The Week

Xyla as seaweed.

This was our final full week of school as next Wednesday is the last day for Rose and Xyla.  We will have two days in Cheshire after that before driving down to London where we will stay with my friend from high school, Cam Smith.  He and I have traded visits a couple of months ago and it will good to see him.  Disappointed that his wife, Shannon, will not be there - It would be nice to see her, too.

Our first order of Business in London on Saturday will be to visit my Grandmother's friends Gill and Jim Joy who live south of London.  They were close with Vera when she lived in Croyden some 25 years ago or something.  Andrea and I have stayed with them once, but that was before R and X.

In addition to doing the usual in London, we will see the Wizard of OZ and Andrea will give a talk at Imperial University.  Good stuff.

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Xyla talking about process.  (Really.)

Tuesday was sports day at the school.  The kids started with a sport carousel.  Picture a huge field with 16 different activities.  There was an army crawls, a hockey obstacle course, tossing games, etc.  The kids were all in multi-aged teams and each of these was divided into four.  Each small group spent some time at a station, collected as many points as possible within an arbitrary amount of time and then moved on.  The whole thing finished with a set of races (in like-aged groups).  It was pretty impressive how well the whole thing was organized and the kids had a great time.  There was also a Dads' race.  I did this but got dusted (we all did) by some guy who had the body of a 100 meter sprint champion.  I caught him later looking at the footage that his wife shot with her phone.  He had a huge grin on his face.

About to play air guitar.

Wednesday was the class show.  They did Sally the Starfish.  Rose was a narrator. (This word is not pronounced anything like it is in American.  Even without the accent it is unintelligible. Oh, and I know that American is technically not a distinct language, but if anyone tells you that the language over here is the same as the language over there - they didn't spend any time away from their tour group.)  Rose did wonderfully with her lines.  Xyla was a seaweed.  She designed and executed her own costume.  I was the producer and although I had some very solid design tips, she brushed me aside and did her own thing.  The resulting costume was excellent, as was her dancing and singing.

Nothing else major happened.  We played a lot of Too Many Monkeys at the Stag's Inn, went to the library, went to the park - stuff like that.

Andrea arrived yesterday and it is certainly nice to have her back.

Liverpool.

She met us at the park where we were helping celebrate Allegra's birthday.  Nice party.  Parks always make sense to me for birthdays.  Good one.

Today we went to Tate Liverpool to check out the Rene Magritte exhibit.  Awesome stuff.  This is not a pipe was in full effect.  Xyla was laughing her tail off at this and the This is a piece of cheese piece.  I got some mileage out of that one during the rest of the day.

Too Many Monkeys at the coffee shop at half time.

Back to the museum afterwards where Rose played air guitar on Carl Andre's 144 Magnesium Square.  Funny how people don't want to step on that thing.  They walk right around.  When I was walking on it one of the tiles squeaked and I thought, "Oh, no! I just broke it."  Silly.

Tons of rain today, more probably tomorrow.  Hope not.  It would be nice to go to the peaks and mess around.





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