Taking my sister into town now to show her around (she’s coming to University here next month) and end up at Wagamama for dinner to say thank you for the day’s babysitting on Thursday – couldn’t believe it when she said she’d never heard of it!

We all had a lovely weekend away chez Portico, it was great to relax, do practically nothing, but catch up face to face for once. None of the children wanted to come home on Sunday.

Yesterday Joe and I had a relatively good day at home despite a few things taking longer than they should have. We got through violin practice and some maths/music workbooks before going to Sainsbury’s. I think I could almost give Joe a list and let him do the shopping for me while I have a coffee in the cafe, perhaps I’ll try that next week

In the afternoon he played a bit of Wii and then we looked at some maps and atlases together; we are trying to plan where to go in the summer, having booked a Dover-Calais ferry crossing. Belgium is a hot favourite at the moment but none of us can really decide! Opinions are split between coast and cities, and we have time to get down south if we wanted to, just can’t make up our minds!

Abbie went to play with a friend after school while Anna came home and took ages to pack her bags for her school residential. She’s staying at the Courtlands Centre until Friday.

This morning everyone was up bright and early and got music practices done first thing; Joe and I went off to work while Steve took Anna (and her kit bag) and Abbie to school. Our work was pretty fruitless as the DVLA staff were all on strike! Still, we ran a few errands before coming home.

We’ve worked through a few more science kit experiments, still on the subject of forces, demonstrating Newton’s 2nd and 3rd laws. Not sure if this information will be retained, but we’ve had fun anyway

And finally, I am tired of usedcarspecialist. No hidden messages in there, honest Even Steve has dumped the usedcarspecialist tag at work, and I’ve been annoyed with it for a while too, so I’m dumping it as well. It was just the first thing we thought of when signing up for stuff and it’s a rubbish ID, especially as it’s always been mine not his which is topsyturvy really!

So if you ever want to IM me again please can you add my new yahoo id which is two_red_boots Or if you’re on gmail I’m now using tworedboots[at]gmail.com so can chat via that (usually better than yahoo as for some reason my yahoo messenger frequently drops out on the laptop), although my main email address is still the same. Just marginally annoyed that the flickr post bar can’t seem to find the flickr ID, it’s returning the error code ‘user not found’, any ideas anyone? I think the time is approaching for a new blog template too …

Laura our music teacher is having a fancy dress Christmas party for all her students this evening … this is Anna’s outfit

added later: she won! yippee, the prize was one free piano lesson!

blog-break? yeah, what a stupid idea, I can’t do it!

Mountain, broken glass, wave … or something else? Had to change it after all – it’s a *tree* now, okay?

Update
I have the part of tarski that I wanted working now, even if I did have to delete a whole section of code to sort it out (not exactly the best way to sort it but it’s done the job), and that’s the tag cloud. I just love looking at it! And of course now I have to go back through my 1600 odd posts to tag them all, which appeals greatly to my ocd tendencies. As if I didn’t have enough to do with consolidating my acww catalogue

Can’t sort the picture just yet so the colours/piccie at the top might take longer to sort out – and I think I (and therefore you ) just have to live with it for a while before making any more theme changes