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At the moment my father is in Verona representing Ireland at the World Bridge Championships. He comes from a serious bridge playing family and is passionate about it to the point of keeping my mum and I up in to the wee hours of the night discussing the finer points of a no-trump doubled with seemingly uncharacteristic energy and enthusiasm when he would finally return home. My mother would refer to us as a bridge widow and orphan respectively.
I, however, gave up my bridge lessons 12 years ago. Partially because I was the youngest person in the class by about 25  years and also because it clashed with the X-Files.

It is, however, a fascinating game and I really should make the effort to learn, especially since my father and uncle and some other amazing players play online. It would also give me more to talk to my dad about besides  work.

My father also works in IT, for SUN and I often think that he only does it to fill up time between bridge games

So far I don’t think he’s actually started playing, googling for him just brings up work he’s done on GNOME… Hopefully, however, they will do well.

The weather for the last two weeks has been absolutely frabjous! A trifle on the warm side for me as I am used to the rather feeble attempts at a summer we get in Ireland. This weekend was particularly pleasant. Jon had an early morning flying lesson - at 8:30am! I’m not all that shocked I used to have violin lessons at 8am. But I think his lessons are a bit less stressful than mine were We then returned the costumes from the latest festival performance then trundled up to Peterbourgh to do some shopping ahead of our week in Cornwall at the end of the month.

Having successfully found new swimming shorts, ‘normal’ shorts  and (more) new shoes for Jon; I then got two pairs of very dinky shoes at Barretts. I have an adversion to spending more than £20 for any single pair of shoes. One pair is black and has a sort of flattenend, square toe and resemble ballet slippers for ‘en point’ (I’m making that term up as I go, I know nother about ballet, I got kicked out of Irish dancing - the shame!) The other pair look nothing less than the ruby slippers - they are very cheery and I have a pair of striped black and white tights that would go with them a treat. Must keep an eye out for flying farmhouses when I have them on

After our short shopping spree we headed over to the home of some friends and spent the rest of the day flopped around their garden. I played ‘french’ cricket with three of their four children for a while. This was a completely new game to me but I managed to do reasonably well - I think We then flopped some more and eventually had a very sedate BBQ with the floor show of Jon mistaking his hand for the piece of bread in said hand. We just laughed, rotters that we are.

We then drove home around nine pm, the sky still a marvelous topaz-sapphire blue while a huge, almost full, moon, quite near the horizon, gradually turned tangerine.

Hopefully next weekend will be as nice as I will be manning table with my jewellery at the Bed-Rock music festival of all places!

After a long slew of things happening in various shades of crumminess something very uplifting happened today.

Well perhaps not such much uplifting in the sense of a life-altering epiphany but it cheered me up no end. And at the moment I really need that. More on that later - but I promise this time it is not baby related.

Anyway the nice thing that happened today was that out of the blue I got an email from a girl I was good friends with at secondary school. She went to a different university, and then I moved off the England so apart from breifly meeting in Dublin 3-4 years ago we haven’t seen each other in about 8 years.

She’s currently finishing off a PhD in Chemistry which leaves in in complete awe - I barely got through 1st year chemistry for engineers! But to top it off it looks like she may be moving over the England and around this part of the country! Whoot!

Back, of course, to my grumbling. The weather here for the last week has been utterly and absolutely glorious so on Saturday I decided to go and deal with the garden. The grass needed cutting again. Now, despite having very dark hair I am very very very pale, so I put on sun block. Missed alot of my back however. And, after spending four hours outside, between 11 and 3, the times you are not meant to be out;I developed an astonishing burn on my back!

Monday and Tuesday it was’t too painful and I went to work like a good girl. The last two days however as its been drying out and peeling have been agony. I look like a victim of I don’t know what!

But I have learnt my lesson - what to make sure I am completely covered up with suncream?

Well, yes, that is a good lesson - No, make my husband mow the lawn!