Getting together!

We just had a great weekend visit with some Canadian friends! And so we had to spruce the place up a bit, mow the lawn and all, right? As you can see the front lawn is not really very large (a bit bigger than a beach towel) and so the kids got out the clippers and set to work! They carefully cut, raked, swept and then packed all the cuttings into a bucket, jumping up and down to pack it all in. It was quite a hoot, actually, and got us out in the front of the house, where we rarely go, and we met a neighbour we hadn't met before and the children did not squabble for an hour! Give 'em a crazy job to do, and all is well.


Once upon a time I worked with Katherine at a newspaper. I answered the phones and photocopied things and she was my supervisor, though I remember afternoons where she went into the back room to finish a painting for her art classes. Not sure what she was supposed to be doing! It was very boring job with crappy pay, but the staff were all a laugh a minute, and the boss was crazy. Once my coworker was sent out for 24 beer which we all drank while listening to the budget speech on the CBC. I guess the paper was out for that week already! Anyways, I met some great people there and have kept in touch with quite a few. Katherine married Barry and they live in London now. Margrit is Katherine's friend from when they were 9 or something, and she came to England for a holiday and they all came up here for the weekend. In this picture we are on a bridge from which we can look down on punters, and it was generally decided that none of us really wanted to do the punting, and none of us really wanted to fork over the £10 each to pay for a punter, and there were other fun things to do anyways. Mature and reasonable thinking, to my mind. I like the idea of punting, but actually it's fraught with stress. So we showed them the Round Church and some colleges, took them to the Eagle pub for gigantic portions of fish and chips, found a new Edward VII post box, they ate all my cheese....
We did take the city sightseeing bus, which was especially thrilling for the kids because on Sundays the bus goes down special pedestrian streets it doesn't usually go on! We all froze, because it was supposed to be sunny and 20 degrees Celsius, but it wasn't. But one must sit at the front of the open-topped double-decker anyways!
This is Elaine trying to push over Kings College Chapel! We started the silly picture theme earlier when they held up the garden rakes to look like they were raking the clouds and stuff. Got to get better at this! We are still pretty good at other silly photographs, like the perennial favourite, the couch picture.