Yesterday morning I worked. It was briefly exciting when all the computers crashed for the whole of West Sussex libraries and we had to write everything down. We then went into a ‘fallback’ state where the computers could cope with basic transactions and it all came back on again after about half an hour so we then had to data input everything we’d written down earlier. I quite like a good crisis – one of my happiest B&Q moments was an evening shift one winter when we had a power cut in the whole of Worthing. The store was thrown into darkness except for dim emergency lighting and we brought all the torches and batteries to the front of the store as loads of people were arriving to buy them. We have a fairly new Saturday Assistant, James who is about 16 and very funny so he and I were discussing Air Raid Shelter tactics to see us through the worst and trying to remember the words to ‘white cliffs of dover’ for a singalong if things got really tough. He and I were both a bit disappointed when everything came back online again.
I had a brief meeting with the Childrens’ Librarian for the area as she was the senior in charge for the day. I had pitched a few ideas to her recently for some events and activities which had been really well recieved by my two immediate bosses and her but when she took them further they were not turned down outright but also not taken up with the enthusiasm I’d hoped for. If I’m honest I do feel slightly disillusioned by it, not because one of my ideas has been met with something other than delight but because a few other people I had spoken to had all thought it would be great and I think it would have improved our library’s offering to children in the 5-10 age bracket who are a section I feel are very ill-provided for in the local libraries. I suspect it will be discussed again though and maybe I should try developing my ideas further without the contraints of doing them as a library worker?
Dad arrived at our house shortly after I did so stayed for lunch. In the morning Ady and the children had done some gardening and sorted out the chickens area. They had been in a fenced off section of the garden with two seperate houses (they sleep three in one and three in another of their own free will) and the original ark that Dad and I built last summer. We don’t actually need the ark anymore as they free range all the time so it was just taking up space, so they’d taken that down, moved the houses against the wall and made a huge area of woodchipped ground for them to scratch around in. Very happy bantams :). Whilst inspecting it I caught and held the cockerel for a while. It’s the first time I’ve help him as when he was a chick he was such a wuss and stayed beside his ‘mother’ all the time. He is now a fine looking cockerel with quite a muted crow and a fancy tail so it’s quite a nice contrast to have him nervous of us and able to be handled after Cocky the killer cockerel from before 😆 .
Dad left and we headed up to the allotment where I finished digging over the whole plot, Ady did some planting of stuff and the children spent some time roaming in the field next door before we got all nervous about not being able to see them and made them come back in the allotments with us again. I’ll keep allotment talk specifically over in the correct place though :). We left there about 5pm after a whole 3 hours up there by which point I was incredibly stiff and achey.
Home for a bath for the children followed by a long soak for me while Ady fed them and they all watched You’ve Been Framed together. I then watched X Factor with occasional watching from the children while Ady dashed out to Sainsburys with our remaining few pounds to get Sunday dinner for today. I had lots of wine, spent the whole time watching X Factor exchanging texts with a similarly X Factor-minded mate and was too pissed to care about blogging so went to bed!
Today I slept in very late but had had a bad nights sleep with Candle prowling about on the pillows from about 5am til about 8am when Ady got up. Dad has lent us the money to be paid back in installments for Tarly’s birthday present but refused to put his credit card number on the booking form and gave me cash instead. As I was keen to get the booking form in and get the date booked we took the form and cash over to Drusillas today. On the way back we drove up Bo Peep Lane which is a track road up to the top of the downs where paragliders jump from. The children and I had been up there before on the way back from Drusillas and it is one of my favourite views in Sussex so as it was a gorgeous sunny day we took Ady up to show him too. It is right on the top of the hill and you have panoramic sea views to the south and views of towns, villages and downs to the north – truly gorgeous. It is perpetually windy as a result and as it has that ‘standing on the edge of the world’ feeling about it looking down on everything it is quite thrilling to feel you could be blown over the edge at any minute. When we got back in the car we were all breathless just from standing outside – one of those real ‘makes you feel ALIVE’ experiences.
We came home to collect some food for the children and some water for all of us and to get changed into old jeans and headed back to the allotment. This time Ady did the hard work and dug out the hole for our wildlife pond. I did some digging back over a patch that weeds had started to come back on and managed to harvest another 20 or so potatoes which suggests it really hadn’t been dug over properly. We walked all around the whole of the allotments nicking ideas and chatting about our plans for our plot which means we now have a sketch of what we’re planning and a list of things we need to research the sowing times etc for.
Once home I collapsed infront of my laptop and spent an hour or so entering some competitions which I’ve not done for a while. Ady cleaned out his car and cooked dinner and Davies and Scarlett disappeared off to play in Davies’ bedroom. As an aside Davies’ reading seems to be coming along, he is doing lots of reading on Viva Pinata, read all the text on the front of his early advent calendar the other day (milk chocolate, 25 festive shapes – he then had to ask what festive meant!) and does lots of reading the tv guide on the sky pages. Scarlett does lots of apparently guessing words but is almost always right which makes me wonder if she is not actually guessing at all and can read whole words rather than having done the sounding it out thing. I have no way of knowing without ‘testing’ her and actually it doesn’t remotely matter. They are both really enjoying audio books at the moment and I am trying to get as many of them as possible with accompanying books for them to follow the text with.
We all had dinner and watched Zoo Babies, Pet Rescue and other such animal-y programmes on obscure tv channels while we ate – Scarlett just adores those shows. I then got caught up in another obscure show called ‘Unbreakables‘ while Ady tasked the children with changing the bedding on our bed. They managed it with much hilarity and then got in it together and watched half an hour of Tom and Jerry cartoons on our telly before retiring to their own beds. Scarlett fell asleep about 9pm, Davies has just reappeared downstairs to inform me that he has been wobbling his latest wobbly tooth for ages and it is nearly ready to come out (it is). 😆
What a lovely weekend! x
Excellent photo.