Monday 30th July 2018 - The Summer Holidays Begin

  Last week - how long ago that seems now - was still a working week, at least on Monday and Tuesday. Then there was the final paperwork to be completed/scanned/emailed, and a few emails and phone calls, and last minute shuffles of next term's schedules ("I know we wanted to book the sessions for the mornings, but we now need them to be in the morning"). So, although most of the week was not timetables, it still felt like a phony holiday...neither work nor play.

Today - today -  let the holidays begin!

I have dealt with four tasks that needed doing, to get them done, and to clear them our of my head. According to Mark Twain

'If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.'

Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/mark_twain_414009
Before I did any figurative frog-eating, (actually frogs' legs aren't too bad - we ate them when I was young, in  Indonesia. Not sure about the rest of the frog though, and it does seem very wasteful to only eat the legs of something and not the rest of it.) -now, where was I? oh yes, I cleaned the bathroom from top (at least, as far as I can reach) to bottom. I can be certain that all those striations in the tiles floor are exactly that - striations, and not dirty marks. There are 30 bars on the towel rail, I counted them as I burned my fingers running a damp cloth over each one. Why would all this effort make me feel so happy? It's something that has been annoying me for weeks, and now it is done. That's why!

I spent some time yesterday watching youtube videos of watercolour tutorials. There's more to this lark than applying paint to paper! This is my latest endeavour;

Two of the stones would insist on looking like sponges than pebbles. Even so, I am very encouraged. This is what I was looking at...

Nor that I was after an exact copy - just a starting point. It took all morning, because of waiting for paint to dry... an opportunity to go and pick up even more fallen apples - another hundred or so. That brings the running total to about 570 or more. This time I had to use a certain amount of caution - the wasps had reappeared and were burrowing into the  apples. I threw the apples (and quite a few wasps) into the garden waste collection bin, as when I lifted the lid of the compost bin there were hundreds of worm, clotted in knots, apparently trying to escape fro  the heap of rotten apples already in the bin.

After lunch we went on a little trippette, to look at Fiat Pandas. There is a great second-hand car place where you can wander round and look at hundreds of cars and try them for size. "Fiat Panda?" I hear you cry out in shock and surprise.

Yes, indeedy. We are seriously considering downsizing from the current Alfa something-or-other to the 2litre 4-wheel-drive Fiat Panda. The next stage is to find one to take for a test drive. It's almost as much of a seismic shift as when my Uncle and Aunt gave up Volvo Estate cars for a VW Passat. That might have happened over 35 years ago, bur I still remember the incredulous cries at this change to The Way Things Have Always Been. Ah well. Nothing stays the same for ever.

This car place is perilously close to Computer World and Hobbycraft. Oh well. It is the holidays, after all.