We had a lovely time on Saturday at Mim & Ed's wedding in Hampshire. Just the name of the village gives you an idea of the kind of place it was: Martry Worthy. It really was the kind of place you see on Midsomer Murders, which was slightly ironic given the identity of one of the guests - a certain Hercule Poirot, no less.
Anton, Becca and Eve were there too, and both girls were very well behaved during the church ceremony, even if Eve did let out a squeak at the "does any know of any reason why..." bit. After the ceremony the guests moved to Ed's parent's house, a quarter of a mile away. It really was something - I've been to other wedding receptions in country houses that have been smaller than this! The weather was doing it's best to help the afternoon along, and the clouds only closed in just as people were moving in to the marquee for the speeches anyway. The speeches were before the meal for a change, I discussed this with Hercule while we were in the queue for the gents, and we agreed it was to keep the drunken heckling down to a minimum. We then briefly discussed toilet plumbing when he vacated the lavatory. I think I made quite an impression on him.
The meal was lovely, and the wine was flowing; Lara was very well behaved, Olga was doing a stirling job, as usual, of feeding her at just the right times, and after a bit of a swing in the car seat, she dozed on and off for the rest of the evening, and was passed around a bit between some of the cluckier guests from time to time when she was awake.
Becca came to our rescue when it came time to head back to the hotel, I'd put us in a premier inn at the services on the M3, in the hope that you could get from the minor road that runs alongside the services into the services themselves, but rather annoyingly there was a big fence in the way (I'd spotted it when we arrived at lunchtime). This meant we'd be faced with an expensive taxi journey up the M3, past the services, and back down the southbound carriageway to get to the hotel, but Becca was driving and gave us a lift. The cars were parked a hundred yards or so from the house in a paddock, but those 100 yards weren't lit, and it was a spooky walk by Olga & Becca's accounts.
It was raining heavily on Sunday morning (it struck us Mim & Ed were lucky with the weather on Saturday and we were really pleased for them on that front) which poo-pooed my idea of climbing the perimter fence and walking down the minor road to Martry Worthy to get the car, so we caved in and got a taxi. We were home by 1.15, and with the weather they way it was, I couldn't mow the lawns as I'd intended (awwww, shame) so it was a nice lazy afternoon of TV and dozing for me & Lara. Olga seemed to miss out on the dozing part, for some reason.
The photos from Saturday are up there on the left of the blog.
Monday, 7 July 2008
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Summer? Maybe..
Well, it has to be nice weather in Marlow today, I've got my shorts on at work.
I was a bit stiff yesterday, I'd played cricket on Saturday and Sunday - a League game first, in which we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory against Great Kingshill, then the Littlewick Green Cricket Club President's Day on Sunday. This is a 6-a-side tournament starting at 10am, with six teams playing in two groups of three with a play-off between the first, second and third teams in each group to determine final positions. It was my second year as a team captain, and our boys did well and finished third. The weather was very nice, apart from a brief rain shower during the lunch interval, where players and partners (and children!) enjoyed a buffet lunch in a large marquee, washed down with a glass of wine or three (for the players - I think wives and girlfriends were doing the driving!). I certainly needed the batting practise, having hit a brief 6 on Saturday (I still can't make it to double figures for the Firsts!), and I opened the batting for our team, and scored 28*, 27* and 28* in my three innings - the rules state a batsman must retire when he's scored 25, although he can return later if needed.
Lara was fine all day, Olga did a stirling job of feeding her at just the right moments, and was unlucky to have to take her for a stroll to get her off to sleep just as the lunchtime rain arrived.
We even took Mishka along, and although he spent half the day in the car (with the windows open and some water in a bowl!) he did also get some time to play about on the grass.
We got home in time to watch the second half of the football, and I must admit I was happy to see those bossy Germans beaten by Spain. Poor old Ballack - serves him right for always being the first person to give the ref a Teutonic mouthful anytime any of the Germans players felt the need to sniff the turf.
What else? We bought a new kettle! How exciting is that?! The old one blew up, tripping the master switch on the fusebox and burning a hole in the extension lead it was plugged into. We decided that, seeing as Lara is drinking cold, boiled water now, we should perhaps buy a half-decent kettle (oh, and we do enjoy our morning cups of tea), so we splashed out on one from John Lewis, which has a built-in water filter, fortunately using the same filter cartridges as the water jug in our fridge. Best of all though, it lights up different colours as the water is heating, from blue to purple to red! Gimmicky, I know, but it'll amuse Lara for 10 minutes when she's a little older.
Writing of Lara, she's been swimming again this morning, and went underwater three times, apparently, although it seems like she doesn't enjoy that bit so much yet. It must have tired her out, as she had a long sleep this afternoon in the park in Marlow. She's eating more yoghurts, brocolli, courgette, carrot & banana now, after a breakfast of baby rice, and to try and encourage her to chew we're giving her slightly-mashed pieces of strawberry (well, it is Wimbledon fortnight after all).
I finally finished mowing the lawn last night, after a week off. We've decided we're going to leave an area of it "fallow" for the benefit of creepy-crawlies and the fact Olga likes the "meadow" look. It's an area of lawn we don't use for anything, and if it reduces the time it takes to mow, I'm in favour of it! All this just in time for me to mow it again on Sunday, most likely... Although the priority now moves on to restarting work on the vegetable patch - I need to put a fence around it to keep Mishka off our plums or whatever else will be growing. We'll need to be thoughtful about where we sit Lara in the garden, as the crop of apples on the apple tree looks to be much more than last summer, and they're starting to fall now.
I was a bit stiff yesterday, I'd played cricket on Saturday and Sunday - a League game first, in which we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory against Great Kingshill, then the Littlewick Green Cricket Club President's Day on Sunday. This is a 6-a-side tournament starting at 10am, with six teams playing in two groups of three with a play-off between the first, second and third teams in each group to determine final positions. It was my second year as a team captain, and our boys did well and finished third. The weather was very nice, apart from a brief rain shower during the lunch interval, where players and partners (and children!) enjoyed a buffet lunch in a large marquee, washed down with a glass of wine or three (for the players - I think wives and girlfriends were doing the driving!). I certainly needed the batting practise, having hit a brief 6 on Saturday (I still can't make it to double figures for the Firsts!), and I opened the batting for our team, and scored 28*, 27* and 28* in my three innings - the rules state a batsman must retire when he's scored 25, although he can return later if needed.
Lara was fine all day, Olga did a stirling job of feeding her at just the right moments, and was unlucky to have to take her for a stroll to get her off to sleep just as the lunchtime rain arrived.
We even took Mishka along, and although he spent half the day in the car (with the windows open and some water in a bowl!) he did also get some time to play about on the grass.
We got home in time to watch the second half of the football, and I must admit I was happy to see those bossy Germans beaten by Spain. Poor old Ballack - serves him right for always being the first person to give the ref a Teutonic mouthful anytime any of the Germans players felt the need to sniff the turf.
What else? We bought a new kettle! How exciting is that?! The old one blew up, tripping the master switch on the fusebox and burning a hole in the extension lead it was plugged into. We decided that, seeing as Lara is drinking cold, boiled water now, we should perhaps buy a half-decent kettle (oh, and we do enjoy our morning cups of tea), so we splashed out on one from John Lewis, which has a built-in water filter, fortunately using the same filter cartridges as the water jug in our fridge. Best of all though, it lights up different colours as the water is heating, from blue to purple to red! Gimmicky, I know, but it'll amuse Lara for 10 minutes when she's a little older.
Writing of Lara, she's been swimming again this morning, and went underwater three times, apparently, although it seems like she doesn't enjoy that bit so much yet. It must have tired her out, as she had a long sleep this afternoon in the park in Marlow. She's eating more yoghurts, brocolli, courgette, carrot & banana now, after a breakfast of baby rice, and to try and encourage her to chew we're giving her slightly-mashed pieces of strawberry (well, it is Wimbledon fortnight after all).
I finally finished mowing the lawn last night, after a week off. We've decided we're going to leave an area of it "fallow" for the benefit of creepy-crawlies and the fact Olga likes the "meadow" look. It's an area of lawn we don't use for anything, and if it reduces the time it takes to mow, I'm in favour of it! All this just in time for me to mow it again on Sunday, most likely... Although the priority now moves on to restarting work on the vegetable patch - I need to put a fence around it to keep Mishka off our plums or whatever else will be growing. We'll need to be thoughtful about where we sit Lara in the garden, as the crop of apples on the apple tree looks to be much more than last summer, and they're starting to fall now.
Sunday, 29 June 2008
Anton's Progress
Anton's 3 Peak Yacht race got underway yesterday, starting at Barmouth in Wales. During the course of last night he should have run up (and down) Snowdon. It's all high-tech stuff, you can follow his team's progress online, using these links. Becca reports that the sleepmonsters site seems to be the most up-to-date. His boat is the Kithros II
http://live.adventuretracking.com/tpyr2008
There is also the official 3 peaks site:
http://www.threepeaksyachtrace.co.uk/
and the sleepmonsters site (who do the tracking):
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Lara's appetite
Lara's eating more diverse things now; last night for supper it was an apricot flavour yoghurt thingy, which was the foodstuff that has made the least mess so far. Olga spent some time in the kitchen preparing food for this week - broccoli & courgette will be on the menu, along with the usual carrot, banana and baby rice.She's also sleeping very well. She had a late night on Sunday, when she didn't go to sleep till nearly 10pm, and I'd needed to give her calpol on Saturday night, but as usual that worked within 10 minutes, even without Mum's milk which usually ensures she's asleep within minutes. However, once she's off to sleep - normally around 7.30ish - she's staying that way until between 5-6am, although these last few days it's been after 6am, like this morning. Then she's also having good naps too during the day, like an hour and a half in bed with us on Sunday, which means she's rarely being grumpy at the moment. Famous last words....
I know, I know, I'm slow at updating this!
It's Tuesday already, where has all the time gone?! What have we been up to? Well, on Saturday I played cricket, which was a miracle given the weather at 10.30am. We scored 103 all out, with my contribution being a massive zero from three balls, batting at number three. I'm saying I was rusty after a month away from the game. 103 doesn't seem like a big total, but when you've played for The Green for a few years, you learn that on a damp, overcast day it won't be a formality to chase that down. Indeed it wasn't, as we bowled Amersham Hill out for only 92. A very satisfying result, given that they were a vocal bunch in the field, commenting on our slow run rate, and the most vocal of them was given out LBW first ball by his own umpire. Oh, I smiled!
Olga and Lucy went out for a meal and a few drinks on Saturday night; Olga was subjected to a chat-up line that involved the line "You're so beautiful, I'm trembling", to which she replied "You should be".
Sunday was a nice quiet day, some housework, a nice afternoon nap, some work in the garden then popping over to Reading to take Lucy home and see Anton, Becca and Eve. It was supposed to be an early night, but the evening was lovely so we lit up the fire in the firepit outside and watched the end of the Italy-Spain game, then watched a programme about Louis Theroux learning to gamble in Las Vegas - the wireless speakers I bought on eBay worked a treat so we could watch TV from outside, by the fire, with the door closed so the smoke didn't get into the house, but still listen to the programme.
Seeing as we missed an early night on Sunday, and I need to mow the lawns and can't do that if I only get home from work at 6pm, we thought we'd have an early night last night, but this time we got sidetracked by a programme on Sky One about Justin Lee Collins trying to become a professional darts player... I know how it sounds, but I like him and it was funnier than it sounds, but it meant that the early night vanished again, although I did still get up early, as planned, this morning.
Getting up at 6.15am rather than 7.30am is so much easier when the weather is nice outside. Lara was awake at 6.15 and very happy, so much so that I don't think she had breakfast and went back to sleep when I brought her up to Olga. I took Mishka out at 7, I'd been lookikng forward to the mornings when I could walk him with putting a hat, scarf & coat on! We're busy at work at the moment, and I wanted to get in early so I could get things done then leave by 4pm so I can mow the lawns (OK, start mowing, it's a two-evening job!). I'm on the bus today so Olga can have to car to take Lara swimming in Marlow; yup, when you need the bus to be on time it was 15 minutes late and standing room only...
Olga and Lucy went out for a meal and a few drinks on Saturday night; Olga was subjected to a chat-up line that involved the line "You're so beautiful, I'm trembling", to which she replied "You should be".
Sunday was a nice quiet day, some housework, a nice afternoon nap, some work in the garden then popping over to Reading to take Lucy home and see Anton, Becca and Eve. It was supposed to be an early night, but the evening was lovely so we lit up the fire in the firepit outside and watched the end of the Italy-Spain game, then watched a programme about Louis Theroux learning to gamble in Las Vegas - the wireless speakers I bought on eBay worked a treat so we could watch TV from outside, by the fire, with the door closed so the smoke didn't get into the house, but still listen to the programme.
Seeing as we missed an early night on Sunday, and I need to mow the lawns and can't do that if I only get home from work at 6pm, we thought we'd have an early night last night, but this time we got sidetracked by a programme on Sky One about Justin Lee Collins trying to become a professional darts player... I know how it sounds, but I like him and it was funnier than it sounds, but it meant that the early night vanished again, although I did still get up early, as planned, this morning.
Getting up at 6.15am rather than 7.30am is so much easier when the weather is nice outside. Lara was awake at 6.15 and very happy, so much so that I don't think she had breakfast and went back to sleep when I brought her up to Olga. I took Mishka out at 7, I'd been lookikng forward to the mornings when I could walk him with putting a hat, scarf & coat on! We're busy at work at the moment, and I wanted to get in early so I could get things done then leave by 4pm so I can mow the lawns (OK, start mowing, it's a two-evening job!). I'm on the bus today so Olga can have to car to take Lara swimming in Marlow; yup, when you need the bus to be on time it was 15 minutes late and standing room only...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)