Just back from a good hour and half spent at The Shack, with the absolutely lovely estate agent who is actually HELPFUL - shock horror. She's sure to get the sack soon. I was running around with a tape measure trying to get the layout sorted - very tricky with half-levels and so on, steps and spaces in between... and she just kindly took over, sketched the thing out, told me where to measure and has taken it off to draw it up nicely and more or less to scale! Will get back to me in the next couple of days! Did you ever hear the like. All for free! I wonder how long that house has been on the market.... I found of course that Ian had remembered it much more accurately than I had - almost perfectly, in fact.... the swine. He's so damn... RIGHT the whole time.
Many thanks for comments, Pie, always lovely to hear from you - chortled heartily at Nea's eating fermented squid, she and the Non are of a like mind - not much cake for the Non either but she does like sucking on a lime! Meat and chunky veg. Life could be a lot worse, I guess. Luckily she is OK with coriander, but hot stuff we're having to ease into veeery slowly. You've never seen such mild 'curries' as the ones I'm doing at the moment, really don't deserve the name of curry at all but at least it gets her familiarised with the general direction of the taste and aromas. Got to start somewhere, I guess. Maths and turning brain off.... absolutely. Likewise the apparent difficulty of understanding the concept 'more' or 'less'. She's fine with 5+4 but 1+2? No way. Well it's getting there but incredibly slowly. Never mind, they're still young. As for brain switched off, she admits to it entirely freely, and even goes so far as to cover her ears for protection against my reaching over and 'switching it on' with the imaginary switch just outside them. On the other hand once she 'turns it on' herself you're pretty sure of a good smooth run at least for a while. For the maths ones, I've got her a whole load of REALLY simple ones, with lots of colouring in and pictures and so on, at least it lowers the guard they set up against 'maths' being 'difficult' and instead she just has a bit of a laugh counting a little and drawing pictures. I seem to end up with a greater net result in the end.
Deary me, boring kid's waffle again. But there was one thing you didn't mention - what about this low-carb stall?? I'm all agog. What's the deal? What's the idea? More beans to be spilled, please! (do beans count as carb or protein? Or just pure wind?)
Also glad to hear that the Venice lectures have taken a turn for the racier - never a dull moment in these academic circles, obviously. Hope you have a good trip to the UK tomorrow, W&W!
Non seemed to have a pretty good day at school yesterday, and came back much more composed-looking. She'd eaten all of her sandwich, she seems to also have visited the loo at some point as she wasn't overflowing when she came home. However, this morning was perhaps not so smooth - when we left stuff in the classroom before going to play there were some kids there, who told me all sorts of interesting things. Like, that it was her turn to do 'news' yesterday (like show and tell) but she hadn't had anything to talk about. How the hell was I supposed to know that she was meant to bring something? I guess a normal child might have gone home and replayed the information from school to their parents, but of course we don't have any of that. Well, we did have some sort of information from the Non (too late, of course, on Tuesday evening) - she was saying something about News and what we gathered was that it might possibly be her News day the next day (i.e. today), so she chose Nora the Wombat and took her in today. Whether she will have done any showing on the day that wasn't hers I don't know. Anyway, from now on, her showing day is on Tuesday so we'll be prepared.
I also found out that it's common practice to bring in a water bottle and put it on the table - so while it was still playtime I left her there in the playground and ran back home to get her water bottle, fill it, name it, and bring it to the table. It took less than ten minutes to do this and I was back at the playground to make sure that she went to the right place, and sure enough couldn't find her at first, then caught her wandering off in the wrong direction. How anyone can manage to ignore the hordes of kids all going in one direction and amble down a side-passage I will never understand. Anyway, she was more than a little distracted while lining up and kept standing up inappropriately, what she was trying to achieve I don't know. Hope she settled down afterwards. It wasn't auspicious. As I thought, I reckon I'll be there in the mornings for quite a while.
Local Kookaburras are just amazing, SO loud, they sound absolutely demented sitting there hooting and chortling away. Slightly warmer again today, up to 22. Oh, talking of which, lovely pics of spring enjoyment on the My Family site, Pie! Just lovely. Has Leo just had a growth spurt again? Looks very Loooong legged.
It's half past twelve already. I'll of to do some paperwork, time does fly so it's quite distressing. Lots of love to all,
V xxxx
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We have been looking again at the photos of the Shack, and as there are only four of them we struggle to get a clear picture. Could you provide some rough sizes please? Photo 1 shows the long living room which appears to be about 35 feet/11metres in length, and about 12 feet in width. Is this guess vaguely right, and how deep is the house from front to back, as we can’t work that out from the photos. The camera used makes everything at the edge of the photo, for example the angles of table on the left, appear to have strange shapes. Similarly in picture 2 is the kitchen about 12 foot long by 10 foot deep? In photo 3 the bar/barbie area is made of brick: is this true of the rest of the house?
ReplyDeleteVery glad to hear that the Littles had a better day on the eating/ comfort zone front: I think it takes some time for kids of her age to find their way around - I know very similar things happened to me when I started school, but later in life managed to catch planes, hire cars and find the right place, even in the depths of Germany where I spoke no German apart from "Ein Bier", so don't despair. I'm sure she will get the hang of school soon. So if she took Nora to school today, what will she talk about next Tuesday?
It has started raining here and is forecast to continue to do so tomorrow, so walking across the airport tarmac to the plane at 3pm should be fun, although more like drizzle is forecast for that time. The Camel will come to collect us at Stansted which is great.
Lots of love to you all,
Whale