16/52 2018

Week 16
16 - 22 April

The weather having drastically improved, we're spending a lot more time out in the back yard again, with toys including the Little Tikes car and some big sticks of chalk. Jamie is really getting to grips with the alphabet and we were playing a game where I would write whatever letters he asked, wherever he wanted. Entirely unprompted, he asked for the letters "O", "D" and "D" on his car door, and then, satisfied, clambered in.

45/52 2017

Week 45
06 - 12 November

One of our places that we go quite often is the garden centre. They have plants, they have a cafe, they have a soft play, and they also have a lot of tat for sale including this rack of toy vehicles.



Jamie worships this rack. I let him turn it himself (with a gentleness bordering on reverence) and on this occasion, he brought his I Spy Book of Every Vehicle On The Road (yes, it's a real book) so that he could sit there and do cross-referencing. He was so pleased when he found ones that matched!

06/52 2017

One of Jamie's christmas presents was this red and yellow Little Tikes car that I suspect most readers will recognise.



We finally put it together last weekend and Jamie is still working out how he feels about it.

One significant factor may be that, so far, he can only propel it backwards.

36/52

Daddy and Jamie this week, going out in what is teasingly referred to as daddy's shiny red sports car.



Steve never desperately wanted a convertible, red or otherwise. But with the big sensible Vauxhall Zafira Family Car containing ramps and powerchair and isofix baby-seat base being needed by me and Jamie every day, a second car was required for him to get to and from work, and this was what came up within budget, mostly because it's too old to be exciting, too modern to be a "classic", and frankly, too draughty and leaky to be a decent car to have in the UK climate. But, it was cheap, and there are some beautiful summer days when it's just right.

Jamie didn't think much of it. Admittedly they only went to the supermarket and back. But being able to see everything in bright and glorious summer sunshine was a bit too much for Jamie - Steve said he only settled down when the sunshade hood of the car seat was up and a muslin cloth draped over the handle.

9/52

A silly one this week.



Our little family is feeling much better than we were, but still not 100%.

Google does everything

except a very simple thing I want it to do.

I've spent weeks, on and off, trying to find something to quickly and easily calculate mileage when I'm out with my PA, so that I know how much petrol money to pay her, and I can't do it.

We mostly go to the same dozen or so locations, but not in the same order and not all in the same day. For instance, on week 1, we might go from my house to the doctor's and then to the bank and then to the swimming pool and then to the shop and then to my house. On week 2 we might go from my house to the bank and then to the library and then to the park and then to my house. On week 3 we might go from my house to the shop and then to the doctor and then to the park... you get the idea.

Currently I calculate mileage by typing all the locations into the Google Maps "get directions" thingy, and then confirming which one I mean for most of them, and then making sure all the dots are where they should be, and adding them up. It only takes ten minutes, and it works well because it plots a route that accounts for one-way systems and suchlike, but it's getting tedious because it's always the same places that I'm having to type in again and again and again, and I have to do it on-the-go or as soon as I get home because by that point I'm really tired and I can't depend on being able to remember exactly where we went post-nap.

I played with the google "My Maps" thing and put a handful of my regular locations into a "local places".

What I want to be able to do is open that up and then drag-and-drop the locations I went to on a given day from my "local places" map into the "get directions" boxes, click OK, and get a list that looks like this:

My House to Doctor: 0.6m
Doctor to Shops: 0.2m
Shops to Park: 2.6m
Park to My House: 3.0m
Total: 6.4m

... which I can just copy and paste into the mileage sheet ready to send off to the salary service each month.

I don't understand how there can be a google app to make my G1 look like a Star Trek tricorder, but not one to calculate mileage. Geeks have expenses claims too, right?

Holiday!

So, this is my first proper holiday from work - a full week rather than the odd day. I'm in Lowestoft, staying with Pip and The Boy. Steve can't take time off work at the moment, and Pip no longer has a car, so the biggest problem has been sorting out the logistics of getting me about, not just to and from Lowestoft but also around places while I'm here.

The first plan was to hire a car for Pip, so that he and Steve could both drive towards each other and hand me over at the halfway point. This way neither of them would be spending the whole day driving. But Steve found that the company he wanted to use wouldn't allow Pip to pick up a car that he wasn't paying for, and furthermore, this payment would have to be by a credit card on which he was named.

Unsurprisingly, as a single parent Pip doesn't have the means to pay for a week's hire of a car. The only possible solution that company had was that Steve should drive me all the way to Lowestoft, hire the car himself, have Pip named as an additional insured driver, and then drive all the way back, causing a marvellous amount of additional expense and inconvenience for Steve's weekend. By this point I think Steve was about at the end of his rope so he agreed to collect the car in person on Saturday, at "about lunchtime, depending on traffic" as he would be driving all the way from Warwickshire.

As such, on Saturday morning we got up at a weekday kind of time and got to Pip's at about 1.30. We brought my stuff in from Steve's car and phoned the car hire place to check things...

... and the call rolled to a diverted number. The person who picked up - apparently nothing to do with the car hire place - told us that the car hire place had closed at 12noon. Just like they had done every Saturday for the last fifteen years. For some reason, this hadn't seemed like a relevant point to raise for the person who agreed we could pick up a car at lunchtime.

We started hunting for alternatives, but it seems that every car hire place that isn't based at an airport closes at lunch on Saturday and does not reopen until Monday morning.

Alternative plan: since the Boy spends Saturdays with his mother, we spent Saturday afternoon relaxing. We all went for a coffee with friends, and then Steve drove back home. Pip and I intend to try and hire a car between the two of us on Monday morning.

It has been really nice to be able to just relax and chatter with Pip.

Day Two

This morning we went out to get a booster seat for the Boy to use in the car, and then to the park where we fed the ducks. This was more complicated than it might sound at first, when you consider it was me in a wheelchair and the Boy on his new bike. Pip definitely got a good workout.

This afternoon we've been rediscovering Sonic the Hedgehog. I lose to a four-year-old. It's mildly distressing, but testament to intuitive gaming controls. Still, I'm managing a good line in getting him past a section when he gets "stuck" which is nice.

Mostly though, I've been taking the opportunity to rest, which was the whole point of the holiday. The Boy had difficulty believing that all I was doing upstairs was having naps, he felt sure there must be something more interesting going on.

Day Three

Okay... I've recovered from getting here and had a good night's sleep. I've made plans to get fed at my mum's and also to get together with several friends, which should be good. The Boy has got used to me being here again and everything is going smoothly.

Plus, Pip and I successfully managed to hire a car. First thing this morning I called Lowestoft Car Hire and arranged to pick up a car from them at about 10am. They were perfectly happy for me to pay and Pip to drive, in fact they seemed quite surprised I was asking whether that was okay. We were really impressed by their customer service. The taxi to take us to their unit arrived here at 9.45, we got there, we were offered several choices, we chose one, did the paperwork, paid, got "shown around" the car, and were driving away by 10.10. That's a LOT more like it.

On with the holiday!

Summer

This is definitely summer. It is scorching hot out there. I have never missed the sea breeze so much.

Going to get a little bit of sea breeze when Steve and I head for the coast at the end of August for Jiva and Munkt0n's wedding. We're really looking forward to that, with extra added squee because the first time we met in real life was when we went to their engagement bash.

That'll just be a weekender though, as Steve can't book any time off work at present. But, Pip and I have been looking into the idea of car hire (Pip took his car off the road after I left town) to enable me to have a proper week's holiday and see everyone. The idea is that Steve could take me part of the way, and hand me and my suitcase over to Pip at a halfway services station. We're thinking probably September would be best, once the kids are back at school. Littlun will be doing half-days, so we'll be able to Do Stuff for half a day without all the local facilities being overrun by Bigger Kids, and then I can rest properly while he's at school.

Until I get some seafront, though, my life has been made that bit more comfortable by work having invested in an air-conditioning unit. The room was getting really quite unbearably hot, what with the combination of (1) thousands of CD cases, flat-pack corrugated cardboard boxes, and other packing materials, also known as insulation; (2) a single barred window which only opens a few inches; (3) a computer on the go the whole time; and (4) up to three adults constantly moving around the room doing work which, while it could not be described as physically demanding, works up considerably more of a sweat than sitting around typing. I don't care that my carbon footprint probably makes the baby Jesus cry. It was getting hard to breathe in there!

And now, I think, I will get my eye-mask out of the fridge, and go upstairs to lie very very still in the hope that sleep will come.

One Of Those Days

I've been a bit flattened by the Birthday Weekend, but yesterday (Wednesday) I had a productive morning. Then mum and Chris had gone out for the day and asked me to let their dog out at lunchtime, so at about 1pm I went to their house (only two blocks away), let the dog out, had a rest, let the dog back in, and went to the shop for some bread on my way home. I had a bit more trouble than usual getting up the stairs to the flat, and once I was in I called Steve to warn him that I was going to be asleep all afternoon and went to bed.

Woken up by the phone ringing, it was mum. Their car had broken down. Their breakdown cover would relay them and the car either home, or to a garage of their choice. Chris's preferred garage is quite a distance from home, so they figured that it would be easier use the cover to get them and the car to the garage and find another way to get them from the garage to home, than to use the cover to get them and the car home and then have to find another way to get the broken down car from home to the garage. My job was to go to their house, dig out their address book, and text them with the number of a friend who lived in that area and might be able to give them a lift home.

Parents stranded in the wilds of East Anglia is one of those situations where "do I have the energy for this?" doesn't really come into it. I was kind of wiped out, and for ten or fifteen miles I'd have told them to call a taxi and I would cover it, but the actual distance according to Google Maps is just over FIFTY miles, which is not taxi territory. So I warned them I might take a while, put on my coat and shoes, and began to shuffle.

Halfway to their house, a group of kids playing in the street with a football came careering towards me. No problem, I just paused and held onto a handy wall... then one of the kids who wasn't in the scrum yelled "MIND THE OLD LADY!"

I looked round.

They meant me.

I was mortified.

Anyway, got to the house, found the number, texted it to mum, let the dog out again, and curled up on the sofa to try and finish my nap. Woke up, took painkillers, planned to head home once they were working. So far so good - until The Sister got home from work. I've mentioned her before. Nice enough girl, although of course being siblings we regularly fight like cat and dog and have phases of Not Speaking to each other, but Oh Dear God does she talk. On and on and on and on, well I can deal with that, but also high-pitched, too fast, repeats herself, and never ever lets anyone else get a word in. Plus, she had had a bad day at work. I nodded and smiled and prayed for deliverance. After half an hour an absolutely shattered mum and Chris wandered in, and I could leave the room. We ordered some takeaway and then I think mum persuaded her to do a bit of work on her job application so she was quiet for a bit, but soon she was talking about what she was writing rather than writing it. Aargh.

We all had dinner and then mum offered to walk me home. Getting up the stairs took the last little bit out of me. I took my coat and shoes off, stood up to get ready for bed, and lurched into the bathroom just in time to throw up. Lovely. No one else is feeling ill so it's not food poisoning and it's unlikely to be a bug. The only theory Steve and I can come up with is that it's my system telling me to bloody well stop punishing it, on the basis that last time I was throwing up for no reason (so that's not counting little teeny bits when I'm extra-dizzy, heat exhaustion, or that bit of food poisoning last year) was when I first got ill and was pushing it by keeping going to work. So today I'm in bed, no ifs, buts, or maybes, and having as many little naps as I can. It's helping.

While I was final-editing this, mum rang. Turns out that as well as their car breaking down and my sister's bad day and me being sick, the people they had gone to meet, on their way home, got stuck in traffic and then something hit and shattered their windscreen. Not a good day for anyone!