Month: May 2006

While Anne was in Germany for an EU project meeting Mia was off with a friend to the first day opening of the local theme park to try out their new attraction. She reported that it wasn’t very scary but we later found out that it wasn’t running at full speed yet. Meanwhile Tony and Gwen went to the Scandinavian animal park where the new attraction is a collection of polar bears (rescued from various unsuitable zoos and exhibiting some nervous behaviour). The polar bears have 600 tons of ice made for them daily but here they are just frolicking in the water. Gwen thinks the park ought to get some lynxes next and had a chance to tell the owner this as he was around. He told her it was on his list but he has to wait until suitable individuals turn up as they don’t take any of their animals from the wild.

We did have one very hot week but this wasn’t it. But as soon as one little ray of sunshine showed itself the girls set up the hammock outside. Last week we had a parent’s evening for Mia’s class which included a slide show of approximately 345 photographs taken during the school year. This took about 45 minutes to get through and included shots of them cooking things over an open fire, sculpting wood with knives, chopping wood with axes, trampolining on the Fox trampoline and making fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together as well as making flints (the only picture with safety equipment in evidence).

Now it is cold and wet and Tony is going off on a goose catch which he thinks has little chance of success because the weather is bad and it is too late in the season.

PS. Always take what Tony says with a pinch of salt and leaven it up on the optimistic side. They caught the most birds ever.

Tomorrow Gwen won’t be coming home as the fifth years at the school in Kolind are coming to Nimtofte and they are all going to sleep on the floor of the gym until Thursday. This is all part of a long term effort to get the year cohort to get to know each other before the Nimtofte cohort go over to Kolind in a year’s time. There the year will be mixed up and divided into about three classes.

Anne is going to Germany for 3 days starting  off tomorrow evening for yet another EU meeting. We run the virtual meetings for this project. Meanwhile in Grenaa the two course centres are going to merge. This is apparantly very much an opportunity rather than a threat. We shall see. Today we had a long session where the two staff complements were meant to get to know each other prior to working with each other from August on. Come to think of it, this sounds very much like Gwen’s event on Wednesday except that we were allowed to go home after dinner!

The daffodils are in full flower at Grenaa, the temperatures are high at the moment but many trees still don’t have leaves so it feels a bit strange to be sweltering under bare trees.

Denmark is probably one of the few European countries not to have a bank holiday on May 1st (or nearest Monday there till).  Gwen and Mia were to be found at serious risk of having one school day too many recently and were given the day off school at about two weeks notice. Unfortunately both Anne and Tony had meetings and other important matters to attend to (such as today being the deadline for handing in income tax declarations) so the girls could not stay home.  Both got invites to spend the day with friends who live in fact across the road from each other. So they got there rather early for a social visit as Tony had to be at an 8am meeting anyway and by all accounts had a great day playing computer games, cuddling some new born kittens, brushing down a couple of horses owned by one of the friends and hopping about on the trampoline of the other girl. Gwen somehow managed to get two ice creams during the day; a perk of having divorced parents who don’t know what the other parent has dished out, I gather.