Phew

Not too bad after all! I did have visions of half a garage full of brown paper bags with handles. Now all I need is the nerve to open the box and see what I've actually bought . . . Damn Paypal. Damn, damn, damn Paypal!

I missed quite a boat recently. All I needed to do was find the family diary to check the dates and commitments over half term, before buying tickets for the Terracotta Army. About half a day it took me, and by the time I got online again all the tickets had gone. Vanished. Pfft. There are still some left for a few weekdays early next year, and I'm seriously contemplating taking the children out of school for a day. This is not an opportunity they are going to have again, after all.

(And why does Blogger think I'm German? I mean, how does it know?)

Aah - who am I kidding? By the time I talk to J about this tomorrow, even those tickets will have gone too.

You do the math

Jeremy and I have decided that, actually, it's quite rude to take wine when invited to a dinner party. It implies that one's host is either too poor to afford a bottle, or will provide rubbish wine, or, indeed, is too stupid to notice that you have brought a bottle of undrinkable because CHEAP vino di merda.

But you have to take something, neh? A little box of six handmade chocolates, a teeny posy of seasonal flowers, maybe organically cultivated, fairly traded pecan nuts wrapped in handblocked mango-leaf paper. You know the sort of thing. Which is all wonderful, but how do you carry it? How do you present it to your host? Especially when that box of handmade chocolates is actually quite teeny when compared with a bottle.

Well, you put it in a brown paper bag, don't you? Not just any old bag mind you, but something a little more classy, bit more up-market, know wha' I mean? Something with handles.

Google, bless it, came up with a number of possibilities. Comparison being the order of the day, and remembering that package and postage count, calculator at the ready, I found some good quality, well-constructed nice looking bags at seven pee a pop. Seven! What a great deal, eh? In went the order, Paypal did its thang, and here I am, awaiting delivery of 500 small brown paper bags, with handles, due tomorrow.

Hang on a mo' though. 500? Five? Hundred? OK. Just how many DPs do we get invited to anyway? Seriously. At a generous estimate, I'd say five a year. Including reciprocation, (where a brown paper bag with handles wouldn't count) that makes 10 social occasions a year - sounds about right. Which means we would use the final bag in 100 years time.

Holy crap! I Just thought - how big is the package going to be?

20 lengths. Go me.

All Change

We said goodbye to Jessie today. Remind me what it is about these girls and university? We are not too sure what to do without her, apart from begrudging her her first foray into adult life, her opportunity to spend three years studying something she's really looking forward to (Architectural Technology - how fab does that sound?), and a LOT of partying. Go Jess.

See the cake? It was delicious, if I say so myself, and as long as I didn't mention that it was orange flavoured, Kit thought so too. As for me - well, cake is something I really don't need that much of. So hooray for Ma and me - we now meet every Tuesday at the swimming pool where I chug up and down a coupla times, and Ma splashes about in the shallow end. I am inordinately proud of the fourteen lengths I managed last time, all with a resounding lack of technique, and with LOTS of inter-length pauses. Go Me.

Know your Onions

The other day, chopping home-grown onions to make supper, I wept. I wept copious quantities of painful tears. Man, was it uncomfortable. And it occurred to me that it was the first time in YEARS that cutting an onion had made me cry. What on earth has happened to our supermarket onions that they don't do this to us any more? Are we so removed from the way the world functions that we breed de-natured onions so as not to cry?

My onion crop was rather successful this year. Thank goodness I make very good red onion marmalade, and in spite of the children's protests they do go into much of what I cook. Next year's sets have just arrived, and by next week should be in the ground, and I get to spend next summer in floods of tears. Can't wait!

Oh and P.S. for those of you who don't know, What's the difference between an onion and an oboe?




Nobody cries when you chop up an oboe! Ha ha ha ha ha!

If only the thought really did count

Met Ma for a swim today. She is in need of regular exercise (CRASH! there goes another glass house), so I said I'd meet her at a swimming pool halfway between us. The pool proved pleasantly warm and underpopulated, and Ma and I paddled about very happily for half an hour. Afterwards, we picnicked on sandwiches, figs and pears in her car, and decided that this was one habit worth getting in to.

So the half a bar of chocolate I just ate doesn't really count, does it?

All Change

It's new everything for us all here at Valentine Towers. The boys go into new year groups, and Jeremy started his job. The boys appear to be having a good time, Kit enjoying the opportunity to use the shorter route to school, which involves Crossing A Road (gulp), and Beri not having a backward glance for me as he files into his classroom.

Jeremy came home from work on Monday full of bounce and pizzazz, enthusing about what a great job this was going to be. Tuesday proved a little more sobering, but by Wednesday he was bushy-tailed again. I'm a tad anxious about tonight, it has to be said. As our friend Oliver remarked, maybe they are playing 'Good Day, Bad Day' with him.

Oh, and poor Kit! On the days I collect Sid from Montessori, I leave a key for Kit, because he is back a few minutes before I am. Yesterday, as I arrived home, he came out to greet us, And Closed The Door Behind Him. Of course with the keys inside the house. Poor boy was beside himself, and wept and wept. (I asked him if he could tell me exactly why he was crying, and he said it was because he felt so stupid. Dunno about you, but I thought that was jolly perceptive.) Luckily our key-holder friends are just up the hill, so Kit fetched and returned the key, and all was well.

And we found a possible reason for the intermittent malfunction of our super duper expensive HDD DVD recorder player thingy, the fixing of which would have required we take out another mortgage. A piece of Geomag was attached to the back of the unit. Gah.

Just fun stuff

I really liked this, and this. Also, I wanted to tell you about my daemon, who is called Rasthmus and is a whippet, but I can't get the code to work. Go to http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/?250059 for me, wouldja?

Good Game, Good Game!

Sid and Beri have a new game. They get out the salad spinner (one of Sid's favourite toys anyway), fill it with the contents of the colouring-in drawer, set it spinning, AND TAKE OFF THE LID. Just how far can a bunch of pencils get flung? We Need To Know.

In other news, school starts next week, so it's New Shoes time. (Am I using too much Upper Case? Hard to tell. Maybe I should use some colour or bold or italic for a change. Or Maybe Not.) Six new pairs of shoes, and we haven't even started on Sid. Thank goodness Jeremy is getting a job. Kit is only just holding on to his taller-than-his-younger-(by four years! (ooh look - italics!))-brother status, but it's not hard to imagine Beri overtaking him. And one of his teeth is loose. He's only just five! This is very precocious, surely. I wonder what old wives' tales there are about losing teeth early.

Excuse me - the Show parade is about to pass our house . . .



Phew. Finally back after an exhausting afternoon at the Country Show. Bungee trampolining, Hook-a-Duck-and-win-a-piece-of-c**p, falconry, dogs jumping through flaming hoops and Very Large Snakes. Something for everyone, really. (Really cool snakes. One about 12' long, an albino boa. Coool. And we could touch them too.)

Jane and Ian are here for the weekend, so how pleased was I that all three children complained vociferously about the quality of their supper, and have left most of it uneaten.


First in an Occasional Series - Things my Mother-in-Law Says.

'Beri, why don't you try a little honey with your sausages?'