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

• shopped for Russia (too much, the bank started worrying it was so out of the ordinary!)
• worried about the weather etc. in Russia
• stuck stickers on luggage labels for 104 people going to Russia
• delivered a car to Yorkshire (just me – fab to see the friends who were buying the car so that made the trip worthwhile )
• done an iMovie workshop at the Apple Store (the kids)
• worked as much if not more than usual, with the ordinary work plus getting the businesses set for being away for 10 days (Steve)
• been to Thruxton to watch my Dad’s 60th birthday present track day (me and the kids, Steve couldn’t afford the time )
  
• desperately wanted to be driven around the track by Tiff Needell because it looked like *so* much fun, but it was way too expensive. Settled for some photos instead (me and the kids!)
  
• woken up to a random cat in our room (not ours) which must have been in the house all night, since all the doors were locked. Haven’t found any evidence of where it was yet though, thank goodness!
• waded through huge piles of post-camping and pre-Russia washing/ironing (me with a bit of help from the kids)
• worried about the lack of school planning going on around here, tried to get my head round it a bit more and actually do some – failed again, there is so much to do I worked for a whole day with practically no stops, and have achieved approximately a tenth of what I need to do before the beginning of September. Doing a bit more this afternoon so hopefully will feel a bit better about it by teatime!
• been out for a meeting with the couple in charge of the Russia trip – as second in command I’m meant to know what’s going on! I do, honest. Well, slightly! Fairly concerned about the weather and dust/smog situation but other than adding it to our risk assessment and giving travellers appropriate warnings, we’re carrying on regardless.
• been for an appointment at the bank – school related – as we’re trying to set up an enterprise project with our senior students. Life skills are top of the list of things to learn so operating a bank account in conjunction with buying and selling things is a good idea.
• taken Josiah to the 2nd hand uniform shop at his school, to look for a blazer and tie. Got those, and a couple of shirts, but forgot to buy a jumper. Then again I could just save myself the aggro of having to track down his jumper every day by not buying him one in the first place! A blazer’s going to be bad enough to keep track of, never mind *2* possible garments to lose?!
• done all the usual music practices, cooking, tidying, cleaning etc. around the house – I’d like to suspend ‘house getting dirty’ in the same way that I can suspend Riverford boxes in the holidays, but it doesn’t work like that, in fact it’s worse with all of us around all the time!

Actually today seemed quite chilled out in comparison to some Saturdays. Joe left early for choir as usual but then the girls and I had an hour extra at home, since orchestra started later than usual – that was really nice Really gearing up for Russia now, which is quite exciting!

We had Josiah’s friend with us for the day so have had two boys and two girls – I’ve not had to remember names today, just used ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ when yelling at people Came home via Sainsbury’s for some essential stuff we’d forgotten (birthday present, pudding for shared tea tomorrow, etc!), and had lunch. The girls then got ready for Caitlin & Riona’s party at Decoy Park, which goes on into the evening.

Meanwhile the boys lazed around watching tv (I took Will out for a quick geocache too but Josiah didn’t want to come!), then eventually got ready to go back to school for their practice and tea before the evening’s concert.

Steve and I went for a quick look in the camera shop (always dangerous, we’re at our best when blowing money) then a bite to eat together – on our own Then we went back to the Cathedral for the concert. It was great, lots of blow-you-away choral stuff, re-creating the Coronation, with footage from the actual coronation on a screen behind the choir.

Just home, now I’m catching up on the last Gareth Malone that I missed in the week … I’d be in his mothers’ choir