I Remembered!!
Yes! I remembered this morning to phone the activity centre before cycling thousands of miles down there. 
Well, it wasn’t quite thousands of miles, but when it’s freezing and you’re cycling against the wind and you have a 10 year old wailing (Yes! Really, truly wailing!), “I CAN’T DO IT!!!”, trust me, it’s like going to the North Pole and back! 
Didn’t make me stop though…. 
So, back to this morning, Olivia tidied her room….with no prompting…. 
I (obviously) had to spend most of the morning sitting down while I recovered. Phoned the activity centre to book everything. I got all the dates I wanted more or less, except for a bit of jiggling around in the middle. The middle two activities, not my middle, although that has been known to jiggle on occasion….but that’s another story….
After lunch, we cycled down there to hand over the deposit and get the written confirmation for it all. Didn’t see the tight shorts man Amanda! But I did take my camera and this is where he would have been.
Hmmm….the whole photo’s blurry….perhaps because I dared to take my glove off in sub-zero temperatures….
If it hadn’t been so blooming cold, I may have loitered with intent….just on the off chance you understand. 
Up into town to get some shopping that we can’t get locally (amidst hail!!!), then back to Lidl’s for veggies and flour (yes, and two cans of beer too!). And they do really cheap soya milk as well!
Back home again, well and truly laden down. Have you ever done that trick of pushing the back of your hands up against a door frame, and then giggled as your arms rose magically in the air? I took my bag off my back and I nearly left the ground! 
“Woah!!” I said.
“What?” Olivia said.
“Take your bag off,” I said.
“Yeah? So what?” Olivia said.
“Your bag’s not heavy enough. Next time we go out, you can carry everything!”
“Don’t think so!” she said.
I think that might have been the point I started sulking.
We both got the urge to make a cake then. A parsnip cake from Vegan Cooking. Ha! I got mine for £1.99 from Trago Mills!!
But we didn’t have oranges and light soft brown sugar….
So coats and shoes back on, and we popped round to the corner shop. In the name of independence and autonomy, I sent Olivia on ahead with more than enough money to get them (and the change). She got dark sugar and two satsumas.
“But they taste the same to me!!”
She did get the right change though.
Got home (again!), made the cake….
About twenty minutes into the cooking of it, I could smell burning. We had a look, it had risen so much, it was touching the top of the oven. So we had to take the shelf out and stick it back in again.
Not quite sure about the manic grin in that last photo. Bit scary….
Also not quite sure how many ‘cooking’ photos I can take before it starts to get really boring. Perhaps next time I’ll get her juggling, or balancing the cat on her head, for a change….
Then, Olivia made some Sosmix sausages for dinner. D’you want another photo of pre-cooked sausages? Nah, I couldn’t be bothered to take one either!
The plan for when the cake had cooled down was to ice it, using vegan cream ‘cheese’ , icing sugar, orange satsuma rind and juice….but I’d got garlic and herb ‘cheese’ instead….
So we didn’t ice the cake, we’re just going to eat it ‘as is’ when we go upstairs in a minute to watch Great Expectations.
Not a joke as such now, just something funny I saw this morning. An ex-cello geek and his rant about Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
I thought it was funny….
