Bare tree

This tree, just outside the bottom of the garden, is one of my favourites in winter.  I love the shapes of the branches.

And so Busy Wednesday rolled around again.  Still not having got over my cold, and having slept very badly, I did my stint as TallGirl's alarm clock and then headed back to bed.  I woke again just before she was due to leave the house (she gets a lift to school) and things were too quiet...  Obviously she was still asleep...  So, she speed-dressed and dashed out of the door, leaving in her wake a string of instructions about things I had to bring to school for her at noon for her afternoon sports club.

And so the morning was spent washing sports kit, drying sports kit, making a packed lunch, and dashing up to school to deliver all of the above.  TallGirl has taken to offering my services as taxi driver to all and sundry, and so we brought BestFriend home with us after sports club, just to add an extra complexity to the riding/basketball pick-up/drop-off routine.  Late finishing riding meant we were very late for CarbBoy and all round slightly stressed.  We've had a little chat about me feeling a bit taken advantage of (it's not like BestFriend's parents ever call or text to ask if it's ok or to say thanks or offer to do the same one day) and I think a better balance will be found.

Dinner, showers, long chat about elements.  I've been listening lately to Bill Bryson's Short history of Everything (or whatever it's called) which I'm now evangelising to everyone.  (For those who don't know it's a history of how everything we know became such, embracing a history of all the sciences.)  Fascinating stuff and kept light with lots of entertaining anecdotes and tales.  I feel sure that if I had read/listened to something like it when I was a teenager then I'd be a scientist now.  There's still so much to discover!  Is it too late for me.....?  Anyway we chatted about salt, how its constituents are dangerous/poisonous but it is essential to life, unless you have to much - which will kill you.  I liked his description of how it is not so much that Planet Earth so perfectly suits us - with the soil containing the trace elements our bodies need to live, and so on - but rather that we have perfectly evolved to take advantage of it.  I'd not thought of it like that before.  I feel rather in tune with my cabbages now.