just another morning here

Since I’ve been counting weekends this summer I suppose I ought to write about the one just gone; but for most of the family it was uneventful.

We spent it lounging around, gardening (Steve & the kids), sewing on nametapes, washing, ironing, and doing schoolwork (me). Oh – we did go to a lovely birthday party on a boat around Torbay, which was fab.

Anna, meanwhile, was living it up with a friend from school, whose family took her to Greenbelt. I was very envious. I asked her to take some photos for me and this was the only decent one she came home with … clearly she was too busy having fun to worry about recording it on camera for her old mum

So today I’m doing the last few bits of preparation that it seems possible to do before actually getting into my classroom, which is still a bit of a bombsite and builders are still there working. We’re meant to be doing some fun activity day or other on Friday as a teambuilding training thing but I can see some of us not managing to go because we’ll need to spend the day working in the classroom … as I don’t suppose the builders will clean up after themselves …
Meanwhile Abbie is getting ready for an afternoon’s Y7 induction before term starts for real (for all three children) tomorrow. I am hoping they might let me take a photo of them all looking smart in the morning …

Actually I’m pretty annoyed about this blog post really … my favourite cache stats site has closed ( It’s Not About The Numbers – what a shame, it was the best one), and I’ve been waiting to blog until a bug with My Geocaching Profile was fixed, which it almost is now … then looked back at my third caching post and it seems that my profile there has automatically updated, meaning that I don’t have pictures of the maps etc. as they were back in May at just over 500 finds, instead they’re as they should be now at 680 finds (sort of). Poo to not realising that would happen back then (which it does say on the site), otherwise I would have done it like this:

Anyway, never mind, I know it’s only really me who’s bothered about stuff like this! I *am* pleased to have that giant country shaded in on the map, just from finding one cache in Russia!

My penultimate weekend of the holidays was spent caching; my friend and I were rather proud of ourselves managing 109 in one day, a figure of 8 walk of around 20 miles, mostly in the pouring rain as well. We did 30-odd the day before, and 28 the day after, as well. We had been going to camp up in North Devon but in the end because of the weather we decided to camp at home instead, so that we could dry our clothes/boots and charge batteries overnight!

The girls had time with friends over the weekend which was great for them, Josiah came with us on Sunday, and Steve had some peace and quiet!

All I can say, having done that, is that it might have bumped my total caches found number up significantly, and it was fun to have the marathon challenge, but I can hardly remember any one individual cache. I would far prefer to spend the time and energy on one decent cache(password available on request) than on 150 pots behind posts. I can safely say that the graph won’t carry on going upwards at such an almost-exponential rate, as I won’t be carrying on like that throughout this academic year!

Since then we’ve just been bumbling around at home; I’ve been working every morning on school stuff and a little bit of orchestra as well, and the children have been generally annoying me. We hoped to have some ‘family afternoons’ but Steve hasn’t made it home before 5pm any day so far, so never mind about that! Evenings have been spent sewing nametapes onto school clothes in the vain hope that if they’re named they might not go missing so often

Russia, land of the Tsars – also this summer was notably a land of heatwave, peat and forest fires, and smog. It seemed so bizarre to me that while Pakistan was enduring huge floods, Russia was suffering from quite the opposite.

Anyway. This summer’s trip to Russia has been in the pipeline for years; it was first conceived by a small committee of people around the time that Anna joined Exeter Children’s Orchestra three years ago. Little did I know then that I’d have anything to do with it at this point!

Last year we signed up to be part of the trip – I figured it would be the experience of a lifetime, since I knew that our family would never be brave enough to go to Russia on our own. I’ve been part of the planning process this year, working harder on things as the year went on, so it was just incredible to finally see it all come together and for 104 people to *actually* go to Russia (and get back, too!!). We had an amazing time – we all really enjoyed it for various reasons, and I don’t regret it for a moment. I’m almost looking forward to helping organise the reciprocal visit!

So, read on if you want the details … or as many as I can remember, at least
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Bang goes the third weekend of the holidays!

Friday night was fab, because Steve came home from a trip to the accountants in a good mood, and took us out for dinner Nice to know that all his hard work has paid off, this year at least.

On Saturday the girls took part in a singing workshop with the Panto people – great fun by all accounts. Josiah and I pootled around all day getting little jobs done – sorting out pets etc.

Today we spent lunchtime at Steve’s parents’ house for a BBQ, celebrating Steve’s Grandad’s and Mum’s birthdays, so that was nice. Sadly his Grandad wasn’t really up to taking part in his own birthday party though

Other than that, we’ve been packing. And giving the house a ritual pre- holiday tidy and clean (which everyone else moans about but I see as essential!). Also watching Moscow webcams and waiting for updates – the smog is clearing and apparently the airport is fully functional tonight so things are looking good for our flight next week. We’re all excited, if a bit nervous as well, but it should be an experience of a lifetime!