Snell-Pym

Alaric's Dad Lionel and his step-mother Lynne are currently over from South Africa where they live. They arrived in depested darkest Gloucestershire last night and for Lionel it is a return to the place he was brought up. Tonight we made them a three course meal along with Barbara - this is the first formal entertianing we have done since moving back into the house after the flood.

So I brought out the table cloths and napkins and the nice butterfly napkin rings David and Michelle got us at Christmas. We made yummy lentil cakes with sage in - yesturday Alaric made some of the same lentil cakes with what he thought was the coriander but it turned out he doesn't actually know the difference between my lovage plants and coriander - he thought the lovage were lemon corriander and thats why it tasted odd :/ - still both types of lentil cakes were good

They sat upon a bed of salad from the garden and we had various dips. We then had ground nut stew cook using the cabbages from the garden (well what were left off them due to this years cattipillar uinfestation). Desert was home-made yogurt and local honey with hazel nuts (I'm afraid these were bought as Jean had eaten the ones from the hedge row I'd gathered.).

The interesting thing to note was Jean's interactions with Lionel - her langage was completely different from how she speaks to dad - eg:

To Dad, 'Ferfer nut?'

To Lionel, 'Grandfather would you like a nut?'

I thought this comparison was very interesting as was the fact she called him grandfather when Al had introduced him as Granddad but Lynne had said Grandfather. I think little bobble has worked out that you can interact differently depending on whats expected of you!

Anyway I did take a photo of the Snells but haven't got round to uploading it yet - I will also shortly be sorting out my cooking blog which I will link to so that you can see the recipies etc... of the fabled lentil cakes!

Having been given the all clear from the Dr about six months ago I informed the college of this and wondered if three years was a bit too long a time to just go back. I didn't hear anything and I sent a few more emials then I get an email saying there should be no problem with me going back but I still don't have a start date and it is the middle of September and I know the course begins in September.

Also in order to be ready for this we have put Jean in nursery for two extra days aweek. We had been told that the government pay for nursery stuff once your child is three. However, the way the system works is almost as if it is designed to unhelpful in the extreme. It turned out they only pay a set quoter of hours which would be equivolent to three sessions - so say three mornings or a day and a half for us. They also will not give that too you in a chunk - oh no so if your child only goes in for say two days they slash the number of hours they will pay for - this renders the whole thing useless for mothers trying to say get a part time job and leaves us with a slight problem - ie half a days fees to find.

We are still paying off the debts that accumulated from me being sick, the move and now the flood. We are also now paying a second gardener for Barbara as Al has to spend so much time in London. I have grown most of our veg this year which has slashed the food bill but that isn't really our main out going.

I have had a huge dilemer to face - I've been making websites and working for a small publisher but these contracts are about to end and I need more money but am going to (hopefully) be doing an MRes two days a week. I've been trying to find a job I can do (medical restraints) on say Mondays and Fridays and possibly Wednesdays but am failing. I think I might have found another web contract but its being slow. This is pretty much my last chance to go back to Geology and I worked so hard for it in the first place I just cant face losing it.

I'm not sure what on earth I'm going to do and haven't really got time or energy to worry about it all. At the moment I am going with the flow knowing that I may have a mother about to go through more radiotherapy and other older people relying on us due to medical issues.

Al is feeling the strain aswell, I am probably doing the wornge thing but if I don't at least try to do my course again I feel that I shall be a non-person. Oh ok I'm being selfish and horrible and stuff and over all I'm scared I'm taking gambles here but I can't see anything else to do where I wont go insane.

With all the rain recently, the place where I park the van has developed an annoying tendency to be a lake. So I have to paddle to get in and out of the van, and so does Sarah - Jean, being sensible, just refuses and asks to be carried.

So I invoked the power of Freecycle and obtained a van full of hardcore, then used a pickaxe to dig out the mixture of hard-packed gravel and mud that comprises the parking area, making a trench which I filled back with hardcore.

After packing it down with a lot of treading, thumping, and the use of the big concrete roller, I dumped the gravel/mud mixture back in, to pack back together again and provide a smoothish surface.

I only had enough to do that one strip, but it's a start! When I've stopped aching from all this work, I'll bid for another load of hardcore on Freecycle and do the side where I get out - then another load for the strip down the middle...

UPDATE

It soon started to rain heavily later that day, so I took another picture. Sure enough, the lake is now constrained to one side of the parking area, and the bit I built up is kept out of the standing water. Yay!

As part of my tireless service to the village of Cranham, I'm now a member of the Cranham Village Hall Committee (and so a trustee of a second charity!)

This has its perks. In particular, when they renovated the hall, a big thick solid shelf was torn out, and I saved it from the skip to put it in my workshop. It's a bit battered, so not very pretty, but as a workshop shelf it'll only get more scarred, so that's fine.

After some trials and tribulations, I managed to mount it on the wall:

Mainly, I had to cut gaps in the brackets to let them fit over the black power conduit (while maintaining their structural integrity), despite the conduit being level with the wall but not level with the shelf, as the line of the blockwork in the wall is not level with respect to gravity. No surprise when you consider that the building had shifted somewhat since it was built.

So, for the record, despite the shelf looking quite wonky, it's level:

I also had the choice of 75mm or 50mm screws. 50mm screws would have only protruded about a centimetre into the wall, which would not bode well, while the 75mm screws had a good centimetre spare, so I cut little blocks of wood and ran 75mm screws through them, then through the brackets, then into the wall. There's something really satisfying about screwing a long, thick (6mm), screw tightly into a fresh, virgin, wall plug.

The 50mm screws were perfect for screwing the horizontals of the brackets to the undersides of the shelf, mind.

Finally, I mounted a strip of angle iron under the shelf, for clipping my set of clamps to:

Much nicer than having them languishing in a bag...

As an exercise in her art class, Sarah made some pictures by cutting out shapes in coloured paper:

Coincidentally, at about this time, I was thinking that I ought to screw a bit of wood to the wall in my workshop and hang tools from it to make them more accessible, and to store them more compactly than having them sitting on a shelf (which is the worst way of using a shelf EVER). So I was delighted when Sarah announced that she'd thought her pictures could be stuck to a piece of wood to make me a toolboard...

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