T-Bird Anni Rides Again

hmph, on my *real* Wordpress blog, the one I set up that has now died, I had the option to twitter a bit here then insert a "more" function which would give people the oportunity to chose to click through and read the rest to move on to the next house on the blogring.  but I don’t have that option with Blogsome even though it’s basically Wordpress, or at least if I do I don’t know how to do it

So, if you don’t want to read a hormonal wimper stop here.  Just move on.  I’ve disabled comments as actually it’s more that I need to twitter than I want any kind of response.

I’m not pregnant.  Again.  I actually genuinely thought I was this time.  My normal cycle is 24-26 days max.  This one was 30.  and not only that, I normally only go 8-10 days post ovulation before the cycle ends, this time I didn’t get my normal very clear ovulation signs but what clues I did get were 14 days before it ended.  So in all possibility it was just one of those "anovulatory cycles" and I conned myself that I knew I had.  But it still sucks.

Now, I know I could go thorugh all hte hoops, go to the doctor, get prodded and poked about, pumped full of drugs costing £££ whilst old dears wait for a bed taht the hospital can’t afford to staff to have an op that she needs but they can’t afford to provide.  And I’m not criticising people who do, women hvae a right to be treated for diseases regardless of it being a worn out hip or a faulty reproductive system but I don’t feel justified and neither in all honesty could I face it.

I could lose several stone.  It would do me good.  It might even do the trick.  But somehow, somewhere I got sucked into a sort of  spiral of too tired to eat properly so I eat easy foods which don’t give me the energy to do waht I need to do.  I’m too heavy to be comfortable excercising so I don’t and get bigger.  and it’s reflecting in Aprilia now too.  I don’t walk places so she doesn’t so she’s not anywhere near as fit as she should be.  And that won’t help her when she’s an adult either.  So now not only am I sabotaging my own chances of health and babies, I’m cocking up the upbringing of the child I did manage somehow to produce.

Humph. 

We popped over to see Kirsty adn James (well, okay Aprilia was more interested in seeing Alex and Marcus…) yesterday and stayed over until after lunch today.  it was a lovely visit with lots of serious educational discussion between the adults (cough) and a thorough work out of the social skills for the kids!

After me moaning to Kirsty that Aprilia is just not making any progress in reading and being very resistant to trying, she promptly sat and "read" 6 Oxford Reading Tree books (level 1 adn 2) to Kirsty and me faultlessly and was very proud of herself.  She was very obviously working it all out from picture clues and a vague idea of the first sound or two on the odd word here and there but I really don’t care.  She believes she’s read 6 books and I’m just not going to argue!

 Owner of an Ace Spelling Dictionary I now am!  and I’d recomend it (and the workbook) to anyone with mdedium sized children as it covers all the weird and wonderful English spelling rules and foibles really well.

Not sure what else has been happening, I was meant to be baking today so i have something to take with me visiting tomorrow.  May well have to do something really un-healthy like chocolate gooey cake (Aprilia’s fave cake, very gooey, covered in choc frosting about 3" deep and several million calories per crumb!) first thing, will see how early I wake up! 

on teh daily rounds of my Sage feeds I came on this article about dealing with sibling conflicts.  Now, obviously I’m in my Ifory Tower here as I only have the one child so don’t have to deal with the bickering etc but I just felt that somehow it was an overly complicated way to deal with the whole thing of always wanting to be first.  Also it struck me as odd that a school teacher should be suggesting how a family dealt with conflicts within the home.

and the punch line of it’s taught the elder child about the value of other people just seemed very odd, surely you don’t need a chart and a day when someone else gets to make all the choices to teach a child to respect and value other people?

Dad reconed that the remaining oil would come off with a bit of wax so I tried it on the bonnet only to find pretty quickly that it didn’t.  Lucky I bought the T-cut too then really! 

Of course, the trouble with T-cut is that once you start, you notice how dull the rest of the paintwork looks in relation to the bit you’ve done, so you need to do the next panel…. and the next…. I did draw the line at doing the roof though, I cna’t see up there so I don’t care what it looks like!

But once you have used the T-cut you then need to polish it to protect that lovely fresh layer of paint you have just exposed to the outside world…..

And then, if you are anything like me and get wax on the black bits you then need to get the Back to Black out to clean it all off.  At which point you notice that the other black bits you didn’t get polish on don’t look terribly black now compared to the bits you’ve just done

and just when you think you are done the sun glints off your windows and you realise that now you have a car with paintwork like it just came out of the showroom and windows like you just drove off a showground    but I figured if I did them then everyone would be able to see how messy the inside of the car was    and besides, if I make it look too clean it will make the house look tatty

There has been a chellenge thrown down on one of the OU forums that I frequent.  Basically it’s to do a huge poster or a web page with all the good things about yourself, all your strenghts, abilities, talents whatever as an "antidote" to those days when you are 3 weeks behind with the washing, have essays due and over due, course work not making the slightest bit of sense or are otherwise feeling like ****

As we don’t have much spare wall space and I want to include my family in this one (sort of like a "Venn diagram" with us all having our own section but also overlapping each other) I’m going to do it as a webpage and I’m saying so here to remind me to do it!

However, first I need to nip to Asda and buy car polish and T-cut to get the last vestiges of oil off my poor momo which looks like it has a bad case of acne at the moment. 

SLOW DANCE

Have you ever watched kids

On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain

Slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?

Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You better slow down.

Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won’t last.

Do you run through each day

On the fly?

When you ask How are you?

Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done

Do you lie in your bed

With the next hundred chores

Running through your head?

You’d better slow down

Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won’t last.

Ever told your child,

We’ll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,

Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,

Let a good friendship die

Cause you never had time

To call and say,"Hi"

You’d better slow down.

Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere

You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,

It is like an unopened gift….

Thrown away.

Life is not a race.

Do take it slower

Hear the music

Before the song is over.

She spent a lot of the morning watching class TV whilst making a paper model farm from a book I bought years ago with the intention of using the farm for the Montessori Language activities.  We are about half way through making the farm up, it’s really detailed and quite fiddly but hoping it will be worth it.  i’m hoping to trail her off to our local "working farm" (surely they all work??) place some time soon to see the lambs etc.

We also played "adding facts snap" - basically I printed off the addition fact flash cards from the Jan Brett website and we use them as snap or Go Fish or Pairs cards - you can match any 2 sums with the same answer.  I know we never got "drilled" on addition facts although we did recite times tables ad nauseum so you could argue that it’s something she will pick up gradually with practice but why practice boring sums over and over when you can play snap with them

Also we tried to wash the car.  Not entirely successful here as once it dried you could still see oil speckling all over it but I shifted 1 layer and aparently T-cut and a good quality polish afterwards will cure the rest.  So guess what I need to buy tomorrow…

And finally….

Aprilia got awarded a certificate with much fuss tonight at Red Cross.  It’s for "CPR Awareness" and it was pointed out that it was because she has shown that she does actually know what to do and given a bit more time to grow and get stronger she’ll do it no problem.  To say she was chuffed was an understatement. 

Duke’s Sunday….

Having had to haul his wife and daughter out of bed (grumpy and yawning at the indignity of such an early start) he headed off to collect someone and meet up.  They all waited and waited and I didn’t show.  He phoned and found my phone to be off (cos it was flat)  Eventually he gets a call from me, explains to now vile tempered wife that he meant the *other* Morrisons roundabout and informs everyone I’m on my way.  Que Harley sniping at him for not explaining properly to me where we were supposed to meet.  This is not the start to the day he had wanted.

Half way there the ambi he’s driving makes some very nasty noises and expires.  Now obviously this isn’t his fault.  The ambi is an L reg so isn’t exactly young, gets hammered by several of those who drive it (including Harley who is a somewhat aggressive driver) and has blown oil seals several times before although not so dramatically as this time.  However, it’s him who is deemed the most dispensible memeber of the team and is abandoned to nurse the truck until the recovery crew arrive.  During the emptying of the truck his kit bag gets put in my car so he now has no flask, no bickies, nothing (cos of course, being an ambulance it gets priority recovery, he’ll be back with his own car within the hour and can join us at the event)  Two hours later, having been supplied with coffee and bics by the local fire crew, he’s rescued, the truck is taken to the mechanics and he’s dropped off at home as that’s what the contract is for.  Which would have been fine except his car was on the other side of town in the ambi garage.  Thus by the time he had his car back the race was half run and there was absolutely no point in trying to join us.

Teh good bit is though that by now he’s in a temper to match any pre-menstrual woman and takes it out on his garage which is now clear enough for us to walk from front to back (see? clouds, silver linings?)

Then of course I roll up home with my very oily car and the phone rings so taht Harley can chew his ear off about the keys not being anywhere to be seen.  Duke’s offer to hare over there with the spare set (and to see where the first set are) is refused along with the offer of helping to strip out every last bit of kit from the ambi leaving him feeling something like a small child being torn into for something his big brother did.

The pinacle though was that a PDA he’s been watching on EBay was due to finish just before 10.  WE had the money for it.  it was a really good bundle.  He fell asleep waiting for it adn missed it by 2 minutes.

I really, really hope he has a better day today! 

Today has had it’s ups and downs.  You know it’s going to be one of those days when by 9am you are already mentally blogging a tirade that would make a hooker blush.

it was a huge RC duty that is supposed to be run by a centre 45 mins away from us (but in effect we run it for them….)  The roads were being closed off at 10AM ready for the event to start half an hour after that so we needed to leave from here at a bit past 9 yeah?   Give us time to get there, scatter the ambis round the course and plug in my radio.  nah, we had to leave in convoy at quarter past 8.  Teh clocks changed today didn’t they?  So that made it in effect quarter past 7, meaning me and Aprilia needed to crawl out of our pits nearly 2 hours before we normally grace the world with our precence.   This in itself does not make for a good start.

Teh convoy was leaving from "the parking layby by Morrison’s roundabout, the one with the picnic sort of area near it" acording to Duke (who then legged it off to pick up an ambi and meet us at the convoy point.  So off I toddled to the supermarket where there is a little parking area and, over a stile, a picnic area.  There is no one there.  I grabbed my phone only for the battery to die just as I started dialing.  So I hare off home to phone Duke from there (no change for payphones even if I could find a working one) to find taht what he actually meant was  "the parking layby on the A…. about a mile further on from the roundabout at Morrison’s warehouse"  That’s the other side of the next town over from us.  That’s a bad start to a day as I am now stamped as "BL**dy idiot woman who can’t even get to the convoy point on time and holds us all up"

Half way there the ambi in front of me suddenly coats my entire car in thick black goo and grinds to a halt.  Everything from that vehicle is promptly piled into my car (whilst me and Lola vainly attempt to wipe enough oil off my windscreen so I can see where I’m going ) and Duke is abandoned with dead ambi to await the pleasure of the AA.

So anyway, we are now running a good 45 mins "behind" and arrive at the event with a good chunk of time to spare to get people out to post, get my rig set up and settle rather than the usual interminal wait we usually have to do.

during the day I was radio comms officer (pompous title for the goon that sits at the radio and works out who’s closest to each person who wants our help and sends them -  it’s a job that’s somewhat akin to juggling with jelly, you just think you are getting it under control and it all slips through your fingers…)  I only had 5 people with radios to talk to alas though the Hayfield Mountain Rescue are on the same channel as us and have some serious power behind their rig meaning that I could read tehm easier than my own units and they transmitted over the top of my units with boring monotony (meaning that twice an ambi was delayed as I didn’t hear the shout and the unit didn’t think to wait for a reply, just assumed I’d heard)  sigh.

Anyhow, on the whole it was a better event than last year even if we were an ambi down so the other 2 really did have to work hard so off we went home.  Got home just as Duke picked up the phone - Harley was calling to ask where the dead ambi’s keys were, he’d gone to give it it’s last rights, sorry, to check nothing valuable was left in there.  Duke had left the keys on top of one of the tyres (standard proceedure aparently) but they weren’t visible so Harley took big lumps out of him over the phone.

So now Duke is totally morose as he was already in Harley’s bad books for something or other (breathing I think) and I am pre-mestrual in case you hadn’t already noticed and managed to hit send rather than delete after a somewhat snide post on EYHE about Scouts being a paramilitary organisation (HUH??????)  So I’m going to sit and force feed both of us enough chocolate to render us comatose.