Thursday 27th March - 'armed for bear'

"This term, dating from the mid-1800s, alludes to the heavy charge of powder or lead that hunters use for large animals like a bear" from the internet

We've used the phrase for years in our household to mean "ready and prepared for every eventuality"

as when I was a peripatetic primary school class instrumental music teacher, and used to load up my car with a selection from

a djembe and a repinique drum (and sometimes my whole 'junk' samba drum kit)

a B flat and a C clarinet, sometimes a trumpet as well (we had a boy in a clarinet class who was born with an extremely short left arm so I got him a cornet and had to learn the basics of playing a trumpet in a great hurry)

a ukulele

a guitar 

descant and treble recorders, an ocarina and a flute

not forgetting lesson notes and registers, mp3 player (so much easier than the ghetto blaster and cd wallet it replaced!),  memory sticks, laptop and small guitar amp to act as a soester with enough oomph to be heard over the sound of infant classes moving to elephant music...

oh, and my handbag and water bottle and lunchbox and mobile phone... and a book to read at lunchtime....

I used teach up to four different instruments to maybe six or more classes per day across West Sussex. No time to be bored in that job! (Except, maybe, in staff meetings?)

There was always a posibility of turning up to teach year 6 samba drumming, to be greeted with 'ah, we forgot to tell you they are on a school trip; now you are here, could you swap lessons and teach the year 4s their ukulele class', or even 'how about teaching the infants'? I always said yes; I expect I should have refused ('not in the contract' or sonething but - why not if I could and that's what they wanted? 

I digress; we were armed for bear at bedtime yesterday and a good thing too...

We switched on the apparently ok upstairs oxygen concentrator - and guess what - faults don't just miraculously disappear if the machine IS actually faulty. 

The machine did its beeping and cutting out routine just as it had done at 5.15 this morning. 

I phoned it in to the 24 hour support number; yes, they would send a technician in the morning and meanwhile I could use the big emergency backup oxygen cylinder overnight. Now, we keep that in the shed at the bottom of the garden...not exactly handy.  So we used our own machine that we bought for staying away overnight ('we advise you don't use your privately purchased machine,' says the help desk assistant; I expect that's in her script). And brought up a smaller cylinder. And kept the portable Inogen concentrator nearby for trips to the loo.

Armed for bear.

Garden

In the garden I have big yellow daffodils, big white daffodils, tete-a-tete daffodils, violas, primulas, one anenome, some violets, soldiers-and-sailors, one red camellia flower, the first grape hyacinths and two tulips.

This is a quick scribble, barely larger than the stamp, on a letter I sent to a friend today, done with a four-colour biro!

Music

Tiptoe through the tulips?

I had no idea this song came from 1929!

Or how about Elgar's Wild Bears (aka 'how to send a class of infants completely wild')