One word? When seven would do…

Had a really good morning at work; it was four of us there, Yvonne (Lancing Library’s boss), Frankie (my favourite workmate), Sarah (the stereotypical library worker) and me. Lots of laughs and lots of catching up as I’ve not seen any of them for a while as they all happened to be on annual leave for the week before I was off last week so plenty to talk about. Frankie – who is the world’s nosiest co-worker – had been checking out the most recent batch of books coming in for me about self-sufficiency, self building and eco houses and so we chatted about that for a while and I showed her the pictures of Simon Dale’s house and explained about having emailed to offer our building help next spring / summer at the latest project. She really surprised me by saying her and her husband are hankering after some lifestyle changes at the moment too and feeling life is too short to work to pay a mortgage and that be your biggest achievement. Her two older children (she has four) are by her first husband though so she needs to stay fairly local but they’ve looked into buying land and self building. She reassured me that I hadn’t got her totally wrong by saying the Simon Dale house looked nice but she thought it might be home to too many spiders though :lol:.

I spent some time on the enquiry desk and joined someone to the library, searched for films made based on Danielle Steel books and dealt with someone who’s new puppy had chewed up a crime novel. I also did an online survey of West Sussex County Council workers about our workplaces and how valued we feel. Ady called in at about 1130am as he’d gone out without a front door key and the morning went really quickly. At 1pm just as we were about to close we had a sudden flurry of people with lengthy reasons for visiting though including a man with twins who both had their legs crossed and desperate looks on their faces asking for the loo, a bloke with pages and pages of photocopying, someone bringing back a book and taking out another three and then the phone rang with someone wanting to renew books that were already 2 weeks overdue with loads of fines and then trying to work out whether it would be cheaper to renew a dvd and pay for another week’s hire charge or just pay the fines for a few more days. And all this happened after we’d closed all but one computer down so we were dealing with it all falling over each other and writing things down on scraps of paper :roll:.

I got home and Ady dashed back out again to do some more stores. I made some lunch for me, which the children pinched most of off me – they were eating weetabix with milk and sugar (sugar!!! I never add sugar to anything except baking, don’t want them to start that idea!) for lunch :roll:. Scarlett has gotten into playing with the pretend food this week so there were various plates of odd combinations of plastic foodstuff on plastic plates scattered round and the teapot filled with water which she was pouring into plastic teacups and bowls. Davies was playing with his Wallace and Gromit playhouses. I asked him if he wanted to paint his dalek shakermaker and he tried to mix up gold according to the key on the box (red and yellow? yep, it merely made orange) but failed so we took it outside and sprayed it with the gold paint I’d used on the papier mache one then he added black detail and scratches to make a damaged Dalek Thay.

I listed a couple more bits on ebay and persuaded the children to stick one of the growing pile of dvds from work on so I can try and take some back. They chose The Lasy Mimzy which seemed a bit slow to start but during the middle captured all of our attention and we ended up all cuddled up together watching it which was nice. They were both quite clingy this afternoon, I don’t think they’d behaved particularly well for Ady this morning as I’m sure their proclamations of how much they’d missed me were spurred on by something, which probably means he’d been cross with them. After late dinners the last two nights and with Badgers an even later finish I fed them an early tea (Tarly had soup, how Autumnal is that? :)) and Ady arrived home in time to stay with Tarly who I believe had a long solitary bath while I took Davies to Badgers.

In the car we had a really interesting conversation about water. Davies wanted to know how water from pipes underground travels up into our taps so we talked about pressure and energy transferance, with him showing a really good understanding of the concept. I explained that a general term for the sort of stuff we were talking about was science and a slightly more specific one was physics although there was more to it than simply energy and movement. Then we talked about inanimate and animate objects, with some examples and how energy can be transfered to inanimate objects from something else to make them move although they can’t move in their own right. Then we got onto tides on the sea, gravity, the moon and all sorts of other stuff – it was a really good conversation with him articulating stuff in a really good way, demonstrating he really understood stuff we’ve talked about before. We were slightly early for Badgers so sat chatting in the car watching one of the helpers in the window talking on her mobile phone. I asked Davies what her name was and he said he didn’t know. The other two are called Julie and Jan so I said she probably was called something beginning with J to keep the pattern and decided Jemima would suit her. Davies thought this was hilarious and dared me to call her Jemima, so when I dropped him off I did indeed call out ‘bye Davies, bye Jemima’ which left him giggling (and her no doubt wondering just what sort of a loon that Davies’ mummy is! :lol:). I sat in the car and read over half of a book on feminism which was interesting, if a bit essay like with lots of referencing other things. I remember my sociology essays being criticised for being too colloquial and not scientific enough so clearly that’s a bias I have towards a certain way and prefer to read as well as write like. I understand why that’s tricky in social sciences though, it’s just clearly not how I process information.

I collected Davies who still seemed in good spirits and we headed to Sainsburys where I needed a couple of things for dinner tonight – potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots and bacon, and some milk and catfood. I had a fiver in my pocket which I could do with keeping as we’re meeting Julie, Jack and Maisie at PYO tomorrow and had checked the bank account to see there was £11 in the account so thought I’d use my debit card to pay. Davies took a fancy to a skinny sweet potato (I’d selected a fat one) and managed to sneak it round to the milk before I realised he still had it, so we walked back round for him to put it back. There followed a comedy sketch with him being sneaky about keeping it and me saying ‘put the sweet potato down, move slowly away from the sweet potato, keep your hands where I can see them’ and him playing along while a couple of people smiled at us. Davies then managed to wedge it under his chin so he could indeed keep his hands up but when I said ‘now seriously, come on, put it down and lets get the rest of our shopping’ he started to cry 😯 real, drippy down his nose tears and great proper sobs. 🙁 No idea at all where that came from but he managed to pull himself together a couple of times and then dissolved again :roll:. I couldn’t quite believe that the child I was having such intelligent conversations with barely an hour beforehand was now crying over what even could correctly identify as an inanimate object but he was inconsolable. I managed to pack with one hand while holding a small child dressed as in his Badger uniform with a very peaked cap that kept poking me in the face while the checkout girl wanted to tell me all about her niece. Whilst in the queue I’d been explaining that I didn’t have money to buy the sweet potato and that crying and making a fuss is never going to work as a way to get things. I explained that I had a list of things I wanted but there was no point in standing in Sainsburys and crying over them as that behaviour wouldn’t get me them. Davies recovered enough to ask for my list and so I said it would start with a bigger house to which he said ‘well they don’t sell them in Sainsburys so there would be no point, not like they sell sweet potatoes (lower lip quiver)’ so I said ‘okay then, I wouldn’t stand in an estate agents where they do sell bigger houses and cry and expect them to say ‘Oh ok, you can have one, just stop crying’. The checkout girl had found this exchange amusing and wanted to share with me the funny things her niece says. And then my card got declined :(. So I left the shopping and said I’d pop to the cash point assuming it was some problem with the card as it’s a new replacement one. And I know I have nearly £11 in there as I checked earlier and the bill is only £7. So I take my still weeping child to the cashpoint and discover that although there is £11 in there £6 of it is an uncleared cheque. Argh.

At that point I decided to take Davies home where he could regale Ady with tales of woe regarding the sweet potato so I dropped him off home and unable to face the embarrasment of returning to Sainsburys (maybe I should have tried the crying thing and seen if they just gave me the shopping actually, she seemed to like the idea) I went to go to one of the two little supermarkets in Lancing. The railway crossing gates were down so I drove to the one this side of the gates, selected my vegetables and realised they had no bacon. So put the veg back and waited for the gates to open before going to the other supermarket, getting all I needed, managing to keep it under the amount of cleared funds in the bank so I could use the card, sat and waited for the gates to open again and finally got home. And you know what? I changed my mind altogether about the sweet potatoes and we didn’t have any, fat or thin.