Hot off the Press (but a bit cold)

Invented an arcade game "Mein Kraft" in which you build defensive walls out of cubes, muse on the nature of being and crush Poland under the jackboots of your advancing stormtroopers, chased by blue ghosts called Wiesenthals.
Today it was very cold. By the time I walked to school it had warmed up a bit from the original 6º C but I still wanted gloves and a hat for the return journey.
Today we examined an aqueous solution of food colouring being drawn up the phloem of celery sticks by osmosis in order to study plant physiology. This went really well until Naughty Oakley took the sticks and threw them against the wall. I think he may be excommunicated soon. Or repatriated. Or whatever.
I was first out of class! First time for everything, follows a tardiness-related diatribe, more on diatribes next week. I was given the woolly hat with the big ear-flaps which made it difficult to see where I was scooting.
Ben came back to ours because his Mum has to go back to school (see me after class, Miss S, just let me polish up my cane) and he laughed at me not eating a banana in one mouthful.
The other mildly lukewarm news of the day is that Ben and I are the front page splash of the local newspaper. In the article, the Portsmouth Scouts rejoice in being given a cash bonus of £10,000 to spend on equipment. This cash-tastic news is only slightly marred by our Dear Leaders' admission that our group were a little slow off the mark in applying so we won't actually get any. We look happy anyway. This is the second time we've been in the paper (article on our nursery) and the PuddleDaddies have been in it 2 years running (beer festivals).
Ben and I played football and races with the JBs and others but it was a bit parky in the park so we simply came home and continued Lego Mania.

Say it with Flowers

Poor old Ben got his head bumped today by the same head-banger that got me yesterday. OK, so he was standing a little close to the door, Bradley opened it right into him.....
We made cup cakes. Well, the cakes were Blue Peters (here's one I made earlier) and we got to add icing and sprinkles. Mine did not survive the journey home in less than 27 pieces so I have saved it specially for Jof.
Today we had a planned blank day for personal projects. I needed to continue my jet fighter diorama and he needed to repot the peyote cacti, a quasi-annual delight last completed 2 years ago.
Thus we had nearly 2 hours of being at opposite ends of the house, far enough away for me to sing and roar to my hearts' content.
Later we discussed my birthday party. The rest of the Puddlers seem to have split down party lines (football for the boys) but I want something inclusive and thrice as big to make up for not having one last year. Vegas? Phineas and FerbWorld? Undecided.

For a few Conkers More

I had another head-bump message in my schoolbag today - not the usual 'collided with unnamed pupil while running around in the yard at playtime' but 'Bradley deliberately dropped books on my head'. Of course, Jof gets the heads-up about a bumped head via text message so she phoned to see how I was - I'd forgotten it. Will she ever learn.
All the way home I serenaded the villagers with our new school song "Bum Bum toastie Bum" and I hope all my friends have done the same. It's all about covering a bum in butter and toasting it.
I also brought home an origami cat with jetpacks and folding instructions. Here it is with unrelated walnut.
After fantastic gymnastics I made Lego jet fighters.

A Fistful of Conkers

A lovely warm day for October and we sat outside for lunch and I didn't even want to play football for fear of overheating.
Everyone loves my new tennis-ball haircut and they were talking to me about it and fondling it all day long.
I took off my shirt for the homeward journey and was still hot so I had a snack and put shorts on for the unexpected park visit, summoning Ben to help.
Leyton and Zak and other acquaintances were already there but I was the only shirtless shouter. He laughed at me when I fell head-first down the slide and I did come off my scooter on the way home but we still got a solid hour of Lego before Beavers, in which we made even more paper aeroplanes.
Our meeting place is on the mezzanine level of an extant church so one of the gruesome legacies is a little jesus on a cross, about a foot high, 7 feet off the ground at the back of the hall behind the stacked-up plastic chairs.
Ben and I spoke special pagan magic words into our paper planes and whizzed them at jesus at close range, in order to bring him back to life. Might be a bit of a shock, being reincarnated as a seriously damaged miniature humanoid with blue children raining missiles upon him, I suppose if he could learn a musical instrument at least he could become an 8-inch pianist.
Incidentally, I have a bucket of conkers from the weekend's activities, for I am bonkers about conkers. I believe I have hit upon a sure-fire way of selling them for Lego-money. If I thread them all together, I can make those trendy car-seat covers that everyone loves so much, as they are groovy and fashionable.
Furthermore, for a truly tectonic-plate-smashing value-add, why don't I niche-market them to arachnophobes? No spiders on these babies.
Even furthermore, if Spiderman fitted these car seats in his Spidermobile, would he fade and die, like Superman with a Kryptonite necklace? Also, if Batman got a bit peckish, could he gobble up the squished insects from the radiator grille of the Batmobile? Just asking.

Pellicules and Flocons de Neige

Thirty years ago in a previous incarnation, I confabulated the word "Pelluciton", insisting that it was the French word for both a snowflake and a flake of dandruff, which makes sense. Not even a real French person saying she had jamais 'eard of eet, mate, served to change my mind. Dandruff is a pellicule, fairly close I suppose, but a snowflake is a flocon de neige, nowhere near.
Another great Beaver sleepover, for which I earned yet another badge. Supper was spaghetti and I had a 5th helping: I maintain I had 8ths of breakfast. Jessica the little blonde Beaver makes funny noises in the night, and we didn't have a tent this time so I moved my sleeping bag around the room like a giant blue caterpillar.
Bluebird said I was the best-behaved Beaver and rewarded me with the last biscuit and a walnut, which I gave to Jof. I also got to carry the harvest festival food in church parade.
After church we piled up our belongings and waited to be picked up, like the luggage carousel at Harare airport.
I returned home to find my conker collection unmolested and a pile of 8 stolen beermats. Using the map of the park that Jof had drawn for me, I selected a likely spot to bury my conkers. I upended a bagful into a hole, covered them over and then thought better of it. Some people could have seen me, I'd buried a few decoys a couple of days ago and now I couldn't find them. Either a feral warthog had dug them up and consumed them, or a rival conker-stasher had looted my deposit and made off with them. (Or I could have forgotten where they were.) I dug them all up and buried them elsewhere.
Meanwhile the rucksack was getting filled and in the end we all chipped in and threw sticks into the trees to knock even more down. This kept us going for ages and at one point (we were right by the fence) a small girl piddled in a pink potty on the pavement right by where we were conkering.
The rest of the day was spent in recovery mode from the Beaver activity but I still didn't get to bed before 930.

Let Sleeping Beavers Lie

Half a Mohican. A Mohalfcan.

Today is the day of the second annual Beaver sleepover! Freedom from parental criticism for 17 3/4 hours! I can't wait until I'm a real scout because then I can camp away for a whole week. In fact, I might join the French Foreign Legion.
The day was spent in hectic preparation. I had a haircut. I bought some wooden book-ends in the shape of a cannon and balls. I ate a jumbo sausage in Rebecca's pantry. I won £2.80 on the lottery. I spent all my pocket money (including the lottery winnings) on Star Wars Lego, now including new cyborg. I donated all my ill-fitting fancy dress costumes to the Salvation Army, expect to see some very strangely dressed Ethiopians soon.

Meanwhile, he went to the darts shop in Fratton Road and got some spare darts and flights and stems for us kids, as part of the 'Make your Garage into a Pub' project. Purely by chance, there was a special offer of free poster with any purchase, heavily made-up nurse with ferocious funbags advertising a make of darts. I don't think she's a real nurse, because her clingy PVC dress has a zip all the way down the front. Jof says that all we need now is a big poster of Luscious Lucy with packets of dry roasted peanuts stapled all over her jugs.
Last year at the Beaver Sleepover, my lot went to the pub with Ben's lot, but this time it's a pub crawl down Albert Road to half-inch as many beer mats as possible for the Garage Door Club.
I arrived at the church second and immediately cut the apron strings. There was one slight administrative error, though. On the application form, there was a space for "Any other medical conditions" in which he had written 'Insane'. Normally, this would not be an issue but the Chief Inspector of Childcare Providers is coming to audit the Scout sleepover and it might lead to questions such as what mood stabiliser is he on, how young do you have to be to be committed, is there a mental nurse on standby, etc. Oh dear.

Scraping like ships in the night

Last night I was ready for bed by 830 pm. I can't have that, I said, so I got an extra half an hour's activity clearing my bedroom floor of Lego, ostensibly so that I can practise camping in preparation for the Beaver sleepover. So I really didn't want to get up this morning, but at least we were able to hoover my carpet this afternoon.
Scooted home from school with only an agreed slight diversion through the park to stock up on conkers. I guess I was first there.
Clearly you can never have too many of these tactile tesserae, I believe I will patent them as stress relievers, much like the little red squares of bubble sheet.

We promised ourselves a direct route through the chestnut fields, with no sideways movement. We could have filled a skip. In the end I distended my school shirt with a couple of pounds of potential trees.
I am now a blue hat in swimming. This means I get to plough up and down the lanes doing real actual lengths. In backstroke you can't see where you're going, many people collided with swimmers going the other way but I managed glancing blows only, like the Titanic and her iceberg lover.

Sophie's Choice

The last visit to Grandma-of-the-past is in a coffee shop in Salisbury again. While we were spending £££ on some funny foreign coins for my collection, Jof ambled into a charity shop and bought these two red dinosaurs for £5 the pair. Eventually we discovered the little articulating switch at the base of the tail (dorsal, not ventral, that would have been rude) which made them twist and roar and claw and gnash, just like the real things. Grandma loved them, as did I, until I sold them on at the school fair for £5 the pair.
I have my Ninja conker-disseminating kit ready by the front door and have planned locations to 'Geocache' them (stashing them in the ground) like a 4 foot squirrel of insanity.
But it's been raining all day and BensMum has invited me round for discrete Lego, maybe more.
So. Do I invent and make some kind of waterproof all-over body Wellington boot and take my conker kit to the deserted waterlogged park, or do I stay in the warm and build Lego Heroes?
In the end, certain people were wrong to trust the Weather-guessers because the rain was entirely absent, and the venue was switched at the last minute like a 1980s rave. He said let's ride the bike to Yellow Plum Park, I objected moanily with extra high-pitched whining. But we found a route that hardly involved any roads and all of a sudden I loved it.
Honey May-Knott and Erin and Ben and the JBs and the Buy-one-get-one-free Twins and the tiny girl that had nose-butted the gate and some additional smaller people were there for my pleasure. We climbed. We played football. We made rules in the bushes and Ben broke them. We played the "Throw the football at the people on the swings" game. We played "Is there a Grandmother in the abandoned sports bag?" We cycled round and round, further and further away, and swapped bikes. Like one of those special parties where you put your car keys in a pudding bowl, we could have gone home with any bike if we weren't watching, for one by one we rode them all.
An hour and a half later, nobody wanted to go home, and that's the only time the bleating started. I may have been wrong to complain about cycling, and everyone may have been wrong when we thought we'll never have as good a day again. We will, for we keep doing so.
Incidentally, that Karma Suture book must be about extreme sewing, looking at the positions those people got into.
Also incidentally, we got the Halloween stuff out of the loft for re-use and assessment. Some of it is a little small, damaged or embarrassing. I think we'll get rid of the chicken suit. What I really want are the 21 inch light-up tombstones available in the New Braunfels marketplace ($6.99), Texans do Halloween so much better.

Making the Southern Belles Ring

Today's trip down Grandma's memory lane takes me to Salisbury where they met me to assess my cycling skills. I went round and round a park showing off in the freezing rain, having just turned 4. He couldn't understand why I wasn't signalling at footpath intersections and she couldn't understand why we were there at all. Eventually I slipped on some icy fallen leaves and had to get new trousers.
They got me a new bike in Halfords with a blatty hooter that Bobert and Ben liked parping directly into their own ears. Yes, I'm still grimacing.
I demanded my scooter for the return from school and Jof had already said I could scootle round the park so we cornered the swinging basket before all the little Wimbornians got there. Of course, I had to share with all the girls but I don't mind, it was someone to show off to.
Then we graduated to digging holes for conkers. Difficult to see how, but there you are. My pet helper got handfuls of them and threw them at us ("♯♪ It's ♪raining conkers,♫ alleluia♫") and then when Jof joined me I roamed the park with my dozen girlie followers finding secret hiding places for them and actually setting out decoy conkers for the boys who were watching my every move.
At about 3 hours after the end of school I got home and started on my plans for world acorn & conker dominatrix. I designed and built a work utility belt with plastic bags attached to carry my booty and OK so I couldn't walk straight with it on and yes, it did collapse rather, sending my collection all over the kitchen floor, but the theory is sound and I shall return to my female followers tomorrow with my maps and plans and, with luck, a flamethrower, why not.

Life is a Freeway (but it's not free)

This is Xmas dinner 2009, just a few days before I turned 4. Grandma could always do those complicated meals that arrive on 19 different dishes, need 7 different cutleries, feed 7 different armies, and yet magically appear all at the same time. It's possible that she was assisted by a robot called "Hostess Trolley 1973"  but I never saw it.
At the time I'd not got the hang of smiling nicely for the camera, it always ended up in some kind of manic grin-rictus. It tickled Grandma.
My homework is due in tomorrow so I had to finish transferring the rough copy to the neat booklet to hand in. I did have a huff when he wouldn't do it for me and I hope that Jof doesn't see the green pen scribbles all over the front of my work shirt.
My huff/sulk/hormonal discharge continued all the way to gymnastics and because I hadn't eaten my lunch I didn't get any snacks. The reason I didn't eat the watermelon I so craved and the packed lunch I chose for myself is ..... laughing. I just can't help it when everyone else is having fun at lunchtime and then all of a sudden, the break is over and I haven't quite got around to opening my lunch. It's not my fault! BensMum says he's been a twit or a scat or a shack or something recently, quite possible that I am doing exactly the same thing.
Still, Jof doesn't know about this so she played me Monopoly.