I’m sat in the lounge, tapping away on my laptop, downloading music from e-music, and feeling pretty tired. I guess the computer clock says it’s nearly midnight though…
We had a pretty busy day today. This morning we went to visit our friend G, who had a motorbike racing accident last week - he highsided in the rain and broke his shoulder. He’s home from hospital now, and wandering around the house with his arm stuck in a support contraption.
I spent most of the time we were then teaching their children how to play chess (TJ asked me - then his little sister Z piped up “I want to learn to play Chest too). Bless.
I’ve taught several children to play chess now, and have got the basic routine pretty much sorted. The key seems to be teaching each piece on it’s own on the board - how it moves, etc - so they remember what each piece does, and get an idea of basic tactics before adding too many pieces into the mix. Today’s lesson ended with me doing a quiz on “what is each piece called, and what can it do”. TJ is a damn smart kid… he picked all the pieces up in the one session. I guess I’ll have to see if he remembers what the pieces do next week.
After visiting, we carried on into town to buy some washing powder (we live a tremendously exciting life).
Oh - before I forget, I just want to mention that we had to visit the Post Office in town, because our postman is too damn lazy to deliver letters needing recorded delivery. This is becoming normal in the UK by the way - the postman will often write a card out saying you were not in, because he/she has not brought your letter or parcel with him/her. What’s more, they never complete the card they put through the door, because it would identify them. Today we had to go and pick up a letter…. apparently a letter was too much hard work to deliver for our fat, lazy, useless f*cking postman.
Anyway - we got back this afternoon, and I got my bikes out of the shed and washed them. I had to take them in to the bike shop in town this afternoon for them to try and make one decent mountain bike out of one old (non-functional) Scott bike, and one barely-functional cheap hulk of a shit bike I bought in Halfords last year. They thought the story was quite amusing in the bike shop - and thought I had done well to make the cheap bike last over a year. Apparently they’ll give me a call in the morning after having a good look at both bikes.
After dropping the bikes in we went and bought my parents a webcam and a headset so they can use use Skype on their computer - I’ll install it when we go and visit them at the end of the week. I can’t wait to see my mum’s face when she realises how simple Skype is (and that it’s free).
Anyway - like I said at the start of this post… it’s late! I need sleep. We’re planning on going to Oxford tomorrow to visit the museums.