NotSheep

What a mixture today has been!

Shortly after 9, Barney left to cycle to the barber’s shop – he has a week of Air Cadet camp starting tomorrow, and they expect hair to be fairly short. He eventually found the bit of paper with the details (little things like where and when and what to pack) this morning, after days of being told we needed to know these things.

I left with George and Freddy not long after Barney, and dropped them off at the sailing club for the last day of their sailing course (for this week – they’re going to do the Level 2 next week). Then I took myself off to see a potential place for home-ed group meetups. A couple of other mums from the group came too, and we were all very pleased with the set-up. When we first decided to try to arrange monthly meets, we were discouraged to find that we’d need group insurance and all sorts of documentation – well beyond the reach of a very informal group such as ours. But then someone put me in touch with someone else, and the someone else is part of a volunteer management committee for a community association, and they said they could let us use their building, which has all the facilities we could possibly ask for, both indoors and out – and at no cost! The location is ideal and the community association couldn’t be more helpful, so we are delighted

The other mums who came had their children with them (I’d left mine at home with Scratchy), and M, one of those children, was disappointed to find that Jack wasn’t there. So when I left, M came home with me – and his mum took H, one of the third mum’s children, home with her Jack was very happy to see me arrive with M, and they had a great afternoon racing around here.

In the meantime I spent a long time on the phone, trying to get someone out to look at my refrigerator, which stopped working overnight. No freezing, no refrigerating. It’s less than two years old, and we’ve already had to call the engineer twice to replace the ice-mechanism – but this time, the whole cooling system has gone. I am not at all happy with the way the retailer and manufacturer are dealing with this, nor that they don’t seem to be at all concerned at leaving a family of eight without refrigeration facilities for who-knows-how-long. I have made it very clear that unless it is dealt with promptly, I will be taking legal action. As it’s now Friday evening and nothing appears to have been done, it looks like that’s what’s going to happen.

Tomorrow…my car goes to the mechanic in the morning, to see if a couple of potential problems are real problems or not, and we also have to head into the city to buy some things that Barney does not have but which he needs for camp. It would have been nice to know about these things a bit sooner! Then we are going to look at a couple of vehicular purchase possibilities. The first is about an hour away, the other about 40 minutes from that, and then we need to be back home in time to take Barney to Camp for 4.45 – I’m really not sure how we’re going to manage all that in the available hours (or when we’re going to have time to collect my car from the mechanic), but we’ll have to do it somehow!