On your marks...

School cross country today.  It really brought it all back: the rain, the mud, the falling, the bloody knees, the elbowing... and that was just the crowd.  CarbBoy did himself (and his new trainers) proud.  And given our school is by a very long way the smallest in this contest, we did brilliantly - with three out of the top five boys, and one of only two girls of ours in the race placed too.  Bravo kids!  I'm sure the home crowd hollering them on helped.

TallGirl was marshalling (and thus avoiding a day full of end of term tests) and ended up soaked to the knees and freezing cold.  It was probably an unfortunate day for the autumn weather to properly arrive, but at least we had no heat stroke to deal with in the near endless relay and quiz that followed. Parents are encouraged not to help too much with the quizzes, so I was delighted to see some new-to-the-school parents blatantly googling answers (oh come on, how many 9-11 year olds can name the Italian President?)

Later, some frustratingly unsatisfying shopping (no-one could answer my perfectly straightforward question about stoves).  So tomorrow I've been given permission from an invoice-just-paid-therefore-gung-ho Mr B to just go ahead and order 'a bunch' of stoves.  Cool.  (Or rather, warm.)  This is well timed as I had to put a wee heater on earlier when I was dealing with paperwork. 

Earlier there had been the usual lovely chat and limited school admin with CheeseLady and more chat with our gardener (I think I will have to come up with a better name for him, since I mentioned blip to him so he may actually read this!)