Melting

The YFG has just returned from two days on a Geography field trip, and there is a little sunburn on her shoulders, where there is a hand-shaped mark where the suncream did go and sunburn where it missed!  They were near Sheringham and Hunstanton on the north Norfolk coast, investigating coastal habitats  - ideal for this hot spell we are having.

The EFG and I had three hours in the garden last night, chatting, in the shade, eating our tea, and reading, enjoying the cool breeze.  I had the absolute bliss of washing my bed linen, it baking in the sun and then going straight back on the bed - and it smells g-l-o-r-i-o-u-s-l-y fresh and clean!  I'd do that every day if the weather would co-operate.

And today - it has been more of an indoorsy kind of day, hiding from the heat as much as we could, and just popping out as much as necessary. I've pottered in the garden tonight, watering the tomatoes, beans and courgettes so that they live through this heat.

I'm not particularly looking forward to going to bed tonight, as it seems that the overnight temperatures are likely to remain above 20 degrees.......and that is going to make for uncomfortable conditions. One of the neighbours has recommended opening the loft hatch and letting heat escape that way - but the girls thought that the number of spiders which would make their way down would outweigh the benefits, so we didn't try that.

Another chilled drink and another cool shower are in order before I try to get to sleep, I think.  At least we are not taxing the hot water system this week!

Facebook friends

As part of my bereavement support work, I have set up a Facebook group so that widows can chat with each other in a safe place.  The partner I am working with on this project has been clear that she would like this to be a Christian women's group, and I respect that. I am not sure that I won't expand into other groups in the future, though. If you are a Christian widow and would like to join the group, let me know in the comments [which I won't publish] and we'll go on from there.

It's HOT here today - Keep Cool and Carry on!

Quick catch up

• The YFG has left this morning for her Duke of Edinburgh practice expedition to Yorkshire. They are starting and finishing in Scarborough and it was an early start to leave the school at 6am, but they are looking forward to a MacDonald's breakfast on the way. She did load up with some porridge before she left, but the more calories she can take on board before they start, the better, I think: she doesn't have an awful lot of food in the pack for the four days, and I am sure she will have lost weight when she gets back!
• The weather is playing havoc with me keeping the weeds under control in the garden and I have given up!  All I am doing now is managing to keep the grass to a reasonable level......
• UJ has been away to the coast with my sister for a week, and we are looking forward to seeing him tomorrow and catching up with his news.
• The EFG helped collect donations at a Food bank drive in Tesco last week, and I worked the same thing in a different Tesco last Saturday morning - I am relieved to be able to say that both received very generous donations, and people were generally very supportive.
• My dad has had to have a chest x-ray. He's not doing brilliantly. We have to wait until he sees the doctor on Friday to get the results, but I am hoping that the doctor will advise him about the wisdom of the August cruise, as I really don't want them to go if he is not well enough.
• Work is going well, and I am still enjoying it........which is good!!  I am getting fed up of people telling me how tired I look, though, so I have had to invest in some proper make-up. Getting up at 4.30am this morning will not help matters, but I shall have an early night tonight. I am NOT tired!
• Much love to all of you who keep reading, now that posting is more sporadic. See you again later this week.

They're back and I'm off!

The girls returned from Stirling on Saturday evening, quite travel weary but full of tales!  The YFG had loved the campus at Stirling, and had "quite liked" the uni in Glasgow. She didn't like the city itself: apologies to any Glaswegian readers but her overall impression of the city was that "everyone smokes and it stinks" but she did love the Kelvingrove museum - she is a big museum fan!

They gathered themselves yesterday and returned to the normal routine of school today - the YFG as the student and the EFG in the Teaching Assistant role she is trying out.

And me? I've got a whole week off work!

I'm going to spend it well - interviewing potential teachers for school today, governors meeting tomorrow, course on Thursday, pootling about in the garden [if it ever stops raining] and sorting the house out post-EF so that rooms vaguely return to how they once were......might be a big job!  Some sock knitting or crochet might also be on the cards, but I am not holding my breath. Some reading is definitely going to be enjoyed.

See you soon!

Glasgow

The girls have been in Glasgow since Wednesday, and they are having a day at leisure in the city today so that they can see what they think to it all. They travelled up on Wednesday so that the EFG could accompany the YFG to the uni open day there on Thursday: she likes it, but the talks about the subject she is interested in were cancelled due to industrial action, so that was a tad disappointing for them. The news last night was that they had walked over 22000 steps, had a wander by Kelvingrove and round a museum or two. Today I hope they don't go mad in the shops......

They weren't terribly impressed with the view from their hotel room window.

Tomorrow morning they will be up at the crack of dawn to catch a train just after 7am to get to Stirling to go to the open day there. After that, they are coming home - and I will be very glad to have them home again - it's getting a bit quiet here on my own.

Hopefully they will take some photos to show me where they have been and what they think - it is years since I was in either Glasgow or Stirling!

RIP Jo Cox

(image from bbc.co.uk/news)

Having been closeted in a staff meeting for over 6 hours today, I had no idea that this appalling murder had taken place until I returned home and switched on the news.  The full details are on the news website here but it is a terrible thing to have happened: a lovely young mother, an MP and someone who seems to have campaigned tirelessly for what she believed in, has been shot and stabbed in her constituency, on her home turf. Makes you wonder what this world is coming to.

Scaring folks

The EFG did her stint at the Foodbank on Tuesday. She arrived at 9.30 for her session until 11.30 but by 10.30, everything was done that needed to be done. She has chatted with the other volunteers and apparently, this is happening more often these days. Why? Because they are just not getting the volume of donations that they usually get, so it takes far less time to sort and stack what they do get.

The consensus of opinion between the volunteers is that the EU referendum is scaring people, and so they are not donating in case they need their cash/stash of food themselves because of all the headlines in the news about what might happen either way. Their amateur philosophy is that if we leave the EU, the donations will fall even further as people worry about what might happen. They are worried, though, that even if the vote is to stay, the donations will not resume at the rate that is required to have adequate stocks on the shelves, because of the uncertainty about the way that the EU will develop.

They are still feeding people, but they don't have the resilience in the back room stock that they had a couple of months ago [well, they have plenty of baked beans at her particular Foodbank, but not a lot of anything else] and the donations boxes in the supermarkets around here are not filling up the way they did, she says.

I preached on gratitude this last Sunday [one of my favourite topics] and one of my points is that we should rely on God each and every day, and give thanks for all that he gives us on a daily basis. I try to remember that whether or not we are in the EU, people still need to be fed when they are hungry.  I am not into politics in a big way, and I just have my own little opinion, but even I can see that there is a lot of scaremongering going on on both sides, and it is hard to watch the damage it is doing.