NotSheep

George nearly became a pancake yesterday afternoon.

This street is a pretty good one for kids to play and ride their bikes on - there’s one of those great big planter-roundabout traffic-slowing things in front of the house next to ours, and several more further down, plus all the streets in the neighbourhood twist and turn, so nobody’s speeding, really. But 28 miles per hour is still fast enough to flatten someone.

Especially if that someone is a just-turned-8yo who is having his first summer that he’s allowed to play out on the street and is just learning some road-sense and winds about at great speed on his bike.

Especially if you’re a cement-mixer truck.

It really was George’s fault, though the cement-mixer truck would have been wise to go a bit slower, considering that there are so many kids out and about. I was out in the driveway and didn’t see exactly what happened, just that George was right beside the truck, inches from the wheels. And that was scary enough. For all of us.

The driver screamed at George, who was more upset by the “are you stupid?” bit than the bit that involved swear-words. At the time I thought that was unnecessary, but afterwards I realised the driver was probably at least as scared as George and me. Anyway, I immediately brought George in and talked to him about it, explained that if he was going to ride out on the street, he needed to pay more attention (he claims not to have seen the truck). We talked again about it later in the evening, and we’ll talk again before he goes out on his bike again.

Maybe it will be a blessing in disguise - maybe the close call will shake George up enough that he does pay more attention from now on. I hope so.

Anyway, otherwise…my friend who was too sick to come last week visited yesterday instead. Her nearly-1yo is just starting to walk, and is very cute. I hadn’t seen them for ages, so it was great to see them yesterday. She also brought her infant car-seat, which means I can leave Jack in the big convertible seat for a while longer.

Scratchy spent a couple of hours in the evening trying to fix my CD/DVD drive. It has never really worked properly, not since I got this laptop two years ago. If I was a more organised person, I suppose I’d have done something about it while it was still under warranty, but anyway…recently it’s been refusing to recognise any CD or DVD, just giving me the message “F: is not accessible”. Anyway, Scratchy found the installation stuff, uninstalled it and reinstalled it (hence the previous note about the filth in my laptop…) and now its still picky, but it will recognise some stuff anyway. Better than nothing.