Monday 4th February 08

A good day as the boys were basically well behaved. It's amazing how their behaviour almost completely dictates our moods. So this morning there was a small outburst, which brought me downstairs and I offered to take them to school, for which Gill was very grateful.

Came home and had a bit of a conference with Gill, she decided to go to the shops and I did a load of housework interspersed with other work. I wrote my paid blog, on gardening for food this week. I did some washing up, and fruit management! Did some stuff in the garden and got in at about the same time as Gill, for lunch.

Gill organised herself a small bit of pampering and booked a haircut from the place which did it before, on Goodramgate. She also prepared some tea for the boys for me to put together when needed as she would be out. I got the boys at 3.15 and asked them if they'd like to help break up the old grotty armchair which has been taking up far too much space in the front room. They were more than happy to have a pair of pliers each, have a go with the bowsaw and a hammer, and between us over an hour, we dismantled and de-upholstered the ugly and useless thing, rendering it into a pile of wood with staples in, foam for the bin, blue polyester stuff for the bin and sacking for the compost heap.

I then did tea, fried rice with sweetcorn and crunchy seeds with a slice of yeasteday's pie which the boys loved. Then at 6ish, I asked them if they'd like to watch the Horizon programme about gravity that I'd recorded a few days ago, and my eldest, a physicist at heart, thought this a big treat!

Gill came back and looked almost glamorous with her new hairdo, and finished off the rice and curry from yesterday. I had a couple of sandwiches and got myself ready to go to a LETS meeting. There had been lots of apologies, and only Stephen and Ben turned up, but we had a really good talk. I cycled back with Ben as he lives just round the corner from us, and he asked if I was in a hurry as he had a friend who was moving to Germany who wanted to give him a few bags of unwanted goods, and Ben needed to use my trailer to get them back to his place to get them on Freecycle, which he helps administer. So I loaded up the cycle trailer... and Ben said there was a webcam and mic in amongst the load, which would potentially be good for me to use for Skype which I'd like to try out.

Came back to Gill who was engrossed in the Attenborough programme about reptiles and amphibians. Later, I recorded the third installment of Atom, so I can watch it with my 10 year old.