Month: September 2006

Picture: Mia eats her mobile phone in an effort to keep the bills down.

Yesterday we were rung up by the deputy head of the girls’ school who said that the staff were going to have a meeting so the girls couldn’t come to school in the morning.

‘So’, enquired Tony, ‘at what time should they come?’

‘You don’t understand, the meeting will last all day.’ replied the deputy head.

”All day?’ repeated a puzzled Tony.

‘We’re on strike! All of us, including the after school club so keep your children at home.’

‘Aaah.’ The penny finally drops.

You can imagine the girls’ reaction. So I stayed home to look after them and we conquered long division into the bargain – something which has been bugging Gwen for years. 

Oh yes, the reason? The council is trying to enact financial savings which will result in every tenth teacher being sacked.

This is Rosemary, our new kitten, who arrived while I was away in Germany. She came from the animal shelter and seems to have been the runt of the litter as she was extremely nervous and tiny when she arrived. We think she is younger than they told us but actually they didn’t know as the mother and litter were dumped on their doorstep. We never did find Hazel again though the door is open should she choose to return.

Getting a cat from the animal shelter is a very good deal as they are delivered treated and sterilised for about £70, a snip compared to what we spent on vaccinations and operations on Hazel. The only drawback is that Rosemary is not old enough to be sterilised so we will have a long journey back to go to the animal shelter vet (it is south of Aarhus).

The weather in Germany, just south of Cologne, was very warm, the beds at the monastery which was our hotel were quite hard. This was the final meeting of this particular project and we ended up discussing what we could try next. But for that we need to do a lot of preparatory work and get our idea (whatever it turns out to be) approved by the EU so the earliest start date for another project with this group would be autumn 2007. We didn’t have that much to do this time as the project team has been very efficient and effective during the previous 3 years of the lifetime of the project and we mainly needed to help with writing the final report.

Mia continues with her violin lessons but has yet to see the value of practising in between lessons. She thinks that Brownies/Beavers is great and we have had to rush out and buy the uniform as she is REALLY COMMITTED! Let’s hope so.

Gwen’s black eye saga has been brought to an end. We finally persuaded the scool that this was an issue worth meeting about and got an apology from the perpetrator. The PTA are taking up the issue of guidelines for when parents should be informed of incidents so we can’t really ask for more though we are convinced that a few ‘misunderstandings’ linger on.

On Saturday we went to the animal shelter to see how you go about getting a cat. They charge about £75 for which you not only get the cat but also one with all its vaccinations and sterilised. Remembering the vets bills from Hazel, that is a very good deal. But we couldn’t take a cat just then because we knew we were going to Legoland the next day and that we will all be away from the house on Thursday and Friday. They seemed a bit annoyed that we wouldn’t take our preferred cat that very instant so we have one reserved but if someone else wants him before we can go and collect him next Saturday then we’ll just have to choose another.

Then we went to Aarhus for the festival. We saw many strange sights including pink bras strung up like bunting in one street. Another strange thing was the marketing ploy by Pilgrim to get us to buy their jewellery. They had samples of their jewellery encased in about six blocks of ice. The picture shows Mia trying to use her finger to melt the ice. Some people seemed to be getting close.

The weather for Legoland was fantastic considering the date. So glad we didn’t go in early August as we had originally planned and when it didn’t stop raining. Gwen was allowed to have her best friend with her as a birthday treat and so Therese came with us.

Mia is now a Brownie and this week is bob a job week so I’m hoping she’ll pick the fruit which is in abundance at the moment. Unfortunately that doesn’t include our hazelnuts of which there don’t seem to be any at all this year.

There are mosquitoes by the thousand though. It’s a very bad year for them and Brownies is always outdoors so Mia got bitten quite a bit tonight after going to Brownies.

Gwen went to Bornholm with her class from Thursday to the following Tuesday. She enjoyed it enormously and recommends that we make a visit as a family. She took over a hundred photos and you can see 11 on our photosite (link is on the newsletter not here as I don’t want to make it too public). On the other hand there were several incidents of varying seriousness including that Gwen received a black eye. Therefore we collected our daughter looking as though she had been in a boxing match. Nobody said anything to us either at the time it occurred or when they returned to our care so I’m afraid that we have been up to the school to complain and phoned both the headmaster and one of Gwen’s teacher after a class session in which it seemed that Gwen’s incident was described as an accident which it most certainly was not. We now wait for the school to act as I don’t think it can be good for Gwen to have her parents continually haranguing the staff.

Meanwhile it was Tony’s birthday last Monday. We had decided to postpone it when we thought he would be home very late that night from Greenland but as we all now know he returned home early. However Gwen wasn’t there so there was still a reason to postpone it. When they discovered at work that Tony had come home early they organised a surprise birthday party on the day in the woods below Kalø¸ where we had a barbecue dinner. That went very well.

The barbecue meal quality was surpassed only by the birthday meal we finally had on Friday at Grenaa where the food was ten cuts above what we normally experience in this part of Denmark.