Town Day.

It's getting a bit colder and there were lots of dark clouds in the sky today. No doubt forerunners to the yellow alert heavy rains due tonight. So keen was I this morning that I had loaded up the car with stuff for the dump even before I had my breakfast. As well as stuff for the dump I took in a couple of bags for the charity shop, the RSPCA one this time as included were some child's sized safety stirrups with leathers and a crop. 

As well as going to the dump I did a full town visit, parking at Lidl's and walking over the bridge into town. I picked up some more books at the library and had a general mosey around. I was looking for a diary to record my daily photos but couldn't find anything. No diaries at Tesco's apart from a mini one which I bought in desperation.

On my way home I thought I'd drop in at the Pound Shop and there I found a good selection of diaries for ..... you've guessed - £1. Normally I buy a long slim diary half the size but this one will do and I won't have to use tiny writing. The goblet I got from Tesco's. I got all excited when I found it because last year Peter and I bought 4 of these recycled glass goblets from the clearance shelf. They weren't cheap so we just bought 4 and very quickly one got broken. But there were no more in the shop. This is the first time I've seen them again and this one was the last one on the shelf. It was only as I looked at my photo that I noticed a chip on the foot. Blast! I dug the receipt out of the bin and it will have to go back. Maybe I can make enough fuss so that they order one in for me.

At home I got out the polyfiller and covered over the cracks in a spare room ceiling. I don't like the random textured effect but it does make repairs less noticeable. That room is now almost clear and in a couple of days I'll paint the ceiling to freshen it up. While I had the dust sheets out and a chair to stand on I also filled some cracks in the corridor ceiling. Every bit helps.

Windy.

It's been a wild day today. More windy than wet but at 9C still very mild for January. The rain got heavier later in the day, hopefully it will wash the mud off the the road. The turning at the top of the drive is still a sea of slippery mud.

My morning was spent doing housework and dismantling some stuff ready to take take the dump. I was back at school in the afternoon in the same reception class. It seemed a bit tame to be just teaching handwriting and reading after spending the last couple of days covering everything. However I have no desire to have responsibility for a class full-time. My short week suits me fine.

After school we had a staff meeting, feed-back from the latest conference our head teacher and another teacher went to in London. New ways of becoming more effective teachers. In between they went to the top of The Shard. 2 gin and tonics cost them £30!! 

Thinking of London I'm enjoying watching the new series of Call the Midwife. As well as being the sort of people centered story I generally enjoy it also brings back some memories. It is set in Poplar which was where we had our first flat only about 15 years later than when the series is set. I too rode a bicycle to get around the local area and while there was a lot of development during that time there was enough of old London left to make the setting very familiar. 

The front of The (Royal) London Hospital is sometimes shown. Apart from being close to Peter's home it is a place I became even more familiar with in the year before our marriage when I would visit Peter there following a motorbike accident. The nurses wore the same purple uniforms at that time though they have been modernised since.

Messy.

My first thought as I got up for another early start was " at least I don't have to do this tomorrow". It's been another grey day and as the storm that dropped all the snow on The States approaches us things have got considerably wetter. It was so wet that for once I didn't take my class out for either morning or afternoon play though luckily things had calmed down enough at lunchtime for the children to have a run around. Because of that and the fact that the children couldn't go and do any of the outside activities during the day things were fairly lively in class.

The photo above was taken yesterday. I posted it on Facebook to tease the class teacher who apart from being fantastically organised, which makes my life easy, also likes everything to be very tidy. I've known her since she started teaching and it's something we joke about together. She often asks me to do the more messy art activities as I'm quite happy with mess. Needless to say everything was tidied up by the end of the day. 

Today I replenished the bag of junk materials so the children could build more castles, part of their current topic. However there were a group of boys who had discovered the therapeutic effect of cutting everything and anything into tiny pieces. Not only that but I looked up from the table where I was working with some children on teen numbers to see a veritable drift of polystyrene bubbles rolling across the floor in the draft. The boys had found some packaging inside a cardboard box and were crumbling and cutting it down to  bubble size. Then there was some cotton wool which had been pulled into individual strands, lots of them. It was looking bad even to my eyes. I didn't stop to take a photo but abandoned my maths children to get a major tidy up started. No more junk modelling for the rest of the day. Having satsumas for fruit time added to the grubby state of the floor as though each child peeled their satsuma into a paper towel small pieces escaped on the way to the bin. 

The storm was in full force as the parents came to collect their children at the end of the day. I stayed behind to write up my assessment notes for the class teacher. A quick diversion to the garage to fill up with petrol as I don't trust the fuel gauge in my car and then home in the gathering gloom and rain.

Swede Day.

An early start for me this morning. I consider that if the sky is dark when I leave the house then it is still night time and all good people should be in bed at night. It was car lights on for the whole journey though it had lightened up by the time I got to school. I had a pleasant day in the Reception class. One little boy made my morning when his response to my reply to his question "Are you looking after us today" was to run over and give me a hug. My ego quickly deflated when the next thing he asked was "Where's Miss Walker?" (She's their class teacher.) We had a morning of maths when my groups of children played little games with teen number cards to practice recognition and ordering. Others are still working on recognising numbers up to 10. In order to prove to the powers that be photos have to be taken of each child doing their maths. It took most of my lunchtime to print the photos, trim and then stick them into books with appropriate comments as well as writing in the reading record books of the guided group I had in the morning but I made sure I had 15 mins to sit and relax. In the afternoon the children had to cut out pictures of 3-d shapes and use them to design a castle which they will later build from blocks, or at least attempt to build. There wasn't too much tidying up to do at the end of the day so I was off before 4.00 and down to the Co-Op to stock up on fresh fruit and veg.

The day, when I finally saw it, had started grey with some drizzle then for a brief but glorious spell in the afternoon we had blue skies and warm sunshine. 

As I drove home I was hoping for a good sunset. I just managed to catch the sun lighting up the edges of the clouds. I was under the clouds as I took these photos and it was bitterly cold.

Driving along the back roads I could see a scattering of fodder swedes along the edges of the road or crushed across the road. "Somebody is harvesting their swedes." was my brilliant deduction and when I turned into our drive I saw the operation in progress in the top field.

There is a proper road surface under all that slippery mud. 

 The automated swede picking machinery.

Warm.

Last night my sleep was disturbed by a nightmare where I was being chased by an evil monster along with scary noises. I woke in a fright to the sound of stentorian snoring sounding even worse than usual as Peter has a bit of a cold. My usual remedy of putting on headphones and listening to the radio did nothing to drown out the loud noises. As Peter already wakes 3 or 4 times in the night from the pain of his arthritis I could hardly poke him awake for something he can't help. After about half an hour I decided the only way I was going to get any sleep was to move rooms. We have plenty of spare beds but I ended up under a duvet on the sofa as that way I could listen to the World Service radio via the tv. I slept soundly until 7.00 when I crept back into bed for a few more hours sleep.

The mild weather continues with it being around 10C all day. I didn't hear the frogs croaking in the pond but when I got close I could see a lot of suspicious waving of the plant stems emerging from the water.

I've got a couple of full days working this week so I decided not to risk overdoing things outside. Instead I got on with the job of sorting 'stuff'. There was a fair amount of moving things from one place to another but some things ended up in the 'give away' pile or the rubbish bag. While I know I'm hanging on to some things 'just in case' I want to reduce the amount of possessions we'll have to pack up when we do move. 

Serendipity ?

Too many aching muscles last night to carry on with weeding in the hens' run today much as I want to get on with that job. I wasn't going to do any outside work but I just couldn't let a dry day go to waste. I compromised by weeding the rocky bank. Although it is a bit of a scramble at least there isn't so much bending. The mild winter has meant that the grass in particular has kept on growing so there was plenty needing to be pulled and dug out. The birds were singing, the wind whistling in the trees and all was well until I heard the dreaded baying of the hunt hounds and the sound of the huntsman's horn. They were up on the hill and then spent at least half an hour on the gorse covered side of the valley no doubt hoping to 'accidentally' come across the scent of a fox rather than the drag hunt trail. The sound of the hunt is one thing I shall not miss when we move away from here.

I had done a fair amount of weeding so I came indoors. I had missed the first episode of the new series of Call the Midwife so I decided to watch it on the BBC i-player and treat myself to one of yesterday's chocolate cookies (very nice it was too) and a small chocolate Swiss roll. (Saturday is treat day on this diet.) Speedy was purring away on my lap when suddenly he leaned forward and grabbed half the Swiss roll which was on a plate in front of me. Needless to say he got a shout and a smack as I prised the cake out of his greedy mouth. Then he got thrown outside and the cake went into the bin.

Yesterday's efforts at filling the holes in the plasterboard under the stairs were in vain. The stairs are very old, possibly several hundred years so there is movement when you tread on them and this caused all the filler to drop out. I've tried again today this time putting superglue in the holes before filling them. Maybe that will work.
Now for the strange co-incidence. We always listen to Radio 4 in our bedroom though Peter falls asleep within minutes usually when he is reading. Last night it got to 11.00 and the announcer said that next would be Great Lives. That's a biography style programme that I generally find boring. So while the radio was still running I turned on my MP3 player to listen to some music and read. When I first got my MP3 player Vytas very kindly put on a load of tracks from his MP3 player. Most of it was older stuff that I knew;Jethro Tull, Dire Straits etc. but there were also some that I had never heard of. Not too surprising as I don't have a radio in my car and hear very little modern music. Currently I've been enjoying the album Grace by Jeff Buckley and that's what I went to last night. I've been meaning to ask the boys about Jeff Buckley or look him up on line as I can see that some of the songs are covers but I wanted to know a bit more. Imagine my surprise when I heard, over the music that the subject of the Great Lives programme was Jeff Buckley. I hadn't missed much and it was interesting though sad to hear about his life and short career.

Sunshine and Wind.

The sun made a welcome reappearance today. This morning the outdoor thermometer was reading 8C and it stayed there for the rest of the day.

As soon as I could I took myself outside for more grubbing about in the wet clay soil. I really enjoy being outside and I worked for as long as I thought sensible. The new veg plot will have a path down the middle so that I can use the whole length of the washing lines.

We had an official letter to -The Occupier, Dingles which could mean either us or our neighbours as both properties are called Dingles. When we opened it we found a TV licence final demand which wasn't us as we pay by direct debit. I took it next door but they don't have a TV or even watch TV on a computer. They get those letters because the authorities can't believe that there are people who don't watch TV.

Much as I would have liked to keep on gardening I got on with sorting stuff in one of the spare rooms. I dismantled the aluminium pole wardrobe as it has done its job. Instead I'm airing clothes I want to keep and storing them in big plastic lidded boxes.  My final job of the day was to put offcuts of the new carpet under my pc chair and the armchair Peter sits in to protect the new carpet.

The warm days have fooled the frogs into thinking spring is here. When I walked over to the little pond there was a flurry of legs as most of the frogs tried to hide.