T-Bird Anni Rides Again

We started the day with doll clothes making.  We have an almost done "kimono" style night shirt to show for it which just needs lace sewing round the edges and eitehr poppers or velcro attaching and it’s done.  There was very little hand holding on this one and I’m looking forward to posting a pic of the results as I think it will look pretty damned good for her first flying solo project (at a good few years younger than I was the first time I was let loose on a machine!)  She also cut out, very neatly, a care bear pre-printed thing that you sew round the edge of to make something loosely resembling a teddy.  It was free of freecycle, I suspect it cost someone an awful lot more money than it can possibly be worth.  There are a lot of curves on it but she has managed one with a bit of hand holding before so she can have a go with less hand holding from me tomorrow all being well.

Then we ambled off to get the final book case I want for the bedroom.  So that’s 3 trips to Ikea to get a total of 1 desk, 2 bookcases and a CD tower.  I could ahve had the lot delivered next week for £35, I suspect that, on balance, it would have been good value, not least since I now have a sore back from mauling the damned thing into the car today.  My car’s loadbed is not long enough, not by a long way, so there was much mauling to do to get it at the right angle over the back of one seat so it was secure, I could close the back door and no one got brained by it.  We may have managed to pick up a few other odds and ends too.  Hmmm, yup, delivery would have been much cheaper.

This afternoon there was random TV for her whilst cutting out paper people for a Brownie badge (World Traveller or World Culture, they all seem to blend together at the moment….) whilst I tried again to make some sense of revision.

This evening she has Moshi Monster-ed whilst I had a "chat tutorial" on the very useful OU student forum thing the result being that she ended up doing lots of puzzling and brain work whilst I got a handle on one poem.  One.  Well, I suppose it’s a start. And it is ‘To Autumn‘ which I do really love.  So that’s okay then.

and you all know how crap I am at doing that!

The smoothie maker is dead.  Smoke from the motor sort of dead.  Even Duke had to admit it was no longer fit for purpose (unlike my Kenwood Chef which sounds dreadful and smells of hot motor but keeps going thus is absolutely fine)  So, I need to replace it urgently.  I’ve got kind of dependent on my daily smoothie to provide a good wedge of my 5 a day.

I can buy the same one again which has the advantage of me already having lots of goblets etc for it so I could make smoothies for a whole birthday party full of people (and keep one blade in quarantine so I know I won’t accidentally eat any banana)  and I like it, it’s a nifty design, small, fast etc (the juicer bit is a waste of space though, not sure what they were thinking of with that bit!)

Or I can get something slightly cheaper that is a similar nifty design but has two nice looking mugs with handles and lids (useful for oversleeping - breakfast in car is a bit messy with a goblet!!!) rather than various sized goblets.  Will have to learn to make my smoothies a bit less gloopy (I’ve been known to need a spoon….) to be able to drink through the lid I suspect but I can live with that.  Kenwood are usually a good brand, so I’m reasonably confident that it’s cheap and cheerful not cheap and nasty.  I’m assuming the motor unit will be a similar size to the Hinari one so will fit into it’s space nicely (and free up lots of space in the cupboard as only 2 mugs, not billions of goblets)

Then again, this one really appeals to me. Funky design, blade totally contained within the cup, you don’t need to screw it off (at which point certain small independent people spill their smoothie everywhere…) and "sippy" type top so again, good for breakfast in car but again, must learn to put enough liquid in to make it drinkable through spout   But, and it is a very big but, only one cup per machine.  So if 2 of us want smoothies I have to find something else to tip one into, rinse the thing out and start again.

So, shall I leave you all to debate it and tell me which one????

Was in work this morning and got home to find Aprilia developing a deep and meaningful relationship with Zoombinis and Spelling Blaster and Duke playing with his mid life crisis bike.  Lunch was a gourmet delight of chicken dippers with garlic bread (blush) and whilst Duke and Aprilia continued as before, I did a bit of a brainstorm on one of the plays from the course and pleasantly surprised myself with how much of it I actually remembered without looking.  Feeling slightly more hopeful that I can do the plays question in the exam now, just need to brush up on a couple of novels (give me a bit of choice in case I don’t like one question) and get a grip on a bit of poetry.  15 days to go before the exam.  Just 15 more days then it’s all over, one way or the other. 

The following is pasted from an e-mail sent to a list I am on.  The person writing has been doing an awful lot of work finding out about the policies of different LEAs etc.  This is really very worrying.  In fact, this particular LEA person puts me startlingly in mind of "Professor Umbridge" from Harry Potter…. very nice, but very, very evil!

A very nice normal rational and reasonable sounding woman- their Principle EWO , who was convinced that their policy was only common sense and that all of G. Manchester were following it

Thier policy is that they have a safeguarding duty to all EHE children (she mentioned the review). Therefore any family that does ‘not even let us in the house’  is reported to social services and the police. because SS have nothing to go on it seems that the police make spot checks. She said it was ‘common sense’ that if a family refuses their requests of a visit  that they may be hiding something.  After all EHE parents can do ‘whatever they like’ in terms of education. She said they try and track across all LA’s if a family move and do not tell them  a new address (even those with no concerns previously) and also check with all agencies the moment a new child is registered , including school records . I did ask if they would send the police round to my house as I would refuse a visit  but would send them a written statement and plan and she really seemed to miss my point- i.e someone as obviously
as clever and articulate as me would not be of concern but yes ALL families are reported  if they refuse visit. and what bothered me the most is she sounded so reasonable and concerned.

…I have spoken with 2 really hostile EWO’s and this  kind of opinion coming from them would not have surprised me- but the hostile ones tend to be tight lipped and will not tell you anything except that their attitude indicates they are suspicious.

I think it helps that I contacted Trafford  by initially saying the legal dept gave me her name  and that i was presenting a submission to the select commitee  and the House of Lords this week (well a slight exaggeration but we will be there talking to Lucas)- basically I did not get the usual question….’and you’re calling from where?’- to whihc they expect me to say some official office and always say from my home -at whihc point they realise its a service user a mere parent they are talking to!!  I think she assumed I was an official bod and she talked to me like I was !  once she twigged  she kept bringing up the ‘common sense’ approach and her own opinion

The irony is that the next LA used the same term- ‘common sense’  in relation to visits and said they have no problem providing the written plan is ok and there have been no issues previously flagged and were not disparaging of EHE in general.  anyway
TRAFFORD-is definately loving all the recommendations and already using them as policy (except of course the ones that are possibly helpful).   The EHE department of the future should Badman recos come into guidelines, or heaven to Betsy , LAW!

Back in the mists of time I used to blog multiple times a week, sometimes even multiple times a day!  Now all I can claim is a few times a month.  Life. It gets in the way you know!

So, this last week then….

Work is ticking along, it’s rather nice actually to have that hour or so doing something fairly brainless, uninterrupted by family and away from the house. 

The Outwell is still up in the back garden, but I think I’ve worked out how to make the kids pod work… I’m going to cut the groundsheeting off it and use it like curtains within a normal pod (will have to sew loops inside the pod but that should be an easy job)  Am still truely hacked off that I was so badly mis-sold with the damned thing but life goes on and in the grand scheme of things a dodgy kids pod is piffling really.

Rainbows is on hold.  I have too many balls in the air, Rainbows is one I can put down for a month with little or no pangs of concience.  We will start after my exam and have a 7 week term.  Final straw was that "a number of parents" phoned the county commissioner to complain that they had expected Rainbows to start and it hadn’t.  No, they didn’t phone me first to find out why.  So stuff them.  They can damned well wait until I’m good and ready to start back  am not flogging myself or risking stuffing up the exam on their behalf.

Educating is going in fits and starts.  We did loads of schooly stuff yesterday, finishing off the waifs and strays of old workbooks and revisiting the first NVR papers book - I’d scanned the whole lot last year which she ground her way through at agonisingly slow pace so we started again, in the book this time, which she doesn’t know is the same one, and she rattled through an entire paper in 10 mins.  She likes NVR now!  Monday she spent the whole day self-educating on the PC with a mix of Zoombinis, Spelling Blaster, Moshi Monsters, Magic Schoolbus and Cbbc website games.

Revision is also going in fits and starts.  I’m happy with the plays part (I know which play to revise, I know it will be an extract to do text analysis on, that’s easy)  I have 2 novels I’m blissfully happy with, which should give me a few options on the prose question.  But then we get to poetry.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I actually rather like poetry.  But the selection we have is pants for the most part.  A few corkers in there but for the most part it’s pretentious or feminist (and don’t get me started on being force fed feminist issues on this damned course….)  Sigh.  I think my trouble is that the first course I did was so well produced that everything afterwards seems like utter dross.

It’s that time of year when we re-qualify on First Aid too.  Irritatingly all the really busy stuff at Wombwell can’t be counted towards the re-qual (you are supposed to be able to count stuff you have actually done so long as all the criteria are met) because I didn’t have my paperwork with me (it wasn’t issued out til the next day) when all hell was breaking loose so no one could stand there and tick bloody boxs.  Calm blue ocean be damned, I want blood…..   or maybe even

By the way, I keep being accused by people at Kung Fu of being too nice.  Was even accused of being a lady on Saturday.  See?  I can still fool some people at least some of the time  

Right, Friday… leisurely day, we went for a play, spoke to Jason and finalised what the deal is for the cleaning job.  Nothing exciting but will help pay off our non too small portion of the national debt.  Back to Brownies in the evening and another badge in the bag for Aprilia (Culture, for which she had to visit a local museum, draw her family tree in a decorative fashion and fill a box with stuff about her life, how come some are so damned easy when others are a huge challenge???)  We had a gentle stroll round the shops afterwards, spent a little more than I would have liked to but at least I knew that Aprilia and Duke weren’t going to have any excuses to eat out over the weekend!

Saturday… Off to Wombwell with Young Tom.  Met Old Tom when we got there, had a relatively quiet practice day with only one real drama - huge bang caught our attention just in time for us to see a small boy flying over the top of the marshals box in front of us.  That woke us up a bit…. he was fine.  Quite how I have no idea, but small boys are made of stern stuff it seems.

Just as we were midway through getting clean ready to head off for tea we got shouted for.  "He’s not looking very well" aparently.  So, off we went.  They were right, he didn’t look at all well.  Not even a little bit.  So, Old Tom phoned for an ambi to take him somewhere away from us ASAP.  It was an interesting phone call…… South Yorkshire vs Darkest Wales language barriers appeared to cause some issues.  Eventually he made himself sufficiently understood that yes, high BP on its own is not worthy of an ambi, and neither is a stinking headache but this guy was ILL and did not need to be taken to the GP out of hours surgery (no, they can’t refuse to send an ambi but they can question why you need it and recomend other services aparently)  They came, they put him in their ambi, we did the emotional support bit with the wife and then we continued our evening toilette and headed out.  The ambi was still there, we have no idea why they were still pratting about nearly 20 mins later when the hospital is 10 minutes away but that is their problem not ours.  It was a "tech crew" with no paramedic so it wasn’t a "stay and ply vs scoop and run" issue for those who have any idea what I mean by that.  4 gallons of diesel would have been my drug of choice but then I’m like that.

Lovely meal was had by all and we waddled back to base to attack the beer in the fridge (do like having a fridge in the new building, very useful!) and finally collapsed into bed when they turned the generators off.

In the morning we found that there had been an accident whilst we were out which required another ambi.  Old Tom was somewhat tactless in pointing out that if they had invited us to their BBQ we would have been arround to help….. he’s like that

Sunday was chaos.  I threw away my hot beef batch after 3 bites, each about an hour apart.  cold beef batch is no fun!  Between brake failures, brain failures, hot exhausts and heavy loads, not to mention grumpy wasps, we sent 1 more in an ambi and 3 in own transport to hospital as well as treating a good sheet of A4’s worth of bumps bites and scratches.  We got to the giggling at everything manically stage. 

Monday…. tried to rediscover the floors from under camping detritus, did 5 loads of washing (well, the sun was out so I went for it!) 2 loads through the dishwasher (which cleared away the camping stuff and all the stuff from the weekend…) and started work.  

Yesterday…made another top from "peasant dress" pattern which Duke has declared to be not even a bit wench-like so I may try to work out how to use the timer on the camera and post a pic - they don’t look much good on a hangar, they really do rely on the body shape to make them hang right.  Also pitched up the Outwell to have another attempt at making the kids pod fit.  several yards of elastic later I thought I’d done it.  Alas, having slept in it last night I can now confirm that I failed fairly spectacularly as a good chunk of it was poking out the side of the tent this morning.  And it rained last night.  That nylon stuff isn’t waterproof you know.  Back to the drawing board then!

What I really need to be doing instead of all that lot though is revising and sorting out Rainbows which starts next week.  I’ve precious little interest in either just now but hey ho.

will blog properly once I catch up with myself but a quick snapshot for you…..

watching some cops and robbers fly on the wall type  thing with Duke Saturday morning before heading off…

"I am arresting you for failing to provide ID and for being disorderly"  cough, when did not having ID become an offence then peeps????

but on a lighter note…

"can we have a mechanical warning flag for kart five one, fifteen please"…. and this was on Saturday before they had all gone out to celebrate the chief marshal’s 18th birthday!

"be nice to me, I’m a pensioner" from Harley who retired (age 55) on Friday and was still rather over excited about it all on Sunday

"Mummy, I made daddy watch Hannah Montana all afternoon" when I got home….. Poor Duke!

Well we have been busy….

Sunday wasn’t quite the day we had planned…. Duke’s phone rang early (ish) in the morning due to a cock up with booking medical cover at Oulton and hence I ended up working  until 2:30 in the afternoon which meant we left for our camping holiday several hours later than planned. Pitching the tent up is remarkably easy without a gale blowing, torrential rain hammering down and a remarkably flat pitch to play with.

Monday and Tuesday revolved around a complicated game played by the children and several gallons of tea drank by the adults.  The central focus of it all being the fire circle.  Upon this altar several tonnes of wood from varying sources was sacrificed to the Great Fire God.  Accolytes of various ages ensured that the sacrifices were fed constantly to the altar fire to appease the apetites of said Great Fire God.  I am quite confident that this is what ensured the rather lovely weather with which we were blessed.

Wednesday was Butser day.  It was a lovely day, we had a go at various skills, one of which was the skill of not making excessive fun of the school marm who was giving us the tour.  Poor woman, she was doing her best… she just wasn’t quite ready for us load of scoundrels!

Tiredness started to get the better of certain small people by the end of the day which resulted in some fairly disgraceful behaviour from Aprilia. Sigh.  I’m reasonably confident that she won’t try the "be friends with us again or we won’t give you your stick back" line again   Never did like games involving points arbitarily awarded.

Which brings us to today.  She emerged from her pit looking more tired than when she had gone to bed and only seemed capable of playing with C who thankfully was up for some quieter play too so they had what appears to have been a pleasant morning building a whole new den somewhere removed from disputed territory (never got to the bottom of that neither… something to do with multiple dens being made by differing groups who were running raiding parties to nick building materials off each other.  Sigh)  But anyway, we packed up in a leisurely fashion, tootled home with a stop on the way for Little Scoff lunch and was home in time to unpack and even for me to get to Kung Fu which was a bonus as Jason is looking for staff which could just help balance the books a bit better  

I know, I’m usually so diligent!

Sunday we went to JJs for a play in the morning with Jackie and Jet and I made pathetic efforts at studying in the afternoon.  Then it was off to Oulton for a nightshift with JB with whom I have an uneasy truce as he is one of the ring leaders of Uncle Curly’s current predicament but is otherwise a nice enough bloke to work with.

Monday I was ridiculously tired considering I had only done one night not the usual 3 but muddled through various "schooly bits" during the day and attacked the blookshelves in the corner of the living room as a token effort of tidying up in case we had visitors (who we aren’t having after all - never leave 2 blokes to organise a night out by text….)

Tuesday I excavated the corner of the  craft room/dining room and discovered an alarming lack of fabric then remembered that I freecycled all the crappy bits ages ago and only kept the stuff I knew what I was going to make stuff out of.  Also reassured myself that I had some fabric on the way from t’internet and became calm again   We also went to look at the swimming pool in the next town as ours is closed for urgent repairs.  Bearing in mind our pool only opened in April, I do feel that all the tiles falling off already is a bit of a poor show really!  Pool in next town is horrid.  We won’t be going again.

Yesterday I spent a while chatting to Draig-Bach (those who speak Welsh will know what that means…. it’s her accepted nickname so who am I to argue!) trying to find out what was happening with aforementioned night out.  It’s been postponed until after we are home from the Sustainability centre and it’s also been relocated to Draig-Bach and Uncle Curly’s house.  Theory being that then the only person who needs to drive is Duke, who doesn’t drink.  Works for me!  Due to a pounding headache, I didn’t do much else yesterday and am not entirely sure what Aprilia did other than send me to my room for being grumpy!  I went, cos I’m a good girl….. and I read a book all afternoon (whilst having a FB conversation with Jax about sewing machine stuff)

This morning we went for a "not back to school play" at a wonderfully quiet JJs.  Heaven.  Alas our day had started at 5am with Aprilia being woken up and thus coming in to me to tell me.  Quite why *I* need to know that she is awake I’m not sure.  I don’t think I *need* this information do I?  Naturally, she went back to sleep.  Obviously I didn’t.  This early start made for tiredness and grumpiness.  Nelly was in a similar state and had one too many melt downs which resulted in children being hoiked off home very unceremoniously.  JJ’s owner Jason (yikes!  that’s his real name!  what is the world coming to?) took one look at me on our way out and instructed me to have a nap and Aprilia to leave me alone for the afternoon so I’d be fit to train tonight…… he has no idea what happens when 8 year olds are left unattended does he???????

This afternoon, after consuming enough Coke to wake me up, I made a top for Aprilia (photo will happen eventually) plain flapjacks and choc chip flapjacks.  This is relaxing and thus revitalising not to mention tasty although the pair of us are going to need bigger clothes if I make many more batches that good!  So I feel just about awake enough now to head back to JJs for Kung Fu with Jason!