T-Bird Anni Rides Again

hmm, no, to be honest, this course isn’t gripping me as much as the last one and I’m still just not getting going with it.  I have an essay due on the 3rd of June and all I’ve got so far are some very random scatterings on a mind map with no clear idea of where to go with any of them.  Mind you, it has at least made me pick out the broad themes of the first half of the course which may make the revision bit at the end a bit easier!  Thank goodness for the Study Guide which tells you what you will cover on a specific week, much quicker than plowing through the text book.

Of course, it would help if the TMAs weren’t on a regular 4 week cycle which coincides exactly with my cycle!  Might also help if I had a bit of support at home but I don’t think that’s at all unusual for anyone remote studying.  But I shall stop there…. just take it as read, the world is against me, my child is vile, my husband doens’t understand me and I need chocolate now, Okay?

In other news, the cat may be useless against mice but she’s far too good at catching bluetits.  Bad cat!  But she’s still very good at purring into the small of my back at night for which I will forgive her just about anything, wonder if I could teach her how to poke Duke when he starts snoring?  She’d be the perfect bed-cat then!

Just a quick disclaimer here, I KNOW we are very well off compared to the vast majority of the world population. 

Bleugh, just done the budget now we know what tax credtis we are getting.  I’d provisionally worked it out on what we got this time last year before Duke started doing the Red Cross work and thus expected to get something similar.  Alas we aren’t getting qutie that much, not a lot less, but a bit, due to teh fact that Duke did actually earn a decent wage last year between 2 full time jobs.  Added to that, he hasn’t got a pay rise for 3 years now which you can kind of look at as effectively being a pay cut when you look at how much more everything costs than it did 3 years ago.  So money isn’t going to be as easy this year as it was last year.

But you know, if I’m good and behave myself with the food budget, make a proper food plan and stick with it, we will be fine.  I did an on-line shop with Asda today, got the full week’s worth of food, including baking ingredients, for about half of what I normally spend even allowing for a delivery fee just becuase there was no "oh look, those look good, we’ll have a bit of that then"  

So no more big ticket shopping (ROFL! got that earlier in the week really didn’t I!) Duke is using my car (cos it’s significantly more fuel efficient) and we are cutting back on play barn etc which it turns out suits Aprilia fine as more families have started coming and she doesn’t like it when there are too many other children, she can’t quite work out the dynamics of who plays with who.  I may end up taking her on her own every now and then as a treat instead.

The only real downer it that it’s going to restrict jollies off to visit folks as the fuel costs may bite into the budget a bit far.  I’ll have to see, I suppose I can feed everyone beans on toast for a month to balance it all out….. 

There were passing comments about Aprilia being fat which obviously upset her (although Granny didn’t seem to notice) but other than taht we have had a rather good day with the Parents.  They had a family friend down from Scotland, hence the visit, and i suspect that made all the difference as she shouted down any comments about size (and being a nurse in her younger days she is believed on these things!!!!) adn after that they probably just didn’t want to upset their guest any further!

The day was rounded off with Aprilia giving me a foot and then a hand massage whilst I read to her and then me returning teh favour once I’d finished reading.  She really is a very lovely girl you know! 

something about words of a fool I believe.  Well, this fool should have been taking NOTES as she went along on this OU course, not just sitting back passively reading.  I hve an essay due on the 3rd of June which basically wants me to summaries teh last 15 weeks of teh course into 1500 words.

Now, if I’d just collated stuff under general headings as I’d gone along life would now be very easy.  But I "study" mainly on teh bed with everything sprawled out round me.  I don’t write very comfortabley so I therefore don’t bother.  I do essays at the PC, with the mind map software to help me organise my scatty little brain.  So I really therefore need to study at the PC too don’t I so taht I can throw randome thougths into a mind map or two as I go along.  My last course I had the luxury of knowing broad themes for the exam so I could revise just those themes.  I don’t have that luxury for this one, I need something to revise off and so far I have nowt.

Shoulda woulda coulda indeed 

Aprilia now knows how to iron, and, most scarily, actually enjoys doing it…. These Brownie badges, they get her doing things I could never convince herto try any other way!

It all began yesterday when I realised that I needed Fimo to do fingerprint keyrings with the Rainbows in a couple of weeks.  Well, 2 piddly little blocks of Fimo didn’t seem worth Merry’s effort really so I felt I ought to make a bit of an effort… and Aprilia is running short on a couple of things and oooh, that looks nice…. and suddenly I’ve spend a little more than I planned but hey ho, i don’t spend with Merry often, but when i do, I do it with style!

Then this morning the kit list for camp arrived and I realised that actually she needed a few bits anyway.  So we set out…. first stop Tesco who have a sale on clothes.  She got nothing even vaguely useful but something very pink!  I got blue non-denim trousers (would you beleive jeans are not considered practical for Guide Camping?????) and, in a moment of weakness under the influence of a small child with incredibly blue eyes that can still wrap me round her little finger at times, a pair of pink trousers.  I may wear them for a dare some time!

We moved swiftly on to the camping shop for waterproofs, a cheap torch I won’t shout about her losing, a survival bag to put her bedding roll in and some stuff I need for the small tent.   I wanted some small-ish peices of groudnsheeting too but didn’t spot that.  We had a good look at all the tents, fell deeply in love with one taht I now can’t remember the name of but it had not only a hanging rail between the bedrooms but also a little zip out bit between the bedrroms and the actual canvass which had a groundsheet so you could lob all the empty bags etc out there out of the way.  Oh, and it had a little cubby on one side too, and a small zip through to the porch bit where we assumed you would dump smelly boots and a huge canopy type porch….. adorable, but huge and polycotton not nylon and I really don’t want polycotton (not that we need a new tent anyway!!!! but hey!)  Anyway, got all that, plus a new handle for my fave pan and a set of pans that nest together really neatly for camping so when I go to camp without Duke I don’t have to run off with all the pans out of the kitchen and hope he doesn’t notice!!!!  And that didn’t come cheap although to be fair it wasn’t as bad as it could have been cos I found everything either on the budget range or on offer.

Then we moved a mile or so up teh road to Ikea.  She wanted a new duvet cover and had seen the one she wanted when we bought her bed a while ago.  And Duke wanted one of those bedbag tray things to stop his laptop burning his legs.  And, apart from hotdogs and icecream, that was actually all we got - must be a miracle, never got out of there without buying half the shop before!

And as if taht wasn’t bad enough, I then needed to order name tapes!  I did think that being a home edder such mundane things as name tapes would be soemthing I’d not need but no, she’s going on a communal camp, she will be there with several million other yellow and brown clad girls, everything needs a label!

Would you beleive we also managed some education in there too?  Okay, so only a page of Miquon (way too easy for her but she’s as bad as me for insisting a book has to be finished!), stories and our new tactic for reading practice….. We are duet reading the ****** Rainbow Magic Fairies, a couple of pages a night.  It’s mindless, it’s simple vocab, it’s big, clear print and she loves it so I’ll grit my teeth and read it slowly out loud with her.  I’m assured its a great way to bring reading on as they get the feel for how words flow, are helped out with the hard words and get the confidence on the easier words.  And it makes me feel like I’m doing something positive.

The handle has fallen off my most favouritest pan in the whole world and it’s not fixable according to Duke - waaah!

But then, I’m a resourceful chapess, and I spotted a grabby pan handle thing in the camping shop today - hmmm

It works!  I can use my pan - yipeeeee!

Oh Lord I really do need to get a life you know! 

I just transfered my bookmarks from FireFox to Google ready for when I ditch Vista (just as soon as Duke re-finds that disc!!!) and it informed me I have 500 bookmarks!!!!!!  Really must go through and cut out the dead wood

I pitched the little tent in the front garden again today, I’m getting much faster at putting it up now which is all for the good as it will be one less way I’ll stand out as teh Newbie at Guide camp!  Still no idea where 1 pod and 1 groundsheet are (grrrr) but I can replace the groundsheet with something better anyway and if it’s only the two of us we only need one pod (and if it’s all 3 we would be in the hobbit hole!)  It is a very poor excuse for a tent really though, compared to the utter craftsmanship of offering like my Vango and the Kyhams I’ve looked at one MP camps.  Nothing that I can’t live with and for £40 you can’t expect a lot (although it’s meant to be £80 at which point I would have been seriously p***d off!) but you can’t get anything taut enough to stop it flapping in a stiff breeze (no adjusters on the tension straps) and the guy lines are in odd places so you can’t pull it tight that way either, oh, and the doors have a design fault so rain can get in a bit and , and , and….. still, it’ll do til I can afford a decent make of small tent!

 Anyway, Aprilia wanted a pic of herself in her camp uniform and thus stayed in it all day.  Yellow really does suit her!  There was some sort of sniping going on in the morning as her "best friend" was being nasty to her and not letting her join in with a game.  All seemed forgotten later though, I do hate those bitchy bickering moments that even small girls seem to have!

As the tent was out we had tent ed including another bribary session with her reading to me in return for extra Harry.  Wonder if I’ll be able to recite whole books before she actually learns to read them for herself!  Mind you, at least it’s a good read, it’s already been established taht her Fairy Magic books only get read out to her once, after that she can work out how to read them herself……. awful books!

She’s still awake, singing Brownie Bells over and over, just wondering if it’s time I went and told her to shut up and go to sleep or if I should just ignore her and hope this means a lie in tomorrow  

She has worked hard today, on the understanding that everything was "worth" a certain amount of Harry read to her!  Maybe not a great inspirational tool but as what matters just now is that we keep the momentum going with the reading I’ll stoop as low as it takes!  Consequently she did a whole Starter Stile phonics book (mainly "or", "ar" and "ir" sounds) and a few other odd bits.

There has been domesticity today too.  Both in the production of Snickerdoodles and Chocolate Oaties and also in the excavation of Duke’s side of the bed in order to rescue all the used towels.  I may have mentioned his penchant for discarding soggy towels on the floor before.  I really ought to just give up and make regular patrols of his favourite drop off points rather than wait until we run out and ahve to do 5 loads! 

 We nearly got a rotavator of EBay but got pipped at the post which has messed up the weekend fairly seriously.  You see, Duke’s nephew-in-law was supposed to be sorting out a rotavator for us to borrow but despite Duke phoning him at various different times of day and night for the past 3 weeks he’s never in adn I suspect that the messages don’t get passed on.  We aren’t *really* part of their family, what with us having moved away from the immediate area and me upsetting the lot of them by home educating (there’s 2 teachers and a classroom assistant in the family….) so although they would go running to any of the "in" family to help them out in seconds, we are definitely the poor second (third, maybe even fourth, after the cat, assorted clubs and societies and the Great God of the School System)

So the plan for Duke to rotavate the back garden this weekend is therefore off.  Which means I can’t get on with any planting, and it needs doing SOON before it’s just too late, and I had hoped to plant into the ground this year, not tubs but daren’t if there’s a chance of said machine being available any time soon.  Okay, so in the grander scheme of things it’s all very petty but bloody anoying non the less. 

And the big news is that I’ve been accepted as a helper on an international Guiding camp in August and Aprilia is being allowed into the "Brownie sub-camp" even though it’s really for more local units!  She’s in high orbit with excitement about that, especially as it has meant Camp Uniform and the news that she will get a special Camp Teeshirt and Necker whilst she’s there!  AND she will do her Brownie Camp Badge!  How much excitement can one gal take!