Saturday was a nice pottering about the house kind of day, to recharge after busy feeling weekends before. I managed to mow the lawn and do other jobs, but nothing amazing. I did, however, manage to lose my patience with L at bed time in a huge and bad way 😳
On Sunday Katy and I did prayers (intercession and thanksgiving) at our newer church. It felt nice to be part of the service, and also to balance the choruses and PowerPoint presentations by doing old fashioned prayers without music backing or punctuation. (Bah humbug. The new stuff is nice, but it’s easy to get caught up in the trappings and forget what it’s all about.)
As there are no swimming lessons this week due to half term, we all went swimming on Sunday afternoon, to a pool a few villages over that I hadn’t been to before. Much better for children than our local one or the one they have lessons in – a separate shallow pool with a shallow end they all feel safe in and a not too scary water chute. L and K were eager to go on the chute with Katy and me, and J eventually realised that it was fun (just in time – we were the last ones allowed on). There’s even a speedometer with a big display when you get off the chute, although strangely it only stops timing after you’ve walked on for a bit. A went in one of those inflatable baby throne things and J, K, A and I had a lot of fun playing pass the A.
Katy IM’d me at work yesterday saying that one of the cats had brought in a bird and eaten some of it but left the rest under the kitchen table. I wasn’t looking forward to clearing it up. By the time I’d got home she’d polished off the rest and lay down all evening (feeling fat, I expect). I was glad there weren’t any bits of foot etc. lying around.
When I got in I took all the children up to our bed, to give Katy a bit of a break / let Katy cook the tea (what an enlightened husband I am, letting my wife cook tea like that). This was a bit interesting. L was cooking things on the DS Lite, A was pottering about occasionally getting tickled by K and me, and J and K were wrestling me and also sometimes getting on the receiving end of a tickle. I was trying to keep the boys off the girls so they wouldn’t get squashed / have their game spoiled. A found a little foil packet buried in a box near the bed, and I relieved her of it but didn’t put it in my pocket as I should. J then found it, read the writing on it and then started asking me about it:
wrestle, tickle, protect L, wrestle
J: Daddy, what’s this?
more wrestling, me thinking “Do I duck this one again, or do I just go for it? If I go for it, how far do I go, and how do I phrase it all?”, more wrestling, I decide to go for it
Me: You know that book on the human body, with the Mummy and Daddy machine?
(J has this book, that skates over all this by suddenly switching from cartoons of bodies to cartoons of machines.)
J: Yes
more tickling
Me: Well it’s for that
J: What do you do with it?
more wrestling
Me: It’s a bit like a glove for a willy
J: Puzzled silence. Yuck. Why would you want to do that?
more tickling
Me: To stop having babies
Fortunately at this point it came to an end and I think J pounced on me and I pushed him over or something. K tried it later but I chickened out and changed the subject.
After tea Katy was at the shelves where we keep various kinds of drinks and found a prehistoric bottle of Baileys that we consume at a rate of 2.3 mm per Christmas on average. She poured some out and asked me to test it. Suddenly all the children wanted a try too, and suddenly found they really liked it. A asked for some, like she asks for food (leaning forward, pointing, looking eager), so after some persuasion from Katy I gave her some on my little finger – mmmmmm! I think they’ve all had some kind of spirit when they were growing their first teeth, so it’s A’s turn. Also, apart from something like alcopops, Baileys is probably the most child-accessible (but not appropriate!) form of alcohol.
The second of our two Freecycle goldfish died, and I buried it in the garden this morning before work. The children seem remarkably chilled about the whole thing, particularly considering how big a deal the first one dying was.
As I tucked J up last night he asked about supercomputers, and what you’d use them for. I told him how computers are very good at doing things with numbers, like adding a pair of numbers together, so everything we get them to do has to be reduced to numbers in some way, like numbers to stand for the dots on the screen. Supercomputers (I doubt he’d criticise me for saying supercomputer => SIMD 😉 ) can do the same thing to many numbers at once, so if you had 1,000 pairs of numbers to add, a normal computer would work through them one at a time but a supercomputer could do many at once and so finish more quickly. Things like rotating a digital photo could work like this (I thought that trying to bore him with matrix multiplication at bed time was a very bad idea, particularly as I’ve forgotten all the details. 😉 A level maths seems so long ago, possibly because it is. 🙁 ) I promised more tomorrow, and during teeth cleaning tonight I tried to explain ray tracing, but probably failed. Radiosity can wait for another day :). Hope that’s given you enough to pause and think about Michelle :).
The colleague who normally gives me a lift to work is on holiday this week, so I’m driving myself in. As I went round a roundabout near the office, having just changed gear, I realised how un-American that was – roundabouts and manual gear boxes. It’s weird what you think is normal but others think foreign. I learned a while ago that Americans don’t know the word fortnight, but only recently I found out they don’t know fiddly either. How weird is that? I know they don’t use tap (for water taps), but fiddly?!
Katy bought the children straw hats from eBay for Kentwell, but they’re too small to fit on their heads even though there’s lots of brim. So she has unpicked one to make a long woven spiral and has just finished sewing it back together, bigger somehow. Very impressive – I would have given up in a huff long ago. Speaking of historical things – I’m very glad I caught Supersizers Go Restoration. Very entertaining, some nice history (Good night darling, stay thick) and weird food.
lol Marcus read after me and asked if I were the Michelle referred to – I hadn’t read to the end of that paragraph, the second link proved too hard and so I had waltzed directly to the penultimate paragraph instead 🙂
I have this morning re-read ray tracing and read radiosity and now my head hurts in the way it often does after a BobBlog. Not that I’ll be able to remember it in a week’s time as the level of comprehension vapourised quite quickly.
Didn’t know cats ate bird/mouse heads and feet without vomiting them up again later for you to tread on in bare feet in a half asleep stupor.
I was surprised to learn from one of my American friends that when I call M ‘cheeky’ she thinks it is the funniest thing.
She would use the word ‘sassy’ instead, which to me seems just wrong.
Marcus was at a high level work meeting a few years ago when some American contacts arrived for a meeting. The rather tartily dressed young lady in high heels, short skirt and low cleavage entered the room with a big smile and said to the besuited English gentlemen (plus Marcus!), “Hi! I’m Randy!” and couldn’t understand why they fell about laughing.