I worked yesterday morning. The Big Boss came in to see me as a result of my rant at my appraisal earlier in the week. I feel most reassured there is now a proper plan in place to deal with Nightmare Colleague and better about having ranted as I did feel very guilty about performing such a thorough character assasignation on someone I used to quite like and have some affection for before the impact of her inability to do the job rippled through the workplaces upsetting the dynamic between the team, increasing our workload in both picking up the slack of her not pulling her weight and in ironing out the mistakes she makes and really compromising the service we are offering borrowers. Ooh that was a long sentence!
The rest of the morning went fairly quickly. I spent tea break talking to the two Saturday Assistants about Home Ed and why we shouldn’t be registered, monitored or tested. Hard to hear such views out of the mouths of two 16 year olds and I may have been fairly passionate in my arguing as J came up to me later and asked ‘you do still like me don’t you?’ 😆 And this is the lad who wants to go into politics – he needs to develop a thicker skin ;).
I then spent an hour on the desk where among other things I helped someone with some local history, ordered in some books for various people and then spent some time being truly silly with colleagues. J had discovered an old list in her tray of dares to do at work which ranged from the silly to the utterly mad. They’d had a period about 8 years ago of doing them and so we’ve decided to restart. This meant yesterday morning we covered skipping instead of walking, only going to the photocopier walking sideways, putting a colleagues chair in the lift when they weren’t looking, calling each other Bob and Neil, making lots of silly internal phonecalls and other such immature behaviour – very amusing 🙂 😆
I spent the last hour shelving and more than made up for being giddy the previous hour by being incredibly efficient.
Davies had YACs which was at Michelham Priory this month. The site has links with Sussex Archaeology and hosted a mosaics session. They learnt all about mosaics, which period they were from, where they were used, looked at a variety of designs and then made their own on wooden boards with polyfilla and various shaped pieces of tile and ceramics. Davies chose to do a pattern rather than a picture. He said he enjoyed it, his pattern is pretty, I’ll take a photo when it’s dried.
Ady and Scarlett walked around the site and enjoyed looking at the sculptures in the garden.
They came to collect me from work having dropped me off on their way and the kids came in with Scarlett choosing yet another pile of Lucy Daniels
We came home for lunch and all played the Creationary Lego game for a while. It’s very good, Davies says thanks again Ali :). Eventually it started to get raucous so Ady went off for a bath, the kids went to watch Star Wars and I went to rummage through my wardrobe to find something to wear that evening.
We were off out with Ady’s ex-boss, recently made redundant. He lives in Kent, about a 90 minute drive from us and we were hoping that the fact he’d invited us out, was asking us to travel to him and had suggested the venue meant he would also be paying, but had a precious £100 in our pockets just in case. Another of Ady’s colleagues was supposed to be coming along too but cancelled late in the day due to coming down with flu :(.
I really struggled to find something to wear as my wardrobe is very much clothes I wear for work and clothes I wear the rest of the time with my favourite 3 ‘business’ suits, a funeral suit, a couple of fancy dresses and two dressy suits. I tried on the dressy suits but although they fit fine I really didn’t feel like me in them and suspected I would be slightly wrongfooted by being in a fancy eaterie, with people I don’t really know and would rather feel confident and comfortable in my clothing. So I wore a dress over trouses with lots of cleavage and chunky jewellry and then added high heels and plenty of make up to nod to the poshness of the event.
My parents were here minding the children which they of course did with their usual good grace, willingness and delight in being able to help out and spend time with their grandchildren…
We let Scarlett sleep in Davies’ room although that turned out to annoy my parents for some reason and indeed did mean that Scarlett had not long been asleep and Davies was still awake when we arrived home just before 1am :(.
So how was the evening? Well as already BK’d we went to The Swan in WestMallin. Lovely surroundings, excellent service and the food was very nice indeed. It certainly wasn’t cheap but it was very busy and no signs of a recession to be seen anywhere! Ady had a mackerel, shallot and beetroot salad followed by Sussex belly pork with butternut squash. I had chicken liver parfait with greengage chutney followed by venison and parsnip puree. We had sides of triple cooked chips, bobby beans and curly kale. All washed down with several bottles of Very Good Wine. It was delicious but a proper Grown Up meal, in proper Grown Up company. Ady and I had a dessert for two to share of School Dinners which was tiny portions of beautifully presented Arctic Roll, Sticky Toffee Pudding and Jam Roly Poly along with a vanilla cream custard and a toffee cream icecream. The pudding was my least favourite bit as I felt it was all a bit novelty rather than being about flavours although Anne had a rather amazing dessert of peanut butter and dark chocolate ice cream with black cherry sorbet which was delicious so I suspect we just chose wrongly.
We finished with fancy tea or coffee or large glasses of liqueurs all round by which point I’d done a quick tally of costs and realised our £100 wasn’t going to cover half by any means. Fortunately Tim was quite indignant at the offer of anything so we were able to leave happy to have had a very nice meal, experienced easily the most expensive dining we’re likely to try and not had to actually blow the same amount of money we agonised over spending on the Centerparcs holiday in January!
We dropped them home and were back ourselves before 1am.
Today has been accordingly lazy. Noone was up much before 930am (I am told, I was not the first to rise ;)), the kids were not dressed until after midday and it’s felt like a Proper Sunday. The kids were struggling a bit with each other so I took Davies with me to Sainsburys to get various bits for dinner tonight, picnic tomorrrow and general cupboard topping up. Scarlett and Ady made an apple crumble.
Ady cooked a lovely roast dinner, Davies played with the lego and Scarlett did some fab watercolour pencil drawings of various animals she is looking forward to seeing tomorrow at Longleat. We watched while eating, and afterwards. It’s so not my sort of film normally and I didn’t pay much attention to the first half an hour or so really but did get sucked in and even Scarlett who originally deemed it too scary and wandered off half way though came back to it and we all watched the last half an hour fairly intently. Scarlett and I really liked Loveday’s hair (I suspect we’re both a bit shallow ;)) with all it’s plaits and flowers and stuff.
After that we watched the first hour or so of which we found earlier while clearing off some old stuff from the hard drive dvd player machine. Not at all sure when we recorded it but it was really interesting. We’re up to 100 years after people but have stopped it to watch the rest another time as it was getting late and it was a longer programme than we’d realised.
We started and read the first five or so chapters for bedtime and then Davies and Scarlett went off to bed. I was hoping a very late night last night and the prospect of a very early morning tomorrow with a long day ahead would encourage them to sleep but it was still long after 9pm before either of them finally fell asleep. I guess that does count as early round here 😉 .
No one has really been on top form with tiredness induced grumpiness and intolerance of each other and I always rather struggle with weekend days being spent at home rather than out and about Doing Stuff but it was a nice relaxing day, plenty of which I spent with one or both children snuggled up on my lap.