been catching the bus that day, as his usual lift wasn’t available and we needed the car, but the bus came early (really – he was on time and it sailed past him well before he got to the bus stop) so he phoned to ask for a lift, I told him how grotty I felt and we decided the most sensible thing was for him to take the morning off to look after children and give me some chance of recovering, then for us to drop him off at work in the afternoon on the way to French, do some shopping and then pick him up and come home together. Genius! It made a potentially awful day fairly bearable 😀

The boys got English and Maths out of the way and L and I iced the board (mostly to cover the Christmas patterns on it!) while Bob did odd jobs, then we oiled the table top (did the benches and underneath of table yesterday) and had snack. Bob and children finished weeding trugs and planted remaining primroses while I iced the cake, then L and K helped me to make pink roses and J and I made white roses while Bob did a bit of general tidying up. At some point a friend popped by with a large bag of apples, which got parked in the kitchen to be dealt with later. After an early lunch we set off, pausing en route to collect a parcel (J caught the “We tried to deliver but…” note as postie put it through the door yesterday – didn’t try very hard then!) and then getting caught in heavy traffic on the A14 so Bob was later for work than planned, especially as he still had to collect J’s new French book from his old school and a suit from the dry cleaner.

Having dropped him off, the children and I went on to Browns Field, where we sat in the car park and finished our lunch while we waited for everyone to arrive for French. Music hasn’t started yet, but all three are now doing French (each in a different class) and it was nice to have a chance to chat – and coo over M’s 3 week old baby 🙂
Then there was time to play outside, and chat some more, before heading off to Daily Bread, where half of us met up again – it must be the place to go on a Friday afternoon 😆

We picked up Bob and were heading home when J remembered that he had left his new French book and CD and also his new music theory book, under a lamp-post in the playground 😡 so we turned round and went back there to look for it, to no avail 🙁 By now it was nearly 5:30 and we had told my dad that we would be home by 5, so tempers were starting to fray, but at least the A14 was unusually quiet and we got home quite quickly, to find that my dad and his partner (Tadcu and Mamgu) had managed to get in (he still had a key from his last visit, fortunately) and had made themselves at home. We fed the children pasta and jar and got them off to bed, then planned jobs for Saturday and got off to bed at a moderately sensible time.

Tadcu doesn’t get over here very often, but when he does he likes to feel useful. Mamgu is the same, so she and I spent the morning baking, with help from random children as and when they felt like it. She made a madeira cake while I prepped up a curry for tea and fed A, then L and I made date slice while Mamgu amused A, we all made cheese straws and got the ingredients ready for flapjacks but by then it was lunch time, there was no room left in the oven and the children and I were supposed to be elsewhere at a birthday party…

Meanwhile Tadcu disconnected the heater which can no longer be on the annexe wall because there is a piano in the way, then he and Bob started to think about taking out the dividing wall between the kitchen porch and the annexe, decided the first step was to put up extra shelves in the kitchen to take the stuff from the shelf on the wall, got the shelves (bought for old house but never put up) from the workshop and began drilling. Tadcu is a great teacher/supervisor; once he had Bob started and was sure all was going well he, J and I took a look at the climbing frame cubes and decided how to put them together. We thought two blocks would be more adaptable (and easier to move) than the one large block it used to be. In fact J had very definite ideas, so he dictated and Tadcu did the putting together, while the children and I grabbed presents and sped off to our party, leaving a hive of activity behind us.

The party was great: lots of children (and parents) we know well and just enough structure to keep things busy, with plenty of time to play or chat as well. The children, and many of the adults, painted mugs (made by the birthday boy’s mum and fired but not yet glazed), including a birthday mug with all the children’s fingerprints, which will be glazed and fired for them, then decorated pizzas and played a few party games while they cooked. Everything over-ran, but nobody cared – except when we realised it was 4:30 and the Rainedrops were due back at home for tea… By the time I had rounded up the children it was nearly 5 and we didn’t get home until the time we had expected our guests to arrive. As it happened, we needn’t have worried, because they were running late too 😉

We got back to find the fridge had moved (it had been in front of the door/wall to the annexe) and there was a door where there had been a wall! The new shelves were now fully stocked, the flapjacks made, the climbing frames assembled and a downpipe inserted where there had been an open-ended gutter on the annexe. There were also a few new (to us) toys, including a lovely doll pram for the girls, as Bob’s parents had been and gone while we were out, bringing some bits which used to be SIL’s. Since A was happy in the car Mamgu and I took the chance to nip out to the shops and get a few more bits and pieces for the christening celebrations, which took a little longer than hoped – but again we needn’t have worried as we returned to the news that the Rainedrops had been held up even more and were now stuck on a totally closed M1.

By the time they arrived I had been able to decorate the cake (not great as no piping bag to be found so had to use bought plastic tube thing 🙁 ), get rice cooked and make a spicy tomato and green bean dish (PIL again) to serve with the curry. Then it was a flurry of getting children off to bed, all in the same room as this had been specially requested on condition of getting ready quickly before we could relax and chat – and finish embroidering the christening gown.