Next stop Britain's Got Talent

I never knew Lara had learned the words to Daisy, Daisy - next she just needs to get the chords right on the guitar, and we're in business. Olga and I can retire and live off the earnings of our rockstar daughter...

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Daylight Robbery!

When I came home from the gym this morning, the milkman had been and dropped off our usual Friday order - 2 pints of milk, 15 eggs, orange juice and bacon.  I left them on the doorstep as Lara likes to find them and take them to the kitchen, and went in for my shower. 15 minutes later I sent Lara out to the doorstep "to see if the milkman has been", and when we opened the door, the bacon had gone!! You can't really see our doorstep from the road, it's up 15 steps, so I'm still wondering if it was a passing opportunist, or someone who had seen the milkman drop off a bunch of stuff. Luda suggested maybe it was a cat, and Lara has run with this, claiming she saw the cat, he's called Percy and he's pink. 
I'm happy to let her believe Percy nicked our bacon... but it's really annoying!

Jabs, Rain and a Scarecrow

Last Wednesday was a jabby day. Lara had to have her boosters, one jab in each arm, and the little trooper didn't cry, and earned two choccy buttons as a reward from the nurse.  She did cry when we took the plasters off later that day, though. After Lara, it was the boys turn, as they had to have their kennel cough boosters at the vets; this is a nasal spray, and Mishka took offence at me putting him on a table in the vet's room, and he reminded me and the vet what a strong lad he is. Jackson was a different matter, he loved the attention, and had his spray and then a jab as well for good measure to boost one of his vaccines.
Here are a few photos and videos from the past couple of weeks:

With the sunshine and rain we've been having, the veg patch has gone crazy. Lara noticed that our neighbour had a scarecrow in their garden, and so Baba spent some time making one for our garden out of some of Lara's old clothes. In Russian it's called a "Chuchilla" (my phonetic spelling) and she lives in our veg patch now - maybe the only female scarecrow around? The garden is producing a lot of strawberries at the moment, which is no bad thing.

Lara decided on Sunday morning that 5.30am would be a great time to wake up, and although I slowed her down a bit, we were still downstairs having breakfast at 6.30am, which is much earlier than normal. It gave me time to write up our latest cricket match though, before Lara and I decided it had been a long time since we'd taken her bike to the park. The weather was terrible, cold, windy and wet, but that just meant that we had the whole playground to ourselves. Then we went shopping, and Lara got a nurses outfit and a cheerleaders outfit, complete with pom-poms, which worked out well, as she uses similar ones at gymanstics and so is deslighted to be able to practise with them at home. She was able to wear her nurses outfit when we got home from the shops as we went round to visit one of her nursery friends who is poorly with chickenpox at the moment, and Lara tried very hard to make Zoe feel better, taking her temperature and listening to her heartbeat.

Olga is away in Kazakhstan for another week; we've worked out that the best time for a skype call is while Lara is having her tea, given the five hour time difference.

Right, back again

After a few hectic weeks, life is returning to a different normality now.

Dad's funeral went as well as could be expected. Lara and her cousin Elizabeth were very good in the chapel, and enjoyed running around and playing at the "do" afterwards at Radcliffe cricket club.

Since then, Lara's been to a friend's party at an indoor play centre:

Then last week we went to the circus that was on in High Wycombe. Of course Lara liked the clowns, and the acrobats were doing things that she recognised from her gymnastics (albeit 30 feet higher than she normal performs!). There were dancing horses, but the highlight were three Brazilian motorcyclists riding around in a big metal spherical ball - the Ball of Death, if you like. It was an amazing sight. Here's someone else's video of it I found on youtube:



Cricket at Littlewick has been a mixed bag, 3 straight heavy defeats, followed by us having to forfeit a game through lack of players, then this last Saturday we had a big win against our rivals at the bottom of the league table. Results and scorecards are here.

One plan we have for a future holiday is to rent a motorhome and tour around, perhaps in Scotland, or maybe the USA or Canada. To give us an idea of what kind of motorhome we'd need to rent, on Sunday we visited a huge motorhome show at Stratford-upon-Avon, and had a look inside dozens, from the very small to the ridiculously huge. The most expensive one we visited was £80,000 to buy!

We have booked one little holiday, up to Scotland and back on the sleeper from London Euston. We'll leave on a Sunday night in August, get off at Upper Tyndrum station in the middle of nowhere (a very beautiful middle of nowhere all the same), have a bit of a stroll, then get a normal train up to Fort William for the night, returning on the Tuesday night to arrive back Wednesday morning. It's just Olga, Lara and I but it might be a tight squeeze in one of those sleeper cabins! Given that we've done longer rail journeys in Russia with Lara, and without her in the USA, it shouldn't be a problem.

And finally, I had a strange trip back in time on Saturday - the cash machine gave me £5 notes! I'd heard they were planning on doing this, but it was the first time I can remember getting a fiver out of one since I was in Keele in '97!

This is our last normal week for a while, Olga is off to Kazakhstan again on Saturday morning for 2 weeks, then soon after that we going on our rearranged summer holiday to the Med for 2 weeks.

Dad

 

Howard John Armstrong

27th July 1938 - 8th May 2011

It's not been the greatest week. My dad died suddenly on Sunday morning, at home, from a heart attack. Whilst not in the best of health after a couple of strokes over the past few years, this was certainly unexpected.
Early memories of him relate almost exclusively to railways - his father was a signalman, and Dad loved railways and everything to do with them. He'd take me on day trips with the North Manchester Railway Society to railyards in places as far afield as Eastfield in Glasgow and Eastliegh in Southampton. I might not have been the trendiest of teenagers, going train spotting with my Dad, but his knowledge of the subject was amazing to behold. On the night that Arsenal beat Liverpool 0-2 at Anfield to win the Division One title in 1989, Dad and I spent all night on Preston railway station (there is no such thing as a "train station"), watching the royal mail trains load up - in the days when a first class letter would arrive the next day, I was shown how it could happen. I saw more of the country on those trips than many of the kids I was at school with.
We built a large model railway in the loft at home, it took years. It started on a table, and grew until we had no choice but to move it up there. I remember waiting anxiously each night for Dad to come home from working in the bank to see if he'd brought a new piece of track, or a new engine or coach.
As I got older and my hobbies moved from train spotting to sports, Dad would come and watch. Perhaps not as often as I would have liked, but what that meant was that when he did come and watch, it meant all the more. I was playing so much sport when I was between 16 and 18 that I doubt he could have come and watched it all! He came to a basketball final we played at the YMCA in Manchester, and to the main local derby football match when Bury Grammar School's 3rd XI - with me as captain - took on Bolton School. I like to think we won that one. It wasn't all victorious - he watched me play cricket for Littlewick Green 2nd XI against Little Kingshill when I first started playing down here, around 1999, and I bowled a 12-ball over (not a good thing, for you non-cricket buffs). I was embarrassed for myself, but also for him, as he was sat near the Little Kingshill players, and I can only imagine the laugh they were having at my expense that he had to listen to, but he never mentioned it to me.
After his strokes he lost his mobility, and became a great supporter of Sky Sports. There was always a game to watch, be it Manchester City in the football season or any cricket at all in Summer. Cricket was a great love of his, and why not, when Gary Sobers lived across the road from you when you were a young teenager, and you worked in the scorebox while he was the professional player at Radcliffe. It's fitting that we'll be having a "do" after the funeral on Tuesday at Radcliffe Cricket Club, I think he'd like that.

Dad could be a man of few words sometimes, but every one of those was always a kind one.