A lion’s rage
This entry is mainly an excuse to show the above photo taken on a recent trip to Ebeltoft. We seem to have shrunk!
Tony is off to Greenland early tomorrow so we decided that we would celebrate both my and Mia’s birthday a little early. We organised a Magical Mystery Tour last weekend. The girls didn’t know where we were going. We headed in the direction of Grenaa on Friday morning on the pretext that I had forgotten something at work and then drove up to the ferry head and got on the ferry to Sweden.
Then it was a rather long drive to our final destination, Vimmerby which is the birth place of Astrid Lindren, writer of the Pippi Longstocking stories among many others. There we stayed in the garden shed which you see in the picture and had unlimited access to Astrid Lindgren World. We got back very late on Sunday night. Very naughty as the girls were starting school again today but it was a short day for them and I think they managed to stay awake long enough to receive their timetables which is mostly what they do on the first day.
This should show a map summary of our UK travels over the last two weeks. You can instead click to enlarge the picture above but note that this is not interactive.
The next school year will begin in a school in the next town for Gwen in August. Not because she has reached any kind of transition milestone but just because the local school is small and stops at Year 6. Over the years they have established a range of traditions for the school leavers, one of which is dressing up and entertaining the younger children after they have had coffee with the teachers. So the pictures shows Gwen in her costume. But which decade had they chosen? Was it the sixties, the eighties or the nineties? Use the comment function to have a guess. One thing the Year 6 children do is dish out sweeties to the other children and Gwen said she had been attacked for her sweets on Thursday! ‘I’m sure we were never that bad at their age!’
Wednesday was Big Bath Day when the whole school traditionally goes to the beach and has sand sculpture competitions. The children had been told they would not go if it rained and it did rain almost continuously as well as hailing at some point. But still the trip was not cancelled and the children ended up sheltering in the public toilets waiting for the worst of the weather to blow itself out and hoping the bus would come soon. The girls came home soaking wet and not terribly impressed with their day.
Time to use the comment function at the bottom of this post! What is going on in this picture? I am there (you may need to click to enlarge in order to spot me). This was an activity designed to make us better trainers. But what are we doing?
Last night Gwen slept with the sharks at the Kattegat Centre. This was an end of year treat for her class. Before they could bed down they helped to prepare the food for the sharks and other sea creatures. They are apparantly very fussy eaters as they had to take the beaks off the octopuses before the sharks would deign to eat them.
It was real Night at the Museum stuff as the kids were locked in to the centre and the creatures all came alive after dark – oh, I forgot, they were alive in the first place! Nobody got much sleep anyway as they were up again at 6.15 and had to be collected by groggy parents at 6.45. Gwen got the day off to recover but everyone else had to turn up for school and work as normal.
Just watched the Chinese film ‘Hero’ which is brilliant even though I don’t normally like action or martial arts movies. The cinematography is stunning and the psychological angle makes it watchable to the end and no I don’t think any person in their right mind could take this as a justification for totalitarian regimes in the modern world. Mia (who watched the first half hour or so) was amazed to see women fighting on equal terms with the men. Another plus was that despite the unremiting violence it is remarkably light on gore. It is fantastical which Mia found hard to accept – she kept pointing out the unrealistic aspects even though far more impossible things happen in the cartoons she loves to watch.
Talking of movies, don’t forget to vote in the poll two posts down from this one on the videos included in the homestead site!
Tony was away Monday and Tuesday on a ’round Denmark cruise’ with the military while they showed him and his colleagues the wonderful nature that has grown up on their training grounds. They wanted advice on how to maintain and improve them, but at one site where they had dammed a small stream and created a wonderful lake and wetland, full of birds, they really could not have done any better. There were no casualties despite being out on the range with “live” training, peak of the trip was a trip on a coastguard vessel under the huge “Storebæ¦ltbroen” (the suspension bridge linking Zealand and Funen) surrounded by harbour porpoises!
Did you know that Mia collects key rings? Even though she does not have any keys… The picture shows her collection to date.
Attached to this entry is a poll about the fox family videos which appear periodically on the Homestead site, not here where we occasionally add public You Tube videos. We would like to know if it is worth continuing to upload them.