A Quiet Weekend
After finishing work on Friday evening I cycled home via the supermarket with Miss 17, and picked up all manner of goodies to help out with dinner. The barbecue we lucked into on Freecycle was going to get it’s first try-out. I am reliably informed that “Friday night pizza night” has become “Friday night barbecue night” throughout the summer.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about barbecues – while it takes twenty minutes to cook, and ten minutes to eat the food, it then takes an hour and a half to clear away all the stuff everybody has left out, and to scrub the damn barbecue afterwards. While the kids gathered around the chiminea late in the evening, I was still in the kitchen, washing the stops down, and clearing up.
I spent all of yesterday – Saturday – washing clothes, and getting them dry. I think perhaps the washing machine did about eight or ten loads during the day and night. At least I now get to go to Germany next week secure in the thought that no fingers can be pointed at me. I also went grocery shopping, and folded about a thousand items of clean clothing that had amassed in the lounge throughout the week. I doubt any of the children will take their clothes and put them away, but we can dream, can’t we?
While running back and forth with washing, emptying the fridge of mouldy food, and filling the bins with rubbish the rest of the family had seen fit to just leave around the place, I looked in on the England Sweden football match at the world cup. I missed both goals, but was happy England have progressed – happy for my own children more than anything.
Of course not all of our children are football mad. Miss 17 announced early in the evening “I don’t care who wins – I just want this stupid football thing to be over”.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Miss 13 won the “Coach’s Player of the Year” at their annual awards yesterday evening. I’ve never seen her smile so much as when she arrived home with the presentation box, and glass plaque. She even tidied her room, in order to put the award in pride of place among the various other football trophies she has earned over the years.
Today is Sunday. I was up at about 9 (shocking, I know), and wandered into town to re-fill the contents of my work washbag. Miss 17 has been “borrowing” razors from me. I needed a new toothbrush and toothpaste anyway. Here’s the thing – why in the actual hell was the supermarket full of seventy year olds at 10am on Sunday morning? I swear – it was busier than a weekday morning. Just to cap things off, the supermarket obviously runs on skeleton staff on a Sunday, so at one point there was a queue perhaps twenty deep at the self-checkouts, all of which were waiting for staff intervention. I thought some of the old people might spontaneously combust in anger – but at least it took my mind of the queue. I mean – it’s not like they had anything else to do with their day, is it?
I’m now hiding out in the junk room, trying to catch the remaining fleas the cats have brought into the house yet again (don’t even dare ask how furious I am about it), and waiting for the British Grand Prix to kick off at Silverstone. It’s one of the few races that gets free TV coverage – next year Formula One goes completely pay-per-view, so I imagine that will mean the end of me bothering with it any more.
Anyway. I need to go find a beer.
Later this afternoon I’ll have to start ironing work shirts back into a suitcase, ready to travel again tomorrow morning. Urgh… Trying not to think too much about that.