The weekend (imaginative title hey?)
Friday morning Aprilia announced that it was time we got on with some Brownie badges. We thumbed through and decided that "Culture" would be a good "instant gratification" type badge to do whilst we got stuff ready for a more long term project. So she is finding odds and ends to put into a time capsule about her life, including her just grown out of Brownie teeshirt (why oh why do they make them so damned short in the body????) and various other very random items. Then she elected that we should do the "visit a local museum" clause so we hot footed it to The Salt Museum which is our nearest offering. It is very good. Cheap too. It filled the entire morning and led to a very late lunch which was not really part of the plan. That just leaves us with drawing her family tree in a nice way which i thought she could do with Granny over the weekend. Unfortunately that got lost in translation and she’s come home with the family tree jotted down on a scrap of paper ready for her to produce rather than anything more finished. Never mind.
Friday also found us haring round trying to find a bottle of Pendaryn whisky for dad. You would ahve thought taht I would ahve remembered to buy it whilst in Wales really 
but I didn’t so we went on a hunt but failed. Never mind.
Friday was also the day that Aprilia was going to Granny’s. So having spent all morning (and most of the afternoon) doing stuff other than getting ready, we did that random packing thing again, filled a sports bag with clothing, books, DS, story CDs, CD player, Brownie uniform….. you get the idea. I’d planned on just doing a "drop and run" as I still needed to get my stuff ready for the weekend too. But dad put the kettle on and insisted I was sociable, and to be fair, I don’t take a lot of persuading, so I gossiped whilst Aprilia went for a hair cut with mum and I eventually got home a good few hours later than planned. Never mind.
We watched the final 2 Torchwoods and decided I didn’t much like it. Neither did I like Duke’s attitude to the sobbing mother that "well, it saved all the other children" I’m Sorry???? I refrained from enquiring how he would feel if Aprilia had been the one available child that could be sacrificed to "save all the other children". I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. And yes, I know it’s fiction.
Saturday we ambled off to Wombwell, treated waaaaay too many small boys who had crashed (no small girls, they seemed more able to keep their karts out of the walls, not sure what that says really) and had discussions with waaaaay too many parents about the concept of good quality rib and back protectors, helmets that are small enough to actually fit their offsprings heads and Gereral Attitudes to officials. Sigh. The evening found us being sociable in an awning with cider, cakes and very good company. I do like the sociable side.
Sunday was more of the same really (without the long drive there, I really do like the staying over at the circuit side of the plan, it requires much less early starts!) and then a mad dash home as mum and dad had conveniently forgotten that they had originally agreed to have Aprilia until Monday morning and were expecting me to pick her up "some time on Sunday" Well, half seven is a time, and it was on Sunday 
Harley drove like a man possessed to get me there (Duke being in the slower ambi and thus had been "volenteered" to finish packing up the treatment room and go to the local hospital to collect spine boards etc that had been attached to patients we had sent in….) although why this required the playing of loud country music I couldn’t quite work out 
And today? Well, today I am intending to evict the last bits of tent etc from the car (yes, the evidence of Shell Island is yet to be dealt with) and do some of the small repairs on it that really have been in need of being done for quite some time. Also this week there is an intent to join in with this odd fashion that seems rife round the blog ring. It’s called tidying up aparently. And rumour has it that once it is done you ahve more space. Actually I’m thinking that tidy is going to have to be something done fairly often before much longer. Having read about a child taken from a family where the state of the house was named amongst the evedence of their abuse, and knowing that, as a home educator, I am already assumed to be some kind of vile abuser, I figure that at the very least we should be able to see 50% of the downstairs floors as a matter of some urgency.
