just another morning here

Here are the Christmas activities from this week, I am exceedingly worn out and really can’t wait until the end of the 20th December when all this chaos will stop!

Monday: practice for school play at my school, Josiah’s first performance (daytime), [swimming lessons as usual], my work meal out.

Tuesday: school play at my school, [piano lessons as usual - no TKD today though as it clashed with play start time] Josiah’s second performance (evening; Steve went to see it as Abbie & Joe ended up doing the same show, so neither of us fancied watching the same thing twice!).

Wednesday: Christmas party at the Donkey Sanctuary for me, including Christmas dinner. Donkey days are a highlight of my school life!

Thursday: Abbie’s performances, one in the daytime [insert choir practice and cello lesson in here] and one in the evening (my turn to be the audience).

Friday: Abbie and Joe’s Christmas school dinner [violin lesson, youth clubs (2) as usual, during which I will have to shop for Abbie's party, argh party bags].

We will have a brief interval in the Christmas activities over the weekend in order to fit Abbie’s birthday in, but even then we’ve got a couple of Christmas things to go to! Also have to manage some work at the garage as I think it’s probably the first Saturday since September that I’ve been able to get into the office.

In other news we have challenges of the business variety as our wonderful mechanic was taken ill at the weekend. He will almost certainly be off work until the New Year at least, and probably not be back to full fitness for a very long time after that. The workshop was the one part of the business that hadn’t suffered due to recession, but hey ho. Steve seems fairly calm about everything but I am worrying.

And this is why Animal Crossing is so nice to play, there is no recession and you can easily make a few million bells just by selling turnips – escapism rules ok.

Just upgraded to WP 2.7 here, I quite like the new format. Tired and should be asleep though so must sign off for the night.

I know it’s a week early but the Autumn concert finished last week so the orchestra got its Christmas music out today (Abbie very happy to be given a tiny little solo at the end of one of the pieces!). Joe had a Suzuki Group concert this afternoon and they played a couple of Christmas songs as well – so although it really is too early, I can’t help feeling as though Christmas is just around the corner. Schools (theirs and mine) are already preparing for Christmassy things so there’s no ignoring it! I will shortly be putting the Christmas CDs in the car too

Er. That’s all I have to say. The rest of my life just seems to pass in a blur of school and after school activities, not to mention homework, plus of course latterly the essential Animal Crossing fix every day. There’s no way I can play it as much as I played Wild World on the DS when I was at home rather than working, but it’s still so nice to escape into that other world, I can’t help it – it feels like watching your favourite old film all over again. OK so I’m weird, but I don’t care (you all knew that a long time ago).

Bit worried about the garage at the moment … wondering how long the recession might go on for as it does seem to be filtering down. I try to ignore it while Steve tries to fix it – both pretty useless reactions really, somewhere in the middle might be a good plan.

Anyway back to tonight: dinner, wine, X Factor, Animal Crossing, Casualty, and at this rate the children currently fighting over pieces of electronics kits will be going to bed early so it should be a peaceful evening!

The funny thing is, that the journalist who wrote this article doesn’t even drive, and has never bought a car!
Still, I think it was a good piece, and it made me smile more than once – prizes if you can guess where

However, and it is the only thing we could find to pick on, apparently there is a missing ‘minus’ in the quotation about earnings! Steve says, for the record, his answer was that his garage could earn from ‘minus 50k to 100K’.

Edited to add: The article came about completely by chance. Apparently LB was in the city doing a similar article on a Met Office worker, and wanted to find a car salesperson to interview for the series, and just contacted Steve from the phone book (or google, whatever he used, I don’t know!). Not quite sure what made Steve say yes, it’s quite unlike him really!

Some more smiley faces on my map, and it all happened spontaneously which was fab
Joe was at his friend’s house, Anna was on the way to hers, when my friend rang up and decided to come over for some caching. Abbie moaned and groaned about it, desperately ringing round her friends to see which ones were in, but didn’t find any – then the minute before we left her friend rang and invited her over as well!

So I had a happy couple of child-free hours to walk and hunt. We picked Josiah up and did one more cache on the way back, which is why he’s in one of the photos too! Especially pleased with the cache where I’m in the photo – firstly it was a satisfying puzzle to solve, and then it was a cool cache hide as well

Steve won his class at Wiscombe hillclimb again today (no Cosworth, yawn), while his dad was doing the honours for us at the Guildhall Motor Show, which we did last year and it was good enough for us to want to repeat the experience this year as well. Steve and I will be there tomorrow so if you read this and you’re in town during the day, then pop and see us.