I worked this morning. It was really busy as being closed for Monday seems to make everything back up and remain chaotic through the week. I guess in terms of deliveries and reservations and things there probably is 6 days work to get through in 5 on a bank holiday week there. It was my all day to work day but thanks to getting pro rata bank holiday time off I only had to work til 130pm rather than 5pm.
Mum was here looking after Davies and Scarlett and I’d already said we’d do something with her in the afternoon so I suggested we go and visit my Granny (Mum’s mum) who we’re long overdue seeing and we went round there for a couple of hours.
She was really pleased to see us and we had the added bonus of my Uncle Tony being there too. Granny’s bungalow is built in what used to be grounds of Tony’s house although it’s all been changed on land registry etc and they have their own seperate gardens now. He lives for 6 months of the year in Thailand where he has a home and girlfriend but no visa for permanent residency and then back here for the other 6 months before going back to Thailand again. He’s been doing it for years having had a really shitty few years when my Aunt Elaine who he’d been with for years and years since they were teens died aged 40 of breast cancer. My cousin Dan, who is a year younger than me was only about 14 and Tony married again really quickly to a woman and they had a son, Jack. The marriage didn’t last and she now lives in Australia with a new husband (and Jack) while Dan lives in Tony’s house here and Tony comes back to when he is in the UK.
Tony and Elaine were real hippies and spent lots of time travelling. I used to really envy Dan his upbringing when we were kids and he was allowed to call his parents by their first names rather than Mum and Dad, get away with all sorts of high jinks and just have a much more relaxed upbringing. Elaine was lovely and always used to buy me the *best* presents for Christmas and birthday, which would usually be messy or inappropriate (eg plaster of paris model kits or make up) and end up being confiscated by my Mum fairly quickly 😆 I wish I’d known Elaine better really and often think we’d have quite a bit in common now and she would definitely have fully approved of Home Ed.
I think Tony has only seen Davies once when we was just about crawling and never met Scarlett so it must have been odd to be presented with two full size proper children for him :). He is a lot like Frazer (which given Frazer is a lot like Mum I suppose is no surprise) and Davies and Scarlett were instantly comfortable with him, asked to see his house and garden and got taken off next door for a look round. They stayed with him for ages helping him with some gardening he was doing and only came back to ask if they could go to the tip with him, a request I had to refuse for car seat reasons.
Granny presented the kids with their easter eggs (we’d not seen her over Easter due to us all being so ill) and there was a packet of mini eggs in there that she foolishly suggested she would have hidden round the garden if she’d known we were coming so they hid their eyes and told her to do it then! 😆 She did and they enjoyed finding them.
It was time to leave and we have very little food as the main shop is coming tomorrow and it was getting late so I stopped at the chip shop for the kids to get fish and chips for tea. I sent them in with the money but they came back five minutes later to say they were being ignored in the queue which was a shame 🙁 I suspect they probably didn’t stand very still in the queue and weren’t very assertive when it came to giving their order. So I went in with them and got it.
When we got home Ady was already here, Mum (who had left her car here) said goodbye and left and the kids cleaned up the whole load of fish and chips :).
Davies tells me he learnt some football tricks from Tony today, Scarlett learnt she has a Great Uncle Tony and he is cool, Ady learnt that 8 fruit trees make an orchard, I learnt from looking at some photos of myself that I need to get some better fitting bras and that you should soak runner beans before you plant them.
Scarlett went to bed rather than listen to stories (I refused to let her carry on playing with toys sitting on the floor while I read) although she stayed quiet enough in her room to hear it anyway.
We have my old laptop out at the moment as we’re using it to download music from a site Ady got a free subscription to with his new phone and it has a big memory but the screensaver is set to randomly pick photos so it’s like a digital photoframe and I’ve spent the last couple of nights getting really distracted by all these old pictures from my 30th birthday onwards. Loads of Manchester, various camps including the 2 Melroses we went to, the first 2 Kessinglands and the Hesfes we atteneded, Hunstanton and the Halloween Helmsley, our Halloween party, trips to Ireland, Centerparcs and other weekends away aswell as just loads of pictures of Davies and Scarlett looking so small and cute :).
What’s the music website?
I like the ‘things you’ve learnt today’ section. 🙂
It’s a nokia thing Chris, http://www.comeswithmusic.com/uk/#/details/ and Ady gets 12 months. It’s great but we’ve been trying to get some of the tracks onto cds or Ady’s mp3 player and can’t. I can, bizarrely manage to get them onto my cheap tenner from Tesco mp3 player though.
Jan – yes, so do we 🙂
Wondered if it was. The mp3s have DRM and should in theory only be playable on the phone and ONE PC – the one set up with the software. You can’t burn them either. Really suprised you got them to work on any thing else. I have been tempted by it – 6 million tracks is a lot – and am looking at ways of removing the drm so they are able to be used flexibily. Which phone did he get?
It’s the N95 8gb.
No idea how come it goes on my MP3 player and I can’t get it off that and onto my laptop but if you find a cunning way of dealing with it do let us know :).
Am impressed with it just for having it on phone and that pc really, the only song it failed to find for me was a KLF one I wanted.
It’s a pretty good deal as you get to keep the music after the subscription ends, albeit tied to those devices. So far the only solutions I have found cost money – not into that 🙂