the adlards

Not only do we get nutso clothes from our own grannies, we get them “thrown in” from other people’s too. That’s right, we started the day at 8am at a car boot sale (I’m pretty sure my day started substantially later, but Michelle assures me I was there). The dress above was the bonus in two sacks of winter clothes in Josie and Sophie sizes. Jo found it at the bottom of the bag Michelle had hidden it in. “Oh! Lovely!“: It is, she proclaims (as if it isn’t obvious to all) a dancing dress. She’d unfortunately seen a group of young flamenco dancers earlier with an instructor clapping the beat, so insisted that one of us clapped to keep her dancing. I’d always wished she’d come with a remote, now I’m not so sure.

That was the last car boot sale of the season, it’s officially Autumn.

The Three are all poorly. Sophie has her first proper cold and spent much of the day quietly gazing into the middle-distance through red slit-eyes. She’s a mean bargaining partner at a car boot sale. She spent the rest of the day yelling, throwing up and certainly not sleeping. Michelle’s feverish, in pain and on antibiotics. Josie’s teething, but otherwise in fine form. I have, suitably fortified with G&Ts, made it through the weekend in fine health. Now I just need to make sure that if I get whatever they’ve had I get over it before next weekend. I did manage a little Autumnal gardening today amidst the other bits. There was a pile of shrubs displaced by the deck-man which needed planting out, and a fair bit of garden to clear to make space for them.

Josie’s taken a liking to pots of pureed fruit, which we let her have occasionally as treats. It would appear that her gut’s not used to such fine nutritional value, but perhaps I’ll make that the subject of another post.

Updates in the gallery.

Michelle’s poorly, so the girls and I found ourselves in the park early-ish on an absolutely still Autumn morning. It was quite beautiful with a light mist lifting by the time we got there. Michelle got some sleep, the girls were well behaved (or slept). I’ve enjoyed being able to spend the day with the girls.

There’s a bit of a rest-of-the-family reunion going on back in ZA – sounds like being a good ten days …

I realised again today that not only do I have very poor posture (I blame a lifetime of IT) but I posture very poorly (I blame myself).

All advice in either regard gratefully accepted.

Turns out it was an eclipse of the sun. Had I been better informed I might have been able, like the characters in boyhood stories, to use it to secure my release from a particularly dastardly boring-to-death this morning.

Alas, I was not thus informed and so suffered the torment oblivious.

Still, I’m on my way home to the Three now. Pretty sure this is dusk, not another eclipse. I suppose I could leap up and try to convince everyone in the carriage that the world’s ending and see if any of then will throw money at me. Probably wouldn’t throw anything at all. They’d all stare fixedly out of the windows. Only in England …
oops. there’s my station.

I was sitting on the deck this evening, enjoying a rather good merlot with bicuits, when the sitting room door opened and out came Josie. Her eyes lit up predictably when she saw the biscuits; she clambered up onto a chair beside me and helped herself. Then she turned and saw the sunset:
Wow! Dad! What’s that!
Oh my goodness Josie. What is that?
That’s horizon.
(Dad takes a second to recover from hearing yet another word he knows he’s never used with her)
Yes, that is the horizon. Do you know what it’s called when it looks like that?
No. What, dad?
That’s a sunset Jo-Jo.
Oh. Yellow.
That’s right. What other colours can you see?
Yellow and black.
Black?
Yes. (pointing at trees)
That’s right, the trees look black. What colour’s the sky love?
Orange and blue, dad.

It’s always important in these conversations to ensure you both have your white balance correct.

It was a lovely evening after a somewhat fraught few days. You might have wondered why I haven’t blogged for a couple of days (or you might not). The fact is I needed time to tone down my initial passionately vitriolic response to our visit to the Fiat dealership on Friday.

On Friday we took the Fiat in for its first service. We booked it in at 10.30 for a “just less than 2 hour” service. We thought we’d do it on a day I was on holiday and drive the car down for the service then get the kids on a bus (which Josie loves) for a couple of hours shopping. We were still waiting for the car at 4.15 with a service manager who would have been fired from the sales team at any self-respecting cinema multiplex. He never once apologised; the closest he got was to tell us that he knew it hadn’t worked out well this time, but if we insisted on talking to him personally next time it would all be OK. You might imagine how well that line of reasoning worked. I let Michelle loose on him. He retired, quivering, to his desk and we walked down the road to a dodgy park with the smell of weed wafting over it from the nearby canal to sit on the swings in the rain and steam about how absolutely rubbish the service management at Fiat is.

What was really frustrating was that the work itself was OK, it was just managed absolutely pathetically. That man shouldn’t have had authority over anything more than a single-celled organism. Leave him at home to play with his sea monkeys. That’s probably what “his” mechanics thought too; maybe that was the problem.

The weekend generally got better from there. We’ve finished the floor at last, but are both pretty shattered. Next chance to catch up is Christmas … like that’s going to happen.

Today’s highlight was having a quiet coffee together while the girls put Phil and Ted’s Most Excellent through it’s sleeper paces. Autumn’s here and buggy snuggles are mandatory. Well, no, not in Starbucks but we weren’t going to move them …

was on the train with me going to work yesterday. I wish Josie had been with me, she would have been beside herself. I tried to get a picture, but this is the best I could do. She’s a very fast little elephant.

I’m in pain. I’ve laid two thirds of the floor and filled the whole dastardly crack. “Filled” sounds so reasonable and straightforward. I have, in fact, beaten it into gaping submission with a cold chisel and hammer, scoured it out with a wire brush, sprinkled it lovingly with water to improve the bond, then filled it with a mortar mix and tried to make it level. All whilst crouching down in a manner clearly never anticipated by the designer of my jeans …

So why is it that I took My Good Wife’s advice and got someone in to do the deck, but insisted on doing the floor myself? It’s possible I never needed to know there was a crack under my living room floor. And of course, I could have done something else with two days of holiday …

Next time I do this remind me not to. Oh yes, there will be a next time.

We met Mark, Sarah and Elspeth for brunch yesterday at the Waterend Barn on their way through to Sussex. It was fun to see them and the brunch was good. Josie obviously heard us planning to give her some of mine rather than ordering food for her, because no sooner had mine arrived than she dashed around the table and puked orange juice over the beans and toast. Very effective, as it turned out. She got the rest of it while I got a new one.

We came home to find the deck-man finishing his final tidy up before putting the last fence panel in (the only way to access our garden is through the house or across the neighbour’s garden). She’d very kindly let us cross her garden. I thought it would be wise to start work on the living room floor while he was still around just in case I needed some advice. I tore up half the carpet to find a crack of frightening proportions running the length of the room. If you’d read “The Mystery of the Disappearing Floor” when you were an impressionable kid you would have been scared too. I sought advice (material not psychological) and instead of merrily laying tiles throughout, have widened the crack – all the time fearing a plunge into the garage below, brushed it out and filled it with mortar. Michelle and I laid the first fifty tiles last night, and have made quite a bit of progress on the rest so far today. All the time avoiding the crack, which needs to dry out … I believe most crack trouble has to do with damp.

Some picks of brunch and work in progress in the gallery.