Up in london for the day. Brought our own food.
Chicago in the Summer
11 years ago
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Old harry rocks.
We are lucky enough to be here on our own. Because it is quite early. The mist has just lifted, hopefully another lovely day.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The last days of summer.
This See cosmos has been spectacolar all summer. We grew it from seed. I have bought some new plants for winter, but seems a shame to pull this up.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
A little trip to Ikea
I went with my friend S to Ikea today, she wanted to go last week - and in fact did go but agreed to go again today with me. This is a good thing because she knew what lane to be in in the very big one way system that you must go through. We went in her tiny car. Obviously we are not going to buy anything too big. Or are we???
After the rigours of the long drive to Croydon (a broken down truck) we thought we would have an early lunch to give us the energy that we were going to need to tackle such a very big shop. We both had gravlax in a 2-for-1 offer. This is just the start of the bargains, I thought. It was nice. Just as we were considering whether we would top up the bottomless coffees, an announcement was made from the loudspeakers that a 'technical problem' had arisen and we would have to evacute the building. We had not had the opportunity to marvel at even one 'room' yet. We all trooped in a surprisingly orderly fashion down the stairs (why no panic I wondered). I carried a baby who silently ignored me, but the mother was grateful as she had the other one. It would be kind of fun to have a child who silently ignored you and I briefly I considered keeping it.
It was quite cold outside milling near the staff quite a good distance from the building, which is dwarfed by 2 very large old brick chimneys. After a while, we noticed that although the staff had all walked safely away from the building, most of the customers that were not driving off, were hanging around the entrance. Nobody made any attempt to get the hangers-around to move further away. I found this very disturbing indeed. S and I wondered if one of our husbands had organised the evacuation ... but he underestimated our staying power. We were out for about 45 mins. We never found out what the problem was, although one staff member did say that this happens every other week as people attempt to steal expensive rugs by taking them out the fire door. No wonder there was no panic on the exit.
This reminded me of my visit to Jane Austen's house where I accidentally opened a fire door, setting off an almighty loud alarm. The volunteer who had to come and free me from the booby trap told me that they had had to put the alarm on because the previous year someone had attempted to steal Jane's desk by sneaking it out the fire exit. Imagine. As it is such a tiny little thing it could probably easily fit in any micro car. It is even smaller than the tiny laptop desks that ikea sell!
So we were eventually back in and pushing trolleys, making excuses as to why our own homes are not as fabulous as the Ikea versions (something to do with moving all the time and always having the furniture that was perfect for 3 houses ago and now stuck with it). You also have to marvel at the cheapness of Ikea - especially the classic lack table at 4.99. S reckons she paid more than this 20 years ago. I bought some things including an almost angle poised lamp for 11.99 and a felt thing called a 'charging station' where we will put the mobile phones , gameboys, ipods etc on a shelf in the study - if I can just clear some space.
We were allowed to have a top-up coffee for free since the evacuation meant that we had missed this earlier.
We ended up with a full trolley load of stuff between us, including a plant, several cushions, a couple of giant photo frames and a biggish basket and easily fitted it all into the tardis-like micro car (that already had several fold up chairs and about 25 eco-friendly bags in it). We picked up Matilda on the way home and jammed her and her school bag in as well. To her amazement.
Then home to look around my house and wonder what would happen if we completely started again, how fabulous it would all be. Especially that laptop desk. With a laptop.... It never ends, does it?
After the rigours of the long drive to Croydon (a broken down truck) we thought we would have an early lunch to give us the energy that we were going to need to tackle such a very big shop. We both had gravlax in a 2-for-1 offer. This is just the start of the bargains, I thought. It was nice. Just as we were considering whether we would top up the bottomless coffees, an announcement was made from the loudspeakers that a 'technical problem' had arisen and we would have to evacute the building. We had not had the opportunity to marvel at even one 'room' yet. We all trooped in a surprisingly orderly fashion down the stairs (why no panic I wondered). I carried a baby who silently ignored me, but the mother was grateful as she had the other one. It would be kind of fun to have a child who silently ignored you and I briefly I considered keeping it.
It was quite cold outside milling near the staff quite a good distance from the building, which is dwarfed by 2 very large old brick chimneys. After a while, we noticed that although the staff had all walked safely away from the building, most of the customers that were not driving off, were hanging around the entrance. Nobody made any attempt to get the hangers-around to move further away. I found this very disturbing indeed. S and I wondered if one of our husbands had organised the evacuation ... but he underestimated our staying power. We were out for about 45 mins. We never found out what the problem was, although one staff member did say that this happens every other week as people attempt to steal expensive rugs by taking them out the fire door. No wonder there was no panic on the exit.
This reminded me of my visit to Jane Austen's house where I accidentally opened a fire door, setting off an almighty loud alarm. The volunteer who had to come and free me from the booby trap told me that they had had to put the alarm on because the previous year someone had attempted to steal Jane's desk by sneaking it out the fire exit. Imagine. As it is such a tiny little thing it could probably easily fit in any micro car. It is even smaller than the tiny laptop desks that ikea sell!
So we were eventually back in and pushing trolleys, making excuses as to why our own homes are not as fabulous as the Ikea versions (something to do with moving all the time and always having the furniture that was perfect for 3 houses ago and now stuck with it). You also have to marvel at the cheapness of Ikea - especially the classic lack table at 4.99. S reckons she paid more than this 20 years ago. I bought some things including an almost angle poised lamp for 11.99 and a felt thing called a 'charging station' where we will put the mobile phones , gameboys, ipods etc on a shelf in the study - if I can just clear some space.
We were allowed to have a top-up coffee for free since the evacuation meant that we had missed this earlier.
We ended up with a full trolley load of stuff between us, including a plant, several cushions, a couple of giant photo frames and a biggish basket and easily fitted it all into the tardis-like micro car (that already had several fold up chairs and about 25 eco-friendly bags in it). We picked up Matilda on the way home and jammed her and her school bag in as well. To her amazement.
Then home to look around my house and wonder what would happen if we completely started again, how fabulous it would all be. Especially that laptop desk. With a laptop.... It never ends, does it?
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Horror in a minor key
I find the idea of ghosts or vampires thrilling rather than actually scary. I suppose that most people would agree that they would much rather be thrilled by the spookieness of a vampire boyfriend than the sort of thing that seems to regularly be happening to me lately, things always seem to work out, just not the way I thought that they would.
Take Tuesday for an example (and this is only an example), I had a pretty full day but, I thought, thanks to careful planning it be ok. I even made a thermos of coffee.
Here is the plan: 8.25 - take kids to school (15 minute drive); 8.50-9.00am vacuum car at petrol station; 9.20-10.20 pilates; 11.15 meet American friend at Heathrow; 12.00-2.30pm lunch with R and her friend; 3.45-3.55pm parent teacher conference for M. It all fitted perfectly with just enough travel time.
What could go wrong?
First up, get the kids to school on time: no brainer thanks to getting bags packed the night befeor (Yea) except for wrestling the dog out of the car as I would not be coming back after the drop off - He is a big exciteable dog and he loves coming to school, I think he enjoys the exquisite sadness of the kids getting out one at a time and the realisation that it is just me and him for most of the day.
Next up, a trip to the petrol station to vacuum out the car as R really did not need to see all that dirt. You have to queue to buy a token. There was only 2 people serving and the 2 people in front of me were buying trolley loads of shopping and ordering coffees as well, aaarrrggghh. Finally get the token and try to clean the carpet. Why is car carpet so hard to vacuum? As I was working on the front passenger side, I realised that the satnav was not in the car as it had been on Sunday. This means that I was going to have to go home to find it - I would be late for pilates. aaarrrggghhhh. With 45 seconds to go I decide to do the boot as well (it is an estate car) as my friend may put her bag there.... I discovered that I had parked on top of the airline that a previous customer had left carelessly all over the ground and a lady was trying to pump up her tyres and was muttering to herself about me. I do not know if I was supposed to apologise to her, but I didn't. I just thought the best thing to do was to move on quickly. So I did move on quickly, people were staring at me and I thought that they must be thinking 'that is the sort of peron who uses the vacuum cleaner at the service station'. It is about a 20 minute drive home, people at bus stops were staring at me. I became gradually aware that things were not quite right in the car and eventually I realised that the boot was open. aaaarrgggghhh. Luckily nothing had fallen out.
I got back home and could not find the satnav, tried to call H to ask where he had hidden it, but he is unavailable. Just will have to use my natural sense of direction to navigate to the place where I am taking R. Hoped she would have phone number of her colleague that we would be visiting. The dog looked at me like I was the meanest person for not letting him come on the school run, I made up for it by asking my neighbour if she would take him out for a little walk at lunch time. She could. Yea.
Dash out to pilates, late, park in a deceptively giant puddle so get feet wet in the stupid carpark in Shere. aaarrrggghhh. Rush into the village hall hoping that I had missed some of the more killer exercises only to find that the hall has been turned into an 'Incident Centre' as there had been a failure of a water pipe that had in turn blown out a gas pipe and water had 'got into' the gas. ok this is bad - but what about pilates, I need it today. It was in the school hall over the road instead. Dash across (had missed the hard exercise). During the oblique lifts, heard a small explosion outside followed by a bit of yelling. Schadenfreude. Yea.
Rush from pilates back to car (step over puddle) and pour myself a coffee from the flask and then watch it spill as I drive over the horrendously rutted carpark and down the little bit of lane with the most potholes in England onto the proper road. As thermos flask has now rolled under back seat, no opportunity of easily re-filling so gulp small bit and hope it will get me to the traffic jam that is sure to be on the M25.
Of course there was no traffic jam that day - so I arrived at Terminal 1 at 11.05 and feel like the pilot of the plane that has started 30 mins late but will 'make up the time' on the journey. Grab my phone so I can call R only to find that it is not working (a problem with the battery connection) aarrrggghh. Although I did have the number on a small bit of paper so thought that if necessary I could beg off a stranger. Yea. It took a little while to find the way out of the carpark. Heathrow terminal 1 is extremely compact so you have to be attentive, lots of concrete buildings that even when there are not a lot of cars, it still looks like there are. The Arrivals board says that R's plane has 'Baggage in Hall' status so plan to stand and wait rather than buy coffee at Costa, after going to the Ladies. But while walking to the toilets, actually see R in queue for ATM machine. Hooray. I really have made up the time. Turns out that she even has good directions to rendez-vous. There are no traffic problems on M4 so arrive on time at seafood restaurant. Yea. I had mussles. They came in a pretty big bucket with a lid that converted into a scrap bucket. My meal took up a lot more space that the others, especially when they brought out the finger bowl. I only spilled a little bit on myself. We had a nice time chatting at lunch. Yea.
I was a bit anxious about the trip home without the satnav. So set off a little apprehensively - but although there were approximately 250 roundabouts, I drove straight to Guildford - or as straight as possible while doing roundabouts. In fact it was 3pm when I reached Guildford and so I had 45 mins to fill in so decided to go to the library and pick up the Stephanie Plum book that I had ordered - number 15 in the series and brand new. Yea. I arrived at school ready to bask in the reflected glory of M's parent teacher meeting only to find that it is actually on next week. aaaaarrrrggggggghhhhhhhh. So had to wait for 30 mins for netball training to finish.
This to me is a horror story, you have to think on your feet and make small changes to what was a pretty good plan. Then you catch up and relax a bit and so are once again caught out thinking you have it all under control.
Take Tuesday for an example (and this is only an example), I had a pretty full day but, I thought, thanks to careful planning it be ok. I even made a thermos of coffee.
Here is the plan: 8.25 - take kids to school (15 minute drive); 8.50-9.00am vacuum car at petrol station; 9.20-10.20 pilates; 11.15 meet American friend at Heathrow; 12.00-2.30pm lunch with R and her friend; 3.45-3.55pm parent teacher conference for M. It all fitted perfectly with just enough travel time.
What could go wrong?
First up, get the kids to school on time: no brainer thanks to getting bags packed the night befeor (Yea) except for wrestling the dog out of the car as I would not be coming back after the drop off - He is a big exciteable dog and he loves coming to school, I think he enjoys the exquisite sadness of the kids getting out one at a time and the realisation that it is just me and him for most of the day.
Next up, a trip to the petrol station to vacuum out the car as R really did not need to see all that dirt. You have to queue to buy a token. There was only 2 people serving and the 2 people in front of me were buying trolley loads of shopping and ordering coffees as well, aaarrrggghh. Finally get the token and try to clean the carpet. Why is car carpet so hard to vacuum? As I was working on the front passenger side, I realised that the satnav was not in the car as it had been on Sunday. This means that I was going to have to go home to find it - I would be late for pilates. aaarrrggghhhh. With 45 seconds to go I decide to do the boot as well (it is an estate car) as my friend may put her bag there.... I discovered that I had parked on top of the airline that a previous customer had left carelessly all over the ground and a lady was trying to pump up her tyres and was muttering to herself about me. I do not know if I was supposed to apologise to her, but I didn't. I just thought the best thing to do was to move on quickly. So I did move on quickly, people were staring at me and I thought that they must be thinking 'that is the sort of peron who uses the vacuum cleaner at the service station'. It is about a 20 minute drive home, people at bus stops were staring at me. I became gradually aware that things were not quite right in the car and eventually I realised that the boot was open. aaaarrgggghhh. Luckily nothing had fallen out.
I got back home and could not find the satnav, tried to call H to ask where he had hidden it, but he is unavailable. Just will have to use my natural sense of direction to navigate to the place where I am taking R. Hoped she would have phone number of her colleague that we would be visiting. The dog looked at me like I was the meanest person for not letting him come on the school run, I made up for it by asking my neighbour if she would take him out for a little walk at lunch time. She could. Yea.
Dash out to pilates, late, park in a deceptively giant puddle so get feet wet in the stupid carpark in Shere. aaarrrggghhh. Rush into the village hall hoping that I had missed some of the more killer exercises only to find that the hall has been turned into an 'Incident Centre' as there had been a failure of a water pipe that had in turn blown out a gas pipe and water had 'got into' the gas. ok this is bad - but what about pilates, I need it today. It was in the school hall over the road instead. Dash across (had missed the hard exercise). During the oblique lifts, heard a small explosion outside followed by a bit of yelling. Schadenfreude. Yea.
Rush from pilates back to car (step over puddle) and pour myself a coffee from the flask and then watch it spill as I drive over the horrendously rutted carpark and down the little bit of lane with the most potholes in England onto the proper road. As thermos flask has now rolled under back seat, no opportunity of easily re-filling so gulp small bit and hope it will get me to the traffic jam that is sure to be on the M25.
Of course there was no traffic jam that day - so I arrived at Terminal 1 at 11.05 and feel like the pilot of the plane that has started 30 mins late but will 'make up the time' on the journey. Grab my phone so I can call R only to find that it is not working (a problem with the battery connection) aarrrggghh. Although I did have the number on a small bit of paper so thought that if necessary I could beg off a stranger. Yea. It took a little while to find the way out of the carpark. Heathrow terminal 1 is extremely compact so you have to be attentive, lots of concrete buildings that even when there are not a lot of cars, it still looks like there are. The Arrivals board says that R's plane has 'Baggage in Hall' status so plan to stand and wait rather than buy coffee at Costa, after going to the Ladies. But while walking to the toilets, actually see R in queue for ATM machine. Hooray. I really have made up the time. Turns out that she even has good directions to rendez-vous. There are no traffic problems on M4 so arrive on time at seafood restaurant. Yea. I had mussles. They came in a pretty big bucket with a lid that converted into a scrap bucket. My meal took up a lot more space that the others, especially when they brought out the finger bowl. I only spilled a little bit on myself. We had a nice time chatting at lunch. Yea.
I was a bit anxious about the trip home without the satnav. So set off a little apprehensively - but although there were approximately 250 roundabouts, I drove straight to Guildford - or as straight as possible while doing roundabouts. In fact it was 3pm when I reached Guildford and so I had 45 mins to fill in so decided to go to the library and pick up the Stephanie Plum book that I had ordered - number 15 in the series and brand new. Yea. I arrived at school ready to bask in the reflected glory of M's parent teacher meeting only to find that it is actually on next week. aaaaarrrrggggggghhhhhhhh. So had to wait for 30 mins for netball training to finish.
This to me is a horror story, you have to think on your feet and make small changes to what was a pretty good plan. Then you catch up and relax a bit and so are once again caught out thinking you have it all under control.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Mobile Phone Mystery solved
After reading a lot of detection fiction over the last year or so, I like a little bit of mystery in my life. Just this week a few have cropped up.
The first was when it seemed like Harry's car was eating my mobile phone piece by piece. The back of it falls off regularly and I snap it back on - maybe 20 times a day. On Monday it fell off in Harry's car that I was driving while he was in Algeria. No one could find it. I actually shook out all the footrests and removed all the bits of stuff that have accumulated over the last year or so. looked down the sides of the seats. Theo even shone a torch. No luck. So the phone is not looking good with all its bits exposed like that. Every time I got in the car i would look again. Then on Tuesday, the battery disappeared. It was then a real mystery. I thought that a child (Toby?) was tricking me, but he assured me (over pain of no more runescape) that this was not so. So double dilemma. The phone is quite necessary now with the kids all over the place at different times and stuff. I was wondering which kind of detection strategy would work the best when it came to me that I was going to have to go where no person has been before - under the carpet. Sure enough, there they were. Together. How they got there is very hard to understand, but luckily I reinserted everything and it worked again.
The next mystery was a missing person. Toby. Caught the bus home, rang to say that evil bus driver from hell had refused to stop at his stiop and so he wa about 2 miles away and walking home. Had cleared instructions with Theo as to direction to take. As it was raining I thought i would go and pick him up. Nowhere to be seen. Was not answering own phone so deduction was either a. kidnapped; b. phone out of charge; c. lost phone. Most likely were b. and c.
Came home and had a think and a quiet worry. Could he have walked the wrong way (possible). Or could he have 'stopped off' somewhere. Decided on another trip up the road and found him at the end of the street. It turned out that he had called into the Percy Arms for a drink. Water with ice.
At least the mysteries are more Stephaie Plum that Lisbeth Salender.
The first was when it seemed like Harry's car was eating my mobile phone piece by piece. The back of it falls off regularly and I snap it back on - maybe 20 times a day. On Monday it fell off in Harry's car that I was driving while he was in Algeria. No one could find it. I actually shook out all the footrests and removed all the bits of stuff that have accumulated over the last year or so. looked down the sides of the seats. Theo even shone a torch. No luck. So the phone is not looking good with all its bits exposed like that. Every time I got in the car i would look again. Then on Tuesday, the battery disappeared. It was then a real mystery. I thought that a child (Toby?) was tricking me, but he assured me (over pain of no more runescape) that this was not so. So double dilemma. The phone is quite necessary now with the kids all over the place at different times and stuff. I was wondering which kind of detection strategy would work the best when it came to me that I was going to have to go where no person has been before - under the carpet. Sure enough, there they were. Together. How they got there is very hard to understand, but luckily I reinserted everything and it worked again.
The next mystery was a missing person. Toby. Caught the bus home, rang to say that evil bus driver from hell had refused to stop at his stiop and so he wa about 2 miles away and walking home. Had cleared instructions with Theo as to direction to take. As it was raining I thought i would go and pick him up. Nowhere to be seen. Was not answering own phone so deduction was either a. kidnapped; b. phone out of charge; c. lost phone. Most likely were b. and c.
Came home and had a think and a quiet worry. Could he have walked the wrong way (possible). Or could he have 'stopped off' somewhere. Decided on another trip up the road and found him at the end of the street. It turned out that he had called into the Percy Arms for a drink. Water with ice.
At least the mysteries are more Stephaie Plum that Lisbeth Salender.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Helping with the homework
We had a very busy afternoon yesterday doing the homework. It is such a family affair for us. All the kids are learning French at the moment and the thing that gets to me about it is that they all seem to be learning the same thing. When do they make any progress past being able to say the name of a list of about 20 professions and that they are annoyed with someone. Is that all there is to learning french?
Matilda is writing a poem (again). It seems that Theo is always writing a brochure about something, and Matilda is always writing a poem. Matilda really likes writing a poem and she is a fast and intuitive rhymer - although gratuitous (for distance yesterday she was rhyming 'fresh' with 'Bangladesh' , not because it makes sense for the poem, but because it was the only word she can think of). I suppose you can buy a rhyming dictionary to help in these emergency situations, but we were on our own. In the end she decided to use 'stress'. She was not really happy as it is not an exact rhyme.
Toby continues on writing his 'Journey through Africa' He sure has picked some obscure places to journey through. He thought that it would be neat to write the bits about the countries where they speak French in French, except that as he can really only write about job descriptions and whether or not he is annoyed with his brother/sister/ friend or parent he would have to stick to English. He started out with 'The sun rose over Africa' which is a great first line, but has been used elsewhere I believe. How much do I intervene? He was also writing 3 paragraphs in the first person about a travellers impression of pentecost. Again it would have been nice to bring in the languages, but one of the few professions he has not learnt yet in French is crucifix maker (I think that is what his character was supposed to be), so same old same old.
Matilda is writing a poem (again). It seems that Theo is always writing a brochure about something, and Matilda is always writing a poem. Matilda really likes writing a poem and she is a fast and intuitive rhymer - although gratuitous (for distance yesterday she was rhyming 'fresh' with 'Bangladesh' , not because it makes sense for the poem, but because it was the only word she can think of). I suppose you can buy a rhyming dictionary to help in these emergency situations, but we were on our own. In the end she decided to use 'stress'. She was not really happy as it is not an exact rhyme.
Toby continues on writing his 'Journey through Africa' He sure has picked some obscure places to journey through. He thought that it would be neat to write the bits about the countries where they speak French in French, except that as he can really only write about job descriptions and whether or not he is annoyed with his brother/sister/ friend or parent he would have to stick to English. He started out with 'The sun rose over Africa' which is a great first line, but has been used elsewhere I believe. How much do I intervene? He was also writing 3 paragraphs in the first person about a travellers impression of pentecost. Again it would have been nice to bring in the languages, but one of the few professions he has not learnt yet in French is crucifix maker (I think that is what his character was supposed to be), so same old same old.
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