This morning all felt rather frantic with Julie cutting it very fine to get to me and then Ady having kindly defrosted my windscreen but done it so early it had refrosted again all made me slightly late. Work seem very laid back about this though, I have explained I am reliant on people arriving at my house and therefore am often dashing in and as the library doesn’t actually open til 930 me arriving not on the dot of 9am doesn’t appear to be a problem. I always apologise and they always wave it away…
My every other Friday is my turn to do the banking with Carol, we have to empty all but the float out of the three tills, do some cashing up process on the system on each till back on the counter, then return in, count up all the money, reconcile it against what the system thinks we’ve taken and then one of us bags it up and fills in the paying in slip ready for the banking while the other enters it all on the computer and emails it across to the council head office. I really like cashing up actually, it was one of my favourite daily tasks at Clintons (mostly because it heralded the end of the day and I used to sit and drink tea and smoke while I did it so it was a nice sitting down activity too) but I do find the lack of cash slightly less satisfying, I like a big wodge of notes to count quickly. I’ve also had to get used to adding up columns of figures again, which clearly has done me no harm but made me realise how very dependant I’d grown on calculators for even the most simple of maths – I think I’d need to refresh my memory now to do long division or long multiplication on paper which is actually quite shocking really. We then take it in turns to go to the bank, so we both get to do it once every four weeks, which always seems to come around very quickly. It was my turn today and I was stood outside the Natwest waiting for it to open and it was bloody freezing!
I did some online training on Britannica online and various other online tools that the library subscribes too, and had fun with the interactive timeline and tried to find the answer to a question Davies had asked me a while ago about sea boundaries which I’d not been able to answer. Then I did a stint on the enquiry desk followed by lots of time spent on the counter this afternoon. As I left to go to lunch there was an army of pensioners swarming around with banners and a proper chant and several community police officers accompanying them. It turned out they were marching from my very local post office to the main Lancing post office in protest at plans to shut 3 of the post offices, including my local one down. There were about 200 of them and they all marched into the post office with loads of press there ready to capture it. Good for them! 🙂 One of them came in the library later, all flushed with his adventure and chatted a bit to me, apparently the post office workers had not gotten wind of the fact they were coming and looked all aghast when they arrived. Let’s hope people power has an impact eh?
I had a very frustrating lunch break spent mostly in Somerfield, I found various little advent and Christmas bits so bought them for the kids for us to do in the first week or so of December as we’re not doing the card exchange but I do like a bit of festive craft of some description, and things for dinner tonight. The queue was horrifically long so I stood in that for about 15 minutes and then the checkout girl kept stopping to chat to her friend who had come in to shop including disappearing off her till at one point to get a pen from somewhere so her mate could write her phone number down :shock:. On the way out of the shop one of the carrier bags broke so I replaced it but another broke again not far out of the shop so I really struggled back to the library carpark with five bags and crappy breaking handles to put everything in my car and then didn’t have time for a cup of tea before being due back from lunch.
This afternoon I had an interesting conversation with Yvonne, the direct boss at Lancing library about a child protection course she’d been on this morning and what level of state intervention should be required between parents and children etc. We also talked about smacking and general child abuse – interesting chat.
Tonight I did lots of cuddling up with the children until Ady got home, we watched some of Children in Need with me insisting that they got the idea of what it’s all acutally about, so there was lots of chat about parents who for whatever reason can’t look after their children properly with Scarlett suddenly saying in a wonderfilled voice ‘Mummy, we’re REALLY lucky aren’t we?’ to which the sad, but honest answer is probably yes really, and probably even more so than she realises yet… And then Dayve arrived. Really good to see him; he was my assistant when we worked in Manchester and is the only person I’ve stayed in touch with from back then. He and his partner had a civil ceremony last year which was great as he’d previously been in a fairly crap relationship which I think took some getting over but he now seems very happy and settled. He does a variety of work including lots of promotional work, which is why he is in Sussex this weekend, selling irons and kettles in a nearby shopping mall; working as an extra (he’s been in Doctor Who and a couple of months ago did three overnight stints of filming for the next Torchwood) and also performs his own music and is in the process of recording his second album. So he’s an interesting person to chat with.
I’ve very much enjoyed my wine this evening after my enforced teetoallness but am now feeling sneezy and snotty and shivery again so am off to bed to throw off my malady once more ready for the weekend.