Things I intend to do this weekend

Write a killer assignment for creepy-Crawley (due Monday).
Clean the fridge.
And the house.
Go grocery shopping.
Do the ironing.
Go for a bike ride.
Buy a new outfit.
Bake something with the girls, using our beautiful new cookbook.
Prepare stunning presentation for Tuesday's interview.
Eek.

LLLaurie R. King

Laurie R. King is one of my favourite writers. I discovered her blog recently, and, in reading it, learned that she, too, used to be a La Leche League Leader! How cool is that? I had always felt, reading her sensitive descriptions of motherhood, that she must have been a LLL-ish sort of mother...

The bluebells are out. The ground in the wood is a haze of blue; it's amazingly beautiful. I took the picture above as I walked in to work this morning, and the one below on my walk home this evening. I'm still amazed by the contrast between 5 on a summer's evening in the park - families relaxing on the grass, dads flying kites, children riding bikes - and 5 on a winter's evening, when it's been pitch dark for more than an hour, it's freezing cold, and everyone is hunched against the rain, heads down, walking home as fast as they can. Probably people who grow up with clearly defined seasons don't find the contrast as dramatic as we do



I'm loving the warm sunny weather we've been having recently; am hoping it's a sign that this summer will be a good one (unlike last year's soggy disaster). The only downside is that the students have run amok with the fake tan in preparation for summer; I had a hard time breathing in class this morning, the chemical reek emanating from my orange blotchy class was so strong.

Beautiful Symonds Yat

We went climbing at Symond's Yat yesterday. After we rappelled down to the cliffs, we climbed the pinnacle you can see part of in the picture and picnicked on top of it. It is a fun climb because it's so airy and exposed, and you get amazing views over the valley as you climb.



The view from the top is gorgeous, as you can see above.

Here's me on the rather muddy second climb. Sophie got really freaked out by all the creepy-crawlies she encountered on the way up on this climb. I was more freaked out by the holds that come off in your hand. At least these days we know to avoid nettles. (Learned that the hard way - at Symond's Yat, actually, just after we arrived here).



We did one more climb after that one, and then repaired to a pub for a very very late lunch/early dinner.

We had perfect weather, which was sort of surprising as it poured with rain almost all the way there. We actually came quite close to turning around and going home; the only thing that stopped us was our innate stubbornness. Glad we were unreasonable!

The rest of the pictures are here.

Things I saw on Saturday

• A handcuffed kid being led out of the Lidl parking lot by four policemen. Which slightly dampened my new-found enthusiasm for the store. Lidl is a German chain, which I visited for the first time last week. No-frills (don't take credit cards, don't go in for customer service in any way, shape or form), but green (inadvertently, I think - I suspect that they avoid bags and excess packaging for cost rather than environmental reasons), yummy (German chocolate biscuits, mmmm) and - the big incentive for me - dirt cheap on a weird mix of things. Eastern European baked beans, for instance, and smoked salmon, and dishwasher tablets.
  
• A dog with furry floppy ears and no fur elsewhere on its horrible ratlike naked body except round its scrawny ankles. It was being taken for a walk at the field where Bobby flies his model plane, and its owners seemed to think it was adorable. It was not. It was repulsive.
  
• A small tree growing between the railway tracks outside Croydon. A tribute to tenacity under adverse conditions.
  
• Laurie Anderson, who I think is completely and utterly fabulous. We were in the cheap seats at the Barbican - seats which, while we had a good view of the stage, would not suit anyone with a fear of heights - and even from all the way up there she was amazing.
  

Voting - because I can!

It's local government election time here, so after work today I walked over to the polling station (the local infant school) to cast my vote. I arrived there with my voter registration card (which is just a piece of cardboard with my name and address on it), was given a rather scrappy looking ballot ballot and waved towards a booth by a custard-cream eating, bored-looking woman. After I'd marked my paper (with a last minute moment of dithering - Lib Dems or the Greens - tiny chance vs no chance?) I posted my completed ballot sheet into a disconcertingly unofficial third-world-ish looking box. The thing I found most disconcerting in the whole laid-back process was that nobody asked me for any proof of identity at any stage. Sadly, our borough is solidly conservative (41 out of 51 councillors are Tories) so my vote probably hasn't achieved much... Still, after our disenfranchised years in the US, it's good to be able to take at least some token part in the political process again.

Pixie dust my ass

I call bullshit.

An obvious solution...

Well, what would you do if you needed to (a) take some scraps out to the compost heap and (b) not get your socks wet?

Talk like me

Sophie is in the garden playing netball with one of her friends, and I'm struck by how her accent changes depending on who she's talking to. She's gone all london-y at the moment - no t's. She's always been quite easily influenced in that way - when she was five her best friend was Indian, and she developed a very strange South African/American/Indian twang. These days, I tend to forget that I have an accent myself - it sometimes surprises me when people ask where I'm from. And I still often use the wrong words - discovered last night, for instance, that people here don't refer to ATMs. I guess because I know what they mean when they refer to "cash points" I hadn't actually ever registered that they never refer to an "ATM". I think my vocabulary problems are compounded by having lived in the US before we moved here - South Africa, the USA and England often have different words for the same thing, and I sometimes get mixed up about which word goes with which country. For instance, it's a jersey in South Africa, a sweater in the US and a jumper here.
Tank tops over here don't look like this, they look like this. Then there's dhania, cilantro and coriander - all the same thing. And brinjals, eggplants and aubergines... I think I must gradually be acculturating to life here, though - these days I can say "jumper" with a straight face. For ages, it sounded so odd to me that I couldn't say it without making little quotey marks with my fingers.

Laurie Anderson!

I'm excited!

I just booked tickets to see Laurie Anderson at the Barbican next weekend!

(B)ready or not....

I had just put all the bread ingredients into the machine, ready for tomorrow's breakfast, when I decided that it would be nice to have cinammon bread instead of regular. So I reached for the jar of cinammon, opened it - and poured a stream of dish soap into my bread. I'd forgotten that I'd used an empty spice jar for the dishsoap last time we went camping...

On the plus side, my new trainers arrived today. I like dots at the moment.

Blah

Feeling blah. Work, home, college ... it all feels like a treadmill. I want to win the lottery and go somewhere entirely new. Not going to happen, since I never buy lottery tickets. And in any case, even if I were able to go somewhere new and wonderful, I'd have to take myself along on the trip, and that would ruin it.

Even more annoyed!

Some idiot put a big scrape on our car this morning! We'd left it in the parking lot at Morrisons, while we had a celebratory Friday morning pre-work (for Bobby) and pre-finally-do-some-lesson-preparation (for me) cup of coffee. I can't believe the scraper would be mean enough not to leave a note. Pig! That makes it a bloody expensive cup of coffee. Unless, of course, we just ignore the scrape the way we have with the one I put on the car a while ago. I can't help thinking that this wouldn't have happened if the Brits could get their heads around angled parking ... their stupid little straight-on parking spaces make these kind of scrapes far more common than they should be!