just another morning here

Started very early this morning dashing down to the workshop to pick up a car, since mine had ended up there on Saturday in the course of a rescue mission for my parents, who broke down on their way here, dropping my sister at University. Not the start to her year that she had imagined but luckily they were coming here rather than anywhere else in the country, as it was relatively easy to sort them out (in the first instance anyway, Terry hasn’t looked at their car yet, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!).

Steve’s dad is on holiday for a couple of weeks, and Terry our mechanic is ill with a horrible inner ear thing that means he can’t stand up, so we were awfully short staffed today. Meant that we had to give up on the home ed group trip we were meant to be going on but hey ho, that’s life.

Once the girls had gone to school, Josiah and I ended up at the office for the day, which was fine – we chucked a load of stuff in a box and de-camped there quite instead (as long as I have internet I’m happy!), the phone didn’t even ring until 11am so not too strenuous.

Joe did violin practice and then some of his Roman lapbook project; today he wrote out a few vocab words for a flappy thing in the lapbook, and we learnt about Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius too – looked at lots of pictures online. The whole Roman thing is making Joe want to go to Italy, he keeps saying that would be a good Home Ed trip to go on (the Roman Baths not good enough!). Went home for about an hour to scoop Abbie up then back to the office for the end of the day.

Oooh look, we’re even named on the Motor Show website! Not that the Guildhall shopping centre website generates that much traffic, I shouldn’t imagine, but nice to get a mention anyway. If anyone local is in town on Saturday or Sunday please come and say hello to me/us, we’ll be behind the little church in the middle somewhere.

Today Steve and I went to Thruxton on a ‘work plus hangers on’ trip. Steve, Russ and Terry all drove a Porsche, a Ferrari, and then a single seater racing car, while the rest of us watched. Terry’s sons and I all had a fast lap as passengers in an RX-8 because it was an opportunity we couldn’t miss! It was a great experience, Steve loved it, as did the others too I think! They were scored on their drives, and I won’t go so far as to mention numbers, but suffice to say Terry did the best, and we will be making sure his certificate ends up on the workshop wall somewhere! We had dinner on the way home, too, making it a really nice day out. Many thanks to my sister Esther who looked after most of the children at home (one of them is at a sleepover with a friend), making it possible for me to go and take photos.

The full set of photos is here

Steve has become rather an expert on bike racks recently, having been researching options for putting a different rack on our car. I’ve found out today that he decided he was so much of an expert that when he was offered the chance to become a stockist of MaxxRaxx he took it. I guess we’ll see how it goes, we don’t really have enough space to start stocking all sorts of different racks, but it could be an added string to the bow here at the garage. We are (still) in the process of doing a new website for Steve Clarke Cars, hopefully the maxxraxx thing will get added in at some point too. In the mean time, if anyone wants to order a bike rack, you know where to come