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As I work for a computer company, I was amused by this email from the woman who looks after the buildings:
The central heating is now back on, we had software and hardware problems with the boiler which have now been resolved.
I dread the day when we need to reboot the toaster. Busy weekend which we should blog soon – photos are on Flickr.
I learned last week that one of my colleagues (one of the few who hasn’t left 😉 ) was one of the Vietnamese boat people. His uncle, father and him were dumped in Harlow with no English, no other Vietnamese people near them, little money and few clothes in a bare flat!
One of the leavers has gone to a place that sounds interesting: True Knowledge. It’s worth looking at the demo video to explain it. I’ve managed to get a beta account, and I’m entering things in which occasionally leads to head scratching: how would you define a knife? an axe? a pair of scissors? a sword? Then what about other things like secateurs, scythes, bill hooks, sickles?
I think it’s safe to say that what it doesn’t know is a lot bigger than what it does know! It’s interesting to look at the page that shows what’s been added recently – a bit like seeing what people are searching for on Google, but less smutty and less biased towards the novel.
tuesday – no swimming teacher (J relieved)
intended to do things with the time but A snotty and grumpy so not much achieved )ref to dev book?)
pancake party at church, chatted about going back to preaching
wednesday – latin here (quiet – adjectives and animals again, plus reading story) then divers and dinodors at haricots then gymnastics, scavenge tea, then badgers
thursday – picked up books – French magic rainbow fairies, v quiet toddlers, aldi, magic school bus, chinese tea, B-a-R curry and childcare/talk on self esteem
friday – friday club – worship (hiding your light under a bushel or letting it shine) then more Gruffalo-based drama, while J did Julius Caesar and then performed as Brutus 🙂 Big Alice came 😀 Afternoon at the park, then picked up Bob (who went out to dinner)
saturday – Body Combat 😯 and lots of pottering. Shall we join the gym? Might well be worth it but would need to break into savings now (£58 a month or £580 for a year for both of us to use gym suite, sauna etc, racquet courts, fitness classes and family to use pool at all local council-run leisure centres!) – would only need to do one class each plus one extra thing (class, swim etc) each week to be worth it and we should prob be doing some exercise anyway – keep telling the children they need to 😳
Bob and children dissected the old central heating timer and looked up things like resistor bands.
sunday – aiming for breakfast at church (bacon butties) – missed, but at least got to church early! good service plus communion and then tea and biscuits 🙂 bought bread and came home to make our own (fake) bacon butties 😉 lovely weather so children ate outside and we threw open all the doors and windows 😀
More pottering, putting together cabin bed for spare room etc – dowel and screws missing (how??) so not quite finished but nearly there.
We were nearly ready in time to collect the parcel on the way to CHEF sports…
Very nearly.
Not quite, though.
As we were about to go onto the A14 we heard the traffic news, which said it was every slow, so we changed course and came the other way. Unfortunately it seems almost every lorry driver in a 20 mile radius had as well, so we then sat in a long queue for several miles wondering if we should have gone the other way after all 🙄
We got to Sports late, but K had been saying he was tired all the way there anyway, so he wasn’t too bothered. A very sunny for a change – did her first serious bit of crawling (she had been going backwards and getting horribly frustrated for a while, then at the w/e toyed with the idea of forwards motion but didn’t get very far) – straight across the floor to a bowl of apple pieces which the littlest Bean had left unattended… Having polished off the apple pieces 😳 she then had a good rummage in the Beans’ lunchbox (sorry!) and came out with a whole apple which she had managed to take a small chunk out of by the time we realised and took it away from her 😆 Littlest Bean was not amused!
We didn’t go to the park afterwards because we realised we might just have time to collect the parcel if we came straight back… and we just made it 🙂 Collected a counting board kit, which K was happy to claim as his, since it had arrived on his birthday 😆 then suddenly remembered that we were supposed to have been collecting some Freecycled CDRoms from a village near where we had been for Sport, so had to go back again *sigh*
Having driven that far (again) we decided we may as well stop at the NT place we went to the other weekend, as we were passing anyway, change and feed A and then go and play in the gardens for a bit. Got there and parked, then realised Bob had the family ticket; mine was out of date. So the children just ran round the park a bit while I fed and changed A and then we came home.
Did a bit of Maths and English and then crashed the computer trying to install one of the new CDRoms *sigh again* Finally got one of them to run and the children played that for a while, but K didn’t like the voice and it was too easy for J. L just wanted to help me, no matter what I was doing, and A went back to screaming again – seems to be all she wants to do the last few weeks, apart from the very occasional sunny patch 🙁
Ho hum.
Tonight after tea, J and I had one of those conversations where afterwards you have to work hard to remember where you started, given where you ended up. We haven’t had one for a long time, so I’m entering it here before I forget.
I think it all started when Katy called the price of something through from the other room as “85 quid”. K asked what quid meant, and I said it was the same as pound. He said something a bit confused about dollars, and I said there were pounds and pence, dollars and cents, and Euros and cents and so on.
J then said that you could use Euros in Turkey. I said I didn’t think so as it wasn’t even in the EU, but that it was trying to join. If it did join that would be a big thing, because it would be the only mostly Muslim country in the EU, and one that’s mostly in Asia. Countries like France have places like Germany and Belgium as neighbours, but Turkey has places like Iran and Iraq – suddenly the EU goes all the way up to the Middle East. J asked about what would change in Turkey if it’s in the EU, and I said things like people can work anywhere in the EU without much trouble.
Then we talked about the UK not using the Euro, but first I had to say a bit about interest, how banks make their money by it, how they set their interest rate relative to what the central bank decides, inflation, and central banks changing interest rates to control it. Then because things like many people in France rent rather than having a mortgage changing interest rates across Europe together would have different effects in different countries, so if we joined at the wrong time it would hurt our economy. So at the moment it’s been left that when our economy fits well enough with the rest of the Euro countries we’d think about joining.
Then we talked about how some people don’t want to get rid of the pound at all, how they think it’s part of what makes us British, with the Queen’s head on it and so on. This is true, but we’re also European, so some people want to use the Euro as it would make us more European. Plus it makes it easier to buy and sell across Europe. I also said that Granddad wants us to join, as he survived a war in Europe and he wants to avoid there being another one and he thinks a common currency would help.
J was quiet for a bit, then asked “If Britain went to war, would your company have to write computer programs for controlling tanks and things?” I said that during the war there was conscription, because there weren’t enough soldiers and so on without everyone joining in. We’re at war at the minute in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there are enough soldiers (simplifying quite a bit 🙁 ) so there is no conscription. Fortunately a war that would need conscription is very unlikely at the minute. But even if there were conscription there would be protected professions, where you’re even more useful to the country doing your normal job than being in the army etc. Or there would be people who joined the army but didn’t fight – like doctors. “Oh yes,” said J, “I remember from Going Solo when a cosmetic surgeon joined the hospital at Alexandria and Roald Dahl went there.” One of the increasing number of books that J has read and I haven’t, so I just accepted it.
I said the vicars go in the army do, that they’re often called padre. “So they can go to church wherever they are?” Yes. “Would they lug a huge pipe organ around with them?” No, they’d probably sing without any instruments :).
It’s like one of those word puzzles where you have to go from a start word to an end word via other words, changing only one letter at a time. We went from money to padres, via economics and geo-politics. 🙂
Friday was a much-needed quiet day at home 🙂
We started off with a list of things to do and we actually managed to tick more than half of them off 😀
One of them was collecting the parcel we failed to collect yesterday, but that was complicated by the fact that another slip had appeared on Thursday saying that a different parcel had failed to be delivered and that they would try again on Friday morning, so we were hoping that that one would arrive early enough for us to get to the depot before it closed at 1:00. It arrived at 3 🙄 so we still have a parcel waiting for us, which K is convinced will be a birthday present for him, as it should have arrived on his big day.
There was lots of good schools TV on, so we watched that whilst emptying and reloading the dishwasher (actually J supervised the d/w emptying while I was feeding and changing A; I came back to find it all done except for a few plates and mugs whose homes the children could not reach) and putting on and hanging out washing.
Double Maths and English happened without (much) fuss, as promised on Thursday (it was a condition of going to play with Z 😉 ) and we also finally got a folder sorted out with stuff from the Terracotta Army trip we did a few weeks ago. J, K and L each dictated while I typed so we got a page on each of their chosen topics: technology, power and animals respectively. Then they drew things to cut out and stick on to decorate the folder (I still need to do the actual sticking 😳 ) and we put everything safely inside 🙂 With almost impeccable timing, the parcel which finally arrived in the afternoon, having been promised in the morning, included three little terracotta warriors to dig out of plaster blocks, so that was Saturday morning’s activity sorted 😉
Also managed to package up and post off the nappies I am swapping for a frontbackandsides carrier, which was just as well, as the mei tai arrived just before my side of the bargain left 😳 It looks good though (much nicer irl than in the photo I had seen) and might just be a keeper. Must get rid of a few others though… Anyone need a sling or two? I seem to have exchanged a cloth nappy addiction for a carrier addiction 😳
J’s English included riddles to work out, which made him think of a question he had seen in Murderous Maths and assumed to be a riddle or a joke: what number is the square root of -1? I said I didn’t know and he told me with glee that it was i, then waited for me to explain why it was funny. I didn’t. I couldn’t! We waited for Daddy to get home… Teatime conversation included a long chat, including paper and pens, about i…
Most of Saturday was spent doing sundry bits of DIY, such as putting up new coat hooks in the hall (Bob, supervised by A and me) and having fun creating clouds of plaster dust in the garden (J, K and L) whilst digging out little warriors. Photos hopefully on flickr soon.
Today we went to local, rather than old, church, although this was not what we had intended. It should have been an all age service so we had intended to go back for it, but the preacher didn’t realise, so had not prepared. Meanwhile there was no Sunday School planned because it was all age worship, so a steward had phoned round on Sat evening to see if anyone was coming with children, we were the last regular family and the only ones planning to come and therefore said we would make things simpler by not going 😕 Actually the service we did go to was very good and fellowship good also, so I think it was perhaps as well that we were there today – except that as well as Bob doing the website I have now been reminded about local preaching (good, I guess), asked to go to meetings about the future direction of worship at the church (again, I guess that’s good really, but a little eek!) and also asked to consider taking over the church newsletter/diary (big eek!) because I look organised (huh?) the children are nice (well, mostly) and I come recommended (? by whom???) – the woman who currently does it (but is leaving in July) said it takes her a few hours a month and she comes in at 10 one Friday a month to print and collate, which takes a while but it’s okay because you can do it while the children are at school – er, when would that be then? I think we’re being sucked in and I’m not sure how I feel about that! At least it’s not Sunday School – I’ve done that at every church so far and I’ve had enough!
Oh and J lost a tooth. In the middle of the children’s address, which was about waiting – so he gave the example of waiting for a tooth to come out 😆 Which reminds me, I must go and check he’s left it somewhere easy for the tooth fairy to get to 😉
This afternoon we went to a fab birthday party at the gym where the boys do gymnastics. The equipment was all out as usual, but with a few extra soft play bits as well, and 30 children were let loose for an hour! It was great! L was able to have a go at all the things she normally only gets to see the boys do and Bob and I were able to watch them doing things I normally only see from the balcony and Bob not at all 🙂 It was lovely to see how confident and daring J and K have become in such a short time.
Home for bath and early bed – all round I think 😀
We had a parcel to collect, so intended to leave early and get it on the way. Ah well!
Just about made it to toddlers on time, despite horribly strong winds trying to blow us off the A14. Gina arrived as we did, so the children and I started with French while she got a few toys out. A mum and her little boy arrived while we were still chanting animal names and chasing flashcards – hope she didn’t think we were mad 😆 I think she may be the mum Joy mentioned to me some time ago as having been there one week when I wasn’t, terribly lonely and rather depressed, but my (rather feeble – I’m not good at this!) attempts to talk to her were met with smiles and not much more 😕 I really need a communicator to do the talking while I do the running the group stuff, as I can do children, but I’m rubbish with adults 🙁 That’s where Jane and Pam were so useful…
Paints again, as they went down so well last time – still need to find somewhere to put all K’s pictures! Also, Gina had brought St. Brigid‘s crosses to make, and some information about Imbolc and Candlemas. We should be starting spring cleaning around now, it seems. Hmmm…
Sarah came along with chess again, which seems to work really well 🙂 and J and K both did some piano, then we even managed some Latin (adjectives as before, plus adding in formosa/us, sordida/us and some animals, but just exposure rather than learning this time – we’ll do it again next time and eventually it’ll go in [who knows, I might even start remembering some of it too!] but it takes on average 7 exposures to a new word for it to stand a chance of being learned).
Instead of going home we went to play with Z and Sarah (last minute arrangement 🙂 ) where J and Z disappeared while K, L and I discovered the delights of Puzzle Journeys – must see if we can get hold of one or two from local library, if Sarah hasn’t got them all already! Then collected Bob from work (waited ages in car park as he’d forgotten why we were picking him up and thought there was no hurry 🙄 ) and went to photographers to look at pictures and decide how many we *need* to buy – and how many mortgages it will take to pay for them!
Late tea (pasta and jar, plus green beans as chosen by L and smoothie from remainders of toddler snack 😉 then leftover birthday cake 🙂 ) and consequently another late night for children 🙁
And then Bob and I stupidly stayed up late playing Peggle 😳
Long list of things to do today, but children have all been playing so nicely with K’s birthday playmobil and A has been so snuggly (and grumpy if not snuggled) that we’ve not got very far yet…
