Month: December 2006

Tony lost half his workday today because of a bomb scare. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. The story is that they were storing a dangerous liquid at Kalø and after 20-30 years it had begun to dry out. Apparantly this liquid becomes even more dangerous and liable to blow up the drier it gets. (Don’t forget that they have explosives and so on for the canon nets they use to catch birds). Anyway one of the technicians found this bottle of dangerous goo today while looking for explosives for their next bird catching expedition and realised what it was and how dangerous it could be and so the police were called, the bomb squad were called, the ambulances were on standby and Tony and his mates had to stand outside all afternoon watching the remote controlled robot going in to remove this stuff. And just as Tony was unlocking the car to go home there was an almighty explosion as the experts had taken this stuff to a field below and blown it up in a controlled explosion.

So Tony will have to go to work tomorrow anyway to finish what he could not get done this afternoon and this is why it pays to tidy up and not forget about potential bombmaking equipment for 30 years!

There was a special offer of a violin in the neighbourhood discount supermarket for just under £30 and Mia wanted this. We advised her that the quality may be dubious but she agreed to buy it with her own money anyway. I couldn’t believe that we’d got not only the violin but also the case for the above price. I thought there had been a mistake at the checkout but no that was the deal!

After one of Mia’s teachers offered to fix the strings and tune it, it seemed to work passably well though it is the bow which seems to be the weak point as Mia’s bow from her rented violin works well on the new instrument while the new bow seems to have areas of weakness where it just won’t play the note. Not bad for £30 even if we end up having to buy a new bow.

Mia is dressed as a Christmas pixie in the picture because it was the last day of school and she was distributing sweets dressed like that together with her colleagues from the school council. She had a friend to stay that day who desperately wanted to try out what it was like playing a violin. Of course Mia is the expert on that in our house and she was a severely critical teacher to her friend. But Johanne was persistent and prepared to overlook the harsh comments. ‘It’s no good, you always make the same mistake!’ and so on.

Mia had her second and final performance in the choir at the local church this afternoon. One of the draws was pop and nibbles with the vicar afterwards.

Yesterday we had a phone call just after 7pm from a lady who thinks that a stray cat visiting her may be ours. So we all went off in the car to her house to take a look but unfortunately for everybody concerned it wasn’t Hazel.

Thank you for voting in the Edublog awards. I don’t know what you did but it worked! We won in our category. I listened in to the live online awards ceremony but rather ignominiously could not make my acceptance speech as my audio settings were wrong!!!

Obviously you don’t want to live in Birmingham. What would your song be like? You’ll get the gist after the first two minutes of this 8 minute video. More explanations at the end if you get that far.