The Curse Looms Bigger than Ever (by sarah)

Yes friends it is back - today in the Snell-Pym disastor sytcom we have exploding taps and clonking vans!

Five in the morning sleepily I moan at Alaric fro having a shower that early. He grumbles at me for leaving said shower on. There was a brief pause and he gets up to investigate.

Not the shower, no lo! It is the squeacky cold tape downstair the washer had finially gone and water was jettosoning out of it at a scary rate. And so poor Al hurts his hand trying to turn the stop cock off.

Now we had known the washer was going due to the squeak in fact we had bought washers for the tape over a year ago but could not get to the washers to replace them. On top of that we could not get the stop cock to completely turn off.

Then there was some confussion later in the day when I thought Al had told Barabara but apparently hadn't been able to find her and she came around to ask if I'd been having trouble with the washing machine!

After alot of talking round in circles before things became clear it was a wait for the emergancy plumber - who fixed it in under five minutes - he said to be fair it was only an easy job if you had the right tools becuase they are stupid tapes!

He was also impressed with our messures to reduce the amount of water lost - ie we put on the fitting for the hose pipe with a penny in it and then cable tied it to the tape and placed tea towls over it to reduce pressure spray.

It was a nasty day as I had left banana chutney half made the night before thinking it would be a simple task to finish it today - sigh.

Then I managed to loose the work I had spent all morning doing on the laptop as it crashed whilst I was saving - it somehow lost the stuff I thought I'd already saved as well :/ The whole file thing - I'm wondering if I forgot to do intermediate saves or something - what ever the cuase I was not very happy as you can imagin!

The Alaric leaves the house to go and help at another Cub group in a sort of exchange thing him and one of their leaders has set up. But a few minutes later he comes dashing back in the house in a bit of a panic as the van isn't starting.

Clonk clonk and the lights go out - so this ment I found myself helping to strip some copper wire to fix the positive contact on the battery and wating Al sand paper it. To our emmense suprise it worked and the van started but I think we are now both just waiting for the next incident to hit us full force!

SIGH

Daffodils (by sarah)

The finially Daffodiles have died in our garden - obviously at their hieght we had many different types - Barabara said she'd never seen so many of them in the garden before - I've missed a few types like the really fluffy dwarf ones but I photographed as many as possible - here they are:

Walnut Tree (by sarah)

I was going to writ a nice post about how well Jeans Walnut tree is doing, it was in budding nicely and looking really good so I thought - I must remember to take a phot of that for the blog - I went back the next day with the camera only to discover that the deer have munched it 🙁

So in hope that it can recover we fashioned a deer protector out of some chicken wire - as its actually two bits of chicken wire its not that sturdy and kept flopping over so we had to use one of the hooks for our garden lantens to keep it in place.

We're hoping its not too late :'(

Of Easter Eggs and New Hats (by sarah)

Jean was spoilt over Easter by a second Easter egg hunt this time with Barbaras friends grandson joining in the fun though he did decide that Jean could have all the eggs he found as the Easter Bunny had left him so many at home and he wasnt sure he'd be able to eat them all!

Him and Jean had a great time playing with the soft play kit and the scout and cub sports equipment and of course Jeans slide - though there was also an unfortunate incident with Als metal watering can and the cattle grid and a very forlorn and guilty looking child and a large dent - we only heard the crash so still not entirely sure what happened!

Jean likes Minty the dog who was also there at the egg hunt though she does seem to think smeel dogs are sort of strange cats!

Of Easter Bunnies and Helicopters (by sarah)

Over the Easter weekend Alarics Uncle Roderick and his duaghter Philippas visited - they arrived in Rodericks helicopter! Jean must be the only little girl to get shoe deliveries by helicopter! She also now waves and waits expectantly every time she sees a helicopter - planes, helicopters, cars and vans all get called too-too (her impression of a horn).

Barabara had the idea of doing an Easter egg hunt with her so me and Philippa hide some little chocolate eggs along the wall of the raised flower beds - Jean adored this though didnt realise the eggs were food!

Whilst Roderick took Barabara up for a tour of the villiage by air we made yummy mexician ffood which we fed to the unfortunate Phillippa who had spewed breakfast on the flight over. We also got to watch Jean enloy her new Weeee!