Katyboo1’s Weblog

Jason has taken the girls bobbing this evening, leaving me to entertain master Oscar.  This has involved us reading Charlie and Lola’s colour book six times, getting very interested in a swimming time table because it has a picture of a small girl in a fountain on the front, and trying very hard not to colour the white walls in with red crayon, tempting though it was.  I did stick him in the bottom of the shower with a collection of buckets and utensils which kept him heartily amused for a further twenty minutes until he did a pooh.  He did have the great kindness to point it out to me, but it meant I had to get him out while I scraped pooh from the tiles.  He wasn’t best pleased, but then he shouldn’t pooh where he showers.  I expect Ray Mears would have a few things to say about it, were he here.

I’ve finally put him to bed, much to his disgust and my relief. I’m going to write this, eat some biscuits (my getting thin regime is going very badly, but I have resigned myself to a rotund middle age) and read some more of the fictional life of Leonardo Da Vinci.  So far he’s now nearly fifty and we have about six new ‘facts’ on which to pin the two hundred pages I’ve managed diligently to read in the last two days.  Basically we think he did some paintings, he might have had some clever friends, he may have put himself in his paintings if indeed it was he that did them, but we can’t be sure because we don’t really know what he looked like.  He invented lots of things, but none of them exists and it is unlikely anyone took him up on his ideas at the time.  He was probably gay, but nobody is commenting, except for the fact that people say he was a snazzy dresser (apparently he quite liked pink tights.  Bit of a giveaway probably) and he didn’t have any babies or wives.  It’s all a bit random, but it helps to pass the time.  I am determined to finish this and get onto something meaty and totally frivolous even if I get eye strain in the process.  Although I could just pretend I’ve read the next two hundred odd pages and just make up some spurious Renaissance based facts.  Nobody would be any the wiser.

As it is I’ve still got neck ache, although not as agonisingly as yesterday, which wasn’t as bad as the day before.  I’m hoping that tomorrow I will be as agile in the neck department as a particularly frisky giraffe, and that all will be well.  Luckily it didn’t affect us hiring bikes today as the weather has been mostly hideous and blowing a gale for the best part of the time.  I don’t really like riding a bike horizontally, even when my neck isn’t hurting.  It reminds me of the hated paper round that my mother tormented me with.  Wednesdays was supplement and Radio Times day, which meant a paper sack four times as heavy as normal, and the ability to ride horizontally with a dead weight hanging round your neck.  It’s a skill I perfected, but I have to say, rather like trigonometry and algebra, I’ve never reaped the benefit yet, despite what the maths teacher told us.

The weather did perk up around five, and now it’s absolutely lovely.  There’s a corking sunset, but that doesn’t really help matters much, as I’m too knackered to go on a bike ride now, and the hire shop is shut.  We didn’t have much luck with the old tourist malarkey today all round.  We went to the marine ecology centre in Sidney which is supposed to be great for kids, with loads of hands on exhibits and relatives of Chris and Barbara to poke at.  We were all quite excited until we found out that it’s shut until May 15th.  Rubbish!  By this point in the day it was sleeting, and as Canada is basically a collection of beaches, wildlife and forests strung together by small hamlets, there isn’t much indoor stuff to do.  We ended up going to Safeway shopping, and letting the kids play in the cleverly converted toy car/trolley.  They had an absolute blast.  So here’s my top tip if you’re carting small kids round Canada in a hail storm, take ‘em to Safeways.  They will love you forever.

We went to a great place for lunch which Nana recommended (much kudos to Nana on the lunch recommendation front so far, she’s batting way above average), called Fish on Fifth.  You could tell it was good due to the fact that even on a Monday lunch time it was heaving.  We had to wait fifteen minutes for a table, and it was still as busy when we left as it was when we arrived.  What I liked was the fact that they cook everything fresh, from scratch, so you will wait that bit longer for your food, but it will definitely be worth the wait, and it was.  We all had fish and chips.  They had other tempting things on the menu, but when you’re 100 yards from the sea in a fish restaurant it seems like a no brainer to go for the obvious choice first.  It was delicious.  We all wiped our plates clean, even the kids, and we will definitely be going back.  Not a place to get thin, but definitely a place to get happy.

On the way home we were discussing the ramifications of moving here.  I don’t think we will, at least not for a good few years, but on balance Sidney is my kind of town.  It’s got several excellent bakeries, a few cracking restaurants, a great toy shop and seven, count them, seven, book shops.  It is close to the sea, close to the mountains and close to the woods, it also has three, three, Starbucks, and charity shops with live animals in them.  It has a pancake place for Jason, and in fact the only down side is the fact that it doesn’t have a TK Maxx.  That and the fact that it’s a long way from home and my mother is morbidly afraid of flying.  If I can’t go out for egg and chips with my mother on a regular basis I don’t know what I would do.  I’d have to ship her over on a cruise and make her move as well.  Lee would have to move here too, after all, I can’t have my eldest son gallivanting around with nobody to keep a beady eye on him.  I’m too young to be a grandmother yet.  I’m not even done babysitting my own children.  if he’s going to hook up with some random floosies I need to get my pencils and questionnaire out first.