What now?

Inspired by several recent returns to the blogosphere I thought I'd put my two pence worth in while Baby Boo has a nap and I have done enough housework to be allowed a "reward". (Yes, I am in fact thinking about other types of reward too...like chocolate and tea and cake...)

So life is good if a little stressful. We've almost bought a house. Baby Boo has learnt how to sleep through the night about 85% of the time. Husbink has a horrible commute but at one end of it a job he enjoys and at the other me and Baby Boo...what more could a man want?!

I have started doing a few things that tax my brain a little teeny tiny bit (there still isn't much brain to tax) and life has some sort of consistency and balance to it. Things are good.

Which always begs the question, what next? Nothing stays the same for long, especially not with a ten month old, but who knows what is coming round the next corner? Sometimes I feel like the title of this blog should change but instead I think it far better to view everything as an adventure rather than just the far flung variety...

Husbink and the Sunglasses

Once upon a time, Husbink had some sunglasses. Then one of the arms fell off so he got a second pair while keeping the first pair with a taped on arm in case of emergencies.
A short while later, the second pair started to disintegrate. I think this time it was that the lenses kept popping out.

A number of years passed and it became evident that Husbink could not hang on to a pair of sunnies for more than a year, often quite a lot less... One pair fell down a crack between rocks in NZ, another pair had again the continuously popping lenses, another pair I think got left on top of the car... It goes on.

He used to have the same problem with mobile phones though mostly that was actually just one horrendous week when he lost three phones in four days. He had to prove himself capable of keeping one before being allowed his swanky new phone!

On Monday, we went out for a nice walk and then to the designer outlet place on the edge of town. We had the camera with us from the nice walk and Husbink was carrying it. He hooked his sunnies through part of the strap and off we wandered. Back at the car about an hour later, no sunnies...it was all so familiar. The shock, the despair, the questioning, the guilt...

He had had these ones for a little over a year so I guess that is quite enough really and apparently...he never really liked them anyway!

(Apols for delay in posting, partly no brain, partly no time, partly waiting for a non-baby post to present itself!)

I was horrid to the Oxfam man...

So, I'm a little slow moving but seriously, not that slow! Not yet...

I'd just finished my tea nad was reclining on the sofa in the hopes of avoiding indigestion when there was an aggressive knock at the door. To be fair, with our door knocker, it is quite hard to do anything but an aggressive knock. I pulled myself off the sofa, already wondering why I was bothering as it wasn't going to be anyone of interest and toddled towards the door. At which point it was knocked aggressively again. I picked up my keys, went into the hall, the person knocked again...

I opened the inner door while they were still fiddling with the knock, perhaps considering a fourth attempt...

On opening the door and seeing it was an Oxfam man...my irritation did not subside. It perhaps increased and I opened with "I heard you the first time". I paused briefly before continuing with "And we already support you". The man, who was not getting the hint said "Ah, but which project?" to which I replied, "I don't know, I don't really care and I'm so much not in the mood." He'd left our front yard before I shut the door.

I feel bad because he had to pull himself together from the shouting pregnant lady and move on to the next house but...I'm not exactly calm yet.

The thing is, although he riled me with his triple knocking impatience and although I generally find people at the door selling things/asking for money pretty irritating, it was actually my final customer at work today who really got me started...

Twenty minutes before I was due to leave, the phone rang. Normally a lengthy call with us is about five minutes long, ten max so I didn't fob the call off on someone else. I really should have.

It started with "My name is Mrs Blah, I'm actually really rather a regular customer in your shop." Right. Not a good start. If you are regular, you don't need to tell us, we know you. She followed it up by telling me that they live pretty much the length of the country from our store. Very regular.
However, they would be coming next week and wanted to be sure that we had everything they wanted to look at. She proceeded to give a comprehensive list and I was able to find everything she wanted. She then passed me on to her husband. How I wish I had passed the phone on too.
Foolishly, I assumed he would be as organised as her...
He began to waffle on through about half the stock we have, not specifying a colour. Or, indeed a size.
I asked him when we discussed the first garment what size he would like and he said "Hmm, it goes from S-XXL, so I imagine XL, possibly XXL." I told him we had a few in XL but XXL was harder to find and we would be unlikely to have any in but could order them for him. We moved on to the next item. Some trousers. I asked for his waist size and he suggested I was being difficult and asking questions too hard for him. I had to simply reply "ok, we've got a reasonable range of sizes, there should be something..." Back to tops. He told me an item and I said "Ah, we're a bit limited at the moment, we don't have any in in extra-large."
"Extra large? I'm not extra large! Dear me, I never said that, I would never say that."
I paused. Took a deep breath. "What size were you interested in then?"
"XL. Or possibly the one down from that. Never extra-large."

I forced myself to physically smile for the rest of the conversation. It was the only way I could hope that I sounded even vaguely interested or polite. Sadly, I will be in store when they come next week. It might of course be fun to point out what S, M, L and XL stand for...someone suggested he might've thought XL meant extremely luxurious...

A blog on the page is worth two in the head...

You know what it's like...
You haven't blogged for a while. You've got loads of posts in your head. You've even started to write a few of them.
But it has been too long. You can't just come back with an average post now, can you? You must burst back onto the blogging scene. So every post gets analysed and checked and never finished and certainly never published.
So you wait until your brain totally disengages and you just post whatever - like I did on Friday, about the meercats... but still, a blog on the page is worth more than two in the head, right?!

Multitasking? Cute?

So, when I was about seven, my Brownie troop had a float in the Halloween Parade in our town in New Jersey. (For those of you who haven't experienced that kind of Halloween, it is very, very different to any form of Halloween in the UK - a very family friendly occasion and just a good excuse for a family carnival.) So, we were doing Snow White. There weren't enough of us so do it on our own so we joined with another troop...which led to two Snow Whites because it couldn't be agreed who would provide one...
Anyway. I was a deer. Which was quite nice really cos the costume was warm! So, we'd been told to keep waving and smiling all the way along the parade route. I was a very good little girl, so I did. It was quite late at night though (I have no idea how late but I was very sleepy) and so there I was waving and smiling and doing everything I was told...and yawning...
The parade was always on the local TV station and as our float went past the commentary stand, this was the voiceover... "Oh my, I've just seen the cutest thing! A little deer, waving and smiling and yawning all at once!" ...and there was me, fast becoming the celebrity of the Brownie troop...
Fast forward twenty-blah years to last weekend. We were at a friend's wedding in Cambridge. It was a lovely day but pretty exhausting all that standing around (I quickly found that the miracle heels I bought for a wedding last summer that were much higher than I'd normally wear but had lovely padded soles couldn't tolerate the extra stone and a bit I weigh this year...standing around was not at all comfy (fortunately I had spare shoes that were an improvement)) and the chairs were really not all that fab either. So early evening I'm slumped in a chair, Husbink had brought me a cushion from the car and I'm kind of zoning out from proceedings. In my own little world...one had stroking bump, one hand stroking Husbink's back.
Suddenly there's a flash and I look up confused to see one of the bridesmaids smiling..."rubbing bump and hubby, so maternal, so cute!"
The pic is on facebook with a fairly similar caption...
Multitasking? Cute? ;)

Compulsory Annual Post

So it is Wimbledon again. It seems that something happens that makes me want to blog about it each year...so here we go.

Last night I stayed up (ok, for normal people it wasn't that late but I'd been planning an early night with my book as Husbink was on nights) to watch the Murray match. Having seen at least some of all of his matches so far, I found this one really intriguing - because it felt so much more familiar.

At last, the crowd knew what they were meant to be doing. At last, there were sections that I couldn't watch. At last, I had to walk away from the TV fairly frequently - because I really did have to get other things done and couldn't fritter away the entire evening on a game of tennis.

Watching last week, Husbink and I had both felt that the crowd - including us - didn't quite know what to do with straight sets. This isn't what we are used to from "our man". We are used to agony. When Murray was simply playing fantastic shots, there were cheers, there was applause but it was slightly lacklustre. Once things started to go a little pear-shaped, we were comfortable again. We can scream and shout and cheer. Hanging our heads one minute, pulling out our hair before leaping up in triumph, pumping the air the next.

I'm always a little amazed by the British desire to support the underdog. In some instances, as with tennis matches, this is partly due to the fact that you get a better game if the underdog puts up a fight, but I think there is more to it than that. We feel like the underdog so often (which is a whole other discussion) that we support them whoever they are. When one of ours starts to do well, yes we enjoy it but we don't quite know what to do with it. The Ashes will be at their best if England scrape through. A resounding victory in each Test and we wouldn't know where to look.

I don't want to go through the trauma of the end of the fourth set last night again. I would like Murray to win each match from here on comfortably but for us the spectators, the experience might be slightly dimmed.

PS we were on holiday last week and shortly (when I have done the picture sorting thing) there will be a couple of lengthy posts...including some propaganda)

Body, Mind and Soul

So we are all made up of lots of different aspects, we can divide those things in many different ways. One such way being to think of our bodies, our minds and our souls.
At the moment, my body is boss. Big time. If my body says jump, I jump. My mind...is sorely neglected, my soul perhaps even more so. I don't have the capacity (mental? physical? emotional?) to listen to anything other than my body at the moment. Mostly what my body says is "feed me" and "rest me".
I've had to listen to it just now and decide not to go out for the evening. The evening would have probably benefited both mind and soul but the body won out again. I don't think this is a problem. For much of my life, my mind has won. Not so much over the past seven years or so since finishing uni but I still think it gets its fair share. My soul tends to win in bursts, great big bursts of getting what it needs that then fizzle away until I realise that there is need for a burst again.
That last pattern, the soul one, is one that it would be good to get out of but otherwise I think it is ok that different parts of ourselves are fed and tended at different times.
You can of course see that my mind is going to pot at the moment from the inane babble of this post. Ah well. I thought it was time to finally let one of the semi-ideas in my mind out so here you have it. There was another one about taking a long time to learn some lessons but I think I've basically written that post before, perhaps about eighteen months, two years ago so I thought that could wait a bit longer (in this instance, it has taken me years to learn that although I might like the wallowing and reading and bubbles of having a bath, they always (well, almost) give me tummy ache and a relaxing shower is much, much better for me. Here endeth my lesson. I think last time it was about a particular author who I admire but whose books I can't stand...)

Hello

Well, that's about as far as this post had got in my head. I just wanted to check in really.
I've had a thoroughly lovely weekend with the marvellous Ruth. It is a little terrifying just how long it had been since we last met but at least we've had the weekend now and the possibility of lots of other meetings over the summer. We talked. That's about the size of it. It was fab.
Other than that...
Last week was pretty crazy at work. We were seriously understaffed. In the end, I only worked 7.5 hours more than usual but it still meant work/tutorial every day but one. I was very sleepy on Friday. And Saturday. And today. I fell asleep on the sofa this afternoon but it was vaguely nightmarish sleep so I'm still mostly just wanting bed now!
I realise this is not the most exciting post in the world ever. Give me another week to get myself sorted and I promise a more interesting post soon...

The Group Dance

I can't imagine that I've got through two and a half years of blogging without mentioning The Group Dance but that doesn't mean it isn't worth mentioning again...
I think life would be vastly improved if it were like a Disney film... When any major decision faces you, when any marvellous (or dreadful) thing occurs, you start to sing and a chorus suddenly appears behind you, knowing all the moves and helping the song along.
A couple of advertisers seem to have caught on of late that this is a deep seated desire in many people's (women's?) hearts.
The first is the Berrocca ad...You but on a really good day...where the four people "dance" on treadmills. I love it. Especially the bit with the two "skating" across the treadmills sideways. It's a group dance. People passing by are suddenly united by this desire to dance...
The rest of the ads are by some mobile broadband provider or other and they are even better. I assume they are based on the event about a year ago when Rick-Rolling ("attacking" people with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up) was "all the rage" and there was a planned singing at something like 6pm at Liverpool Street Station...suddenly heaps of people burst into song all around the place, not knowing if they'd be joined - but they were. Anyway, these ads are all in train stations and all involve lots of people singing and dancing together...and I just want to be there!
I think it is part of the whole loss of community thing as well, there is something about The Group Dance that makes you feel like you belong to something larger, a bunch of people beyond those you know personally.
I think I've mentioned before about various national radio DJs that create this sense of community despite the fact that the listeners have no geographical proximity. One of the best examples is Chris Evans on Drivetime on Fridays...he plays the same song at about 6.20 every week (it used to be Delilah which was brilliant, now it's The Wonder of You which is so-so) and that is the start of the weekend - you sing along and then text in where you did the D-Spot (as it was) or the E-Spot (as it is).
Another of my preferred examples is that of Steven-ing or Steven-age from Adam & Joe on Radio 6 on Saturday mornings. If you don't listen to Adam & Joe, umm, basically, if you ever here someone in a public place shouting "Ste-ven!" and others responding "Just coming!" then it wasn't someone shouting to their friends, it was strangers connecting... Husbink wanted to try out some Stevenage when we went to see Lenny Henry in Othello at the West Yorkshire Playhouse last month but I wasn't sure the audience was right...
Back to The Group Dance... The streets in this town are so busy so much of the time with all the tourists that it would be so "easy" for a group dance to form, perhaps I should just start one day and see if anyone joins in...

Making Mistakes on the Internet

This post is going to be hard to write without adding to the things that are on the internet that shouldn't be. I will be intentionally vague. I hope you can still keep up.

Someone I know has made a bit of a hideous mistake and put something on the internet that really should not have been there. They are going to lose their job. Which seems to be an increasingly common issue with the internet and email doesn't it? There was something or other on the news this morning about people being fired because of Facebook comments/posts/pictures/whatever. I didn't listen too much but you'd have thought people would start to learn some time soon, wouldn't you?

Anyway, as I said, this post isn't really about that, that is just the scene setter. What this post is about is gossip. You see, I knew a little about this particular issue before today. I should not have done. I mostly wished I didn't. But I didn't do anything with my knowledge and I didn't stop the conversations.
Today has been a free for all on the "victim" amongst mutual acquaintances. It has been discussed from all angles - the funny side (there is one, albeit a rather cruel one), the stupid side (which could also be the disbelieving side) and the wider implication side.
I do not know how to extract myself from conversations of this nature but I don't really want to be part of them either. Correction - I would like to not want to be part of them. I feel uncomfortable with them but I still want to know what is said, enjoy the chewing over that such discussions have.
This is something that I go through on a fairly regular basis. How to extract myself from conversations I do not wish to participate in...but equally don't want to be left out of.
There are bitchy conversations, complaining about one person or another.
There are cyclical, depressing conversations that just get people lower and lower.
There are conversations where I simply don't want to know.
I didn't think I did well at all at distancing myself but someone did tell me last week that they were amazed by my patience because I never seemed to join in one particular string of bitching session. This has given me a little bit of hope for keeping going with the attempt. Any wise thoughts, little tips or evergreen conversation turners?!

Right then.

I was going to blog about some of the serious stuff from New Word Alive wasn't I? Hmm...once again the week has stolen the blogging mojo from me and I'm now at the weekend (feeling very sleepy) and wondering what it was I was going to say...
So I suppose a summary is the best I can hope for at the moment so it goes like this...
I had a very good time at New Word Alive (for those confused by the "new", I was too, I'm still not sure I can explain the ins and outs properly but what used to just be Word Alive has now split from Spring Harvest for various theological issues). There were bits that were not good, I felt a little bit of an outsider at first but by the end it all came together.
The organisers put quite a big stress on the need to have a holiday as well as go to sessions and stuff. This was quite a change from when I'd previously been and it was very easy to overload yourself with knowledge during the week and feel like popping at the weekend. Instead this time, I mostly went to one morning, one afternoon and one evening thing. Sometimes though I stayed in the caravan and watched the morning or evening session on the telly. Otherwise, I slept, I played Adventure Golf (superior in many ways to just your average crazy golf, if for no other reason than fitting in with the theme of this blog), I debated ways for one of our group to ensnare a "famous" single Christian speaker... And of course, the goat came out from time to time when everyone was getting too sensible.
All the sessions I attended were good, wholesome stuff. They gave me things to think about and things to change. They did not answer big questions (like which church?) they did not make me think I should change my life forever. But that is ok, or perhaps even good.
When younger, I used to experience the highs and lows of these kind of big Christian events. While there, everything was possible, everything would change, the world would never be the same... Then home... The highs never lasted and rarely changed anything. To have a more consistent sort of experience where I can learn and come away with a few small nuggets that can make a difference in my life is a much more valuable thing.
Apologies. I'm really sleepy. I doubt this is making sense... Giving up now... Sozzo!

It comes, it goes...

So for a bit there I was back in the blogging zone...it seems to have gone a little awol of late.
I have half written a post but I can't quite finish it...which actually is relevant to what the post is about...keeping secrets. So you see, the post is quite hard to write!
Anyway, I'm ticking along. I'm off to Spring Harvest next week. I'm looking forward to it but I'm also a little nervous, I always am for some reason, many reasons I expect.
We had a nice weekend last weekend with Husbink's parents. It was VERY relaxed. So relaxed as to be lots of sleeping and not very much else.
Husbink is on nights again tonight and I am off ot home group. I would rather be sleeping but I'm sure it'll be good for me.
Anyhoo, just to check in really. :)

Being Me

A bit of a break from the last post for something more lighthearted!

On Friday, Husbink got home from the night shift and wasn't completely exhausted. It was a beautiful day so I suggested he didn't sleep and we went out somewhere. We went to an RSPB reserve on wetlands east of Goole. It was very beautiful. There were lots of birds. (I love wigeons, they are so cute - pictures another time). We also saw stoats. Or weasels. We aren't quite sure which but they performed very well. (I quick Google search confirms our opinion that they probably were stoats. The fact that a few of the same images came up for stoats and weasels though makes me not completely confident...) And we saw rats. But they were out in the country so they were cute too! (Actually, they were quite interesting as my immediate reaction to them was "gosh, I've never seen an unstressed rat before!" they were just chilled, nibbling food, sunbathing...)
Then we Ikea'd (I think it is a verb, no?) and acquired new furniture so Saturday was spent rearranging the house. And buying lots of seeds so that I can grow patio vegetables (potatoes, carrots, peas, tomatoes, peppers and another go at spring onions but I'm not holding my breath there.)
We played poker on Saturday night with friends in Leeds.
Sunday was chilled other than a strenuous gym session and a challenging sermon in the evening. I had some pain so I was pretty grumpy and a bit wiped out. I still have some pain today so I'm still a bit wiped out. Though that is partly due to the personal training session too.

ANYWAY. That was all preamble to the point really. The point was, that I had a really good weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed all the things we did but I also realised that I've been having a bit of a tendency to behave how I think other people are expecting me to behave at the moment. With our new cell group or the knitter natter group or whatever, I've been taking the lead from the people already there rather than just being myself. If they don't like me when I'm being me, well, at least they know what's not to like!
Durrr.....

What constitutes "full time"?

(It was, by the way, a very good adventure. Husbink particularly took some amazing pictures of lochs with fog and wisps of cloud...I shall do them justice at another date...but for now...)
I believe in part time work, quite strenously! As well you know (if you know me), this is nothing to do with being lazy, it is to do with being healthy and happy and seeing Husbink and looking after him and all that sort of thing.
However.
Over the past few weeks, I've been picking up more and more work. It seems that rather a few students got their GCSE mock results over the past month and there has been panic in the ranks and a need for tuition has arisen! So I refuse some and accept some. I now have five hours of tutorials a week, plus all the travelling that they bring. I might be picking up another student next week too but all seems to have gone quiet on that front so I am probably not.
Anyway. I still technically only work 25 hours a week, plus the travel. That makes 30 hours at the absolute maximum. Most full time work is at least 37 hours a week but I am doing enough - more than enough actually, I feel my time being stolen. The house is suffering a little. A couple of my outside interests are suffering. I am quite content though and with the nature of my students, I will lose them all in a few months time once exams are over and can then start again deciding how many to take on and where to "put" them.
But my point is, I keep thinking "I'm working full time now" - which I'm not, officially, but to me I am.
I know lots of you work proper full time or more than full time...is it because you love your jobs? Or that we value our time differently? Or that I'm just quite lucky to be able to be so picky? Or a little of all of the above?
In other news, I have new glasses. Because my eye sight has improved. I'm less short sighted all of a sudden and so reading and writing and knitting (three major uses of my time) were becoming very painful.
My glasses are mostly black and a little bit orange. Not what I was expecting but I rather loved them so...(oh, and they are a lot more subtle than that sounds but I did enjoy telling Husbink over the phone that they were BLACK and ORANGE. He was afraid...)

Being Lazy

I have taken a long, long time to learn how to be lazy. That's lazy in a good way. Clearly.
Yesterday, I think I may have finally managed it.
We woke up. I made tea. We snoozed, listening to Adam and Joe on Radio 6. We got up to make breakfast...and took it back to bed. Listened to more Adam and Joe and when they finished, switched over to not-Jonathon Ross on Radio 2. Husbink read Empire. I read The Economist.
We eventually got up around 1pm and had some lunch. We played Mario Kart.
Around 3pm we went to the gym. We left the gym sometime after 5pm.
We came home and pootled about before making a fish laksa for dinner. We played more Mario Kart, watched an episode of Life on Mars. I went to bed. Husbink watched Match of the Day.
For me, the gym bit was hugely necessary otherwise I'd have felt like I'd wasted the day too much. Also, I'm not good at not leaving the house. If I stay inside too long, I do go a little loopy. (Various days on holiday when we've tried this have ended in tears. Actual tears.)
It was a good day. But today, I get to be busy again, rushing hither and thither and that's much more what I'm made for!

Not Much Adventuring Going On...

Both in the blogging world and the real world.
It seems we have settled down to 'normal' life again. Which, frankly, is a shame. I know it was inevitable but that doesn't make it good.
Not to say that life in the Used-to-be-Adventuring household is bad; it isn't. Things are ticking along pretty well at the minute. Husbink loves his work. I am getting to the point where the work is good. It has taken a little while to get the balance right but I think I'm pretty much there.
We are starting to meet people and make friends in our new city. We are settled in our house. We have decided on a church (this was not like our deciding on a church in NZ where it was so utterly obvious and right and so on. This was deciding on a church in a "there's very little to pick between so let's just choose" way). We have joined a gym. Much as I always think I shouldn't like the gym and that there should be other (cheaper, better) ways of exercising, the gym really does work best for me. Partly because I can go on my own (and prefer going on my own) so it is something I can do when Husbink works (or sleeps, like this morning when I will go to the gym while he recovers from the night shift.)
Anyway, the point of all this is that it does not lead to anything very much to blog about. I know I used to blog about normal life as much, if not more, than about adventuring but it seems I needed the adventures to make normal life also worthy of note. This is not to say that I haven't had hundreds and thousands of posts (okay, that might be going a little far...) going round my head over the past few months but all of them, for a range of reasons, have been censored before meeting the page.
So that's my quietness dealt with but what now? I am in a state of some change which is always the kind of time for blogging but it is very internal change. Things are now not changing for a while, possibly a really long while, and the internal change is learning to live with that. Does this make for interesting blogging? Or perhaps, if not interesting blogging, motivated blogging?! We shall have to wait and see I guess!
'Til then...

Slightly Disappointing

I had a wonderful day on Sunday. Well, a wonderful afternoon and evening. The morning was sadly a bit of a let down but I'll not go into that now (another post is brewing I'm sure). So we toddled across to Leeds on Sunday afternoon and while Husbink went to the rugby with Mr SD and a few other friends, Mrs SD and I pootled into Headingly (much faster than I expected from her "I can only go slow now" protestations!) for a coffee and a big old chat. It was marvellous. I love Mrs SD. Then we met up with the rugby goers back at the house of two of them and had a good chatter there too. And then we went to a rather famous (amongst us, anyway) curry house and met up with four more of the old group (and missed those that were missing) and had a lovely, lovely time. I was really in need of people and I got them! It was great to talk and laugh and be silly and talk and eat and... A really lovely evening. We all then went our separate ways (Husbink and I getting home in time to watch Bring Back Star Wars...it was very silly but much, much fun...) So what was the disappointment? Well, it was the morning after. I've eaten at that curry house a huge number of times. We've pined for it while at a distance. This curry house is so well loved to us and our friends that when my mum rang during the meal and I told her where we were she said "oooh, say hello from me!" not to the people but to the building! Right... Anyway, I've never felt ill effect from a meal there (other than self inflicted overstuffedness) until Monday morning. Don't worry, I was not ill, it was in no respect food poisoning or anything severe like that, I just wasn't right. Like you get sometimes after partaking in lesser curry meals. Husbink and I have a twenty-four hour rule that we apply to curries to class whether they were good or not. (Note that this is very different to my twenty-four hour rule for the purchase of shoes, bags, coats...where the accessory rule requires that I am still thinking about the possible purchase twenty-four hours after leaving the shop and thus clearly require the item and must return for it, in the case of a curry, the twenty-four hours should be marked by the meal not in the least playing on my mind!) For the first time ever, this curry house failed the twenty-four hour rule. Which is probably just a reminder that you should never look back.

Growing Up

Over the last few months with one wedding and another and various large social events, I've run into quite a few people that I haven't seen for years and years. And it has been lovely.
I realised the other day that I kept dreading bumping into people from school or whenever because of one ex-friend (and I don't know why they are an ex-friend. Really. No idea. They just stopped talking to me. I did something. I don't know what...very, very weird!). Whenever I run into him it is deeply uncomfortable. He just doesn't seem to be letting go (of this mystery unknown thing. And there is a thing because other people know what it is and won't tell me. Anyway.)
So I'd been dreading running into various people. The kind of people who were friends of friends at school. Sometimes we got on. Sometimes we didn't so much. It was always fine-ish though. You know?
I'd tarred them all with this same brush, I assumed that they all harboured some secret grudge against me that I was never to know of but was to spend every wedding and big reunion regretting despite my lack of knowledge as Husbink and I sat in the corner ignored by all and sundry. Me? Paranoid?!
Not so. It turns out that most of us have grown up! That it was lovely to run into people, find out what they'd been doing, what they are doing, what twists life has taken for them...
It was just reassuring to discover that fundamentally, most people are rather nice when it comes down to it.

The Dangers of the Telly...

When we moved into our house, we couldn't get much reception on our telly. Not with the roof aerial, not with the little set top aerial. We couldn't get anything on the digi box.
And this was fine. Not a problem. We could watch DVDs, we could play with the Wii, it really wasn't a problem.
Then at the weekend, my parents came to stay. My dad fiddled and fiddled and tweeked and now we have all five channels. Which means we have the Olympics. And that we had the Olympics in time for the British "gold rush" over the weekend.
So now what happens? We come down in the morning, we switch the TV on and it stays on. All day. Pretty much. We do other things (Husbink goes to work sometimes!) but the TV just stays clicking away, telling us all kinds of things that we really need to know. Really.
I know that the all-day element will stop with the end of the Olympics but, well, hmm, what a time waster!

I Miss You

One of the least fun things about all this moving is all the people you have to keep leaving.
One of the very best things about this move is that we are now in fairly easy reach of lots of lovely people - doctor/woman, snoo, associated husbands (hmm, I think Husbink should start a sports team or a quiz team or a support group or anything really called "associated husbands") and several more besides. But they are still a drive away or a train away or something other than a very quick pop.
It has helped spectacularly with the settling in to see doctor/woman and mr me on Saturday (they got to watch me do some un-flat-packing, lucky them) and to have an evening with Snoo and the Hub on Monday (despite the failure of the Wii to provide entertainment!). Not to mention that the ever wonderful Mr and Mrs SD came to help us move in (and brought us a spare fridge, as you do). But I want to see them more! I want to share car journeys to and from work with Mrs SD like we used to. I want to bump into the Hub on the crescent as we go to work in the mornings or come home in the evenings. I want to know that d/w is just down the road (even if, actually, I've probably spoken to her more in the past few months than we ever used to manage then!). No one lives where they used to anymore (if that makes any sense), that era has finished but...
I don't mean to be a big whinger. I've already been round to someone's house in this new city, a very kind and friendly older couple who took care of me on Sunday when I explored a strange new church (it was very different for me, I'm unlikely to settle there but it was a very refreshing change) and I know that I will find more people here. I know I'll meet them and they will be fabulous...I just don't want to have to leave any more people!
All the people in the Hutt that we've left behind, the people we've now left in Carlisle (admittedly with a couple of them it is just the case that we got in first, another few months and they'd've left us), all the people scattered across the UK...would you all like to come and live down the round from me again please? Thank you very much
xxx