Mishap, missing pins and missing fuel

I had a mishap this week which has resulted in extensive purpleness and pain to my arm.  To set the scene I was at a local park with five older children and a two year old.  The little one saw the others playing on the zip wire and wanted to have a turn too.  As he is small and obviously too young to sit on the seat on his own, I agreed he could go on with me................we sat on the seat, held on tightly and whizzed off to the other end of the runway............all was going well until the return journey when we started to overbalance.  Going through my mind was the thought that I needed to keep the aforementioned little chap safe and the only way to prevent us falling off was to wind my arm around the vertical holding-on chain and grip tightly.  This worked, hurrah, we stayed on board......however this was at the expense of my left inner forearm which immediately turned purple, puffed up and my hand went into spasm.  Several days down the line and I am starting to look like Barney the Dinosaur and my arm still hurts.  At least the small chap was unscathed.........I will be giving the zip wire a wide berth from now on.  I didn’t enjoy the experience when I tried the zippy last year and this week has just confirmed my opinion!

The saga of the falling down conservatory continues.  Eventually the workers arrived on day three instead of day one of the digging out and commenced works.  To be fair they have made good progress and the foundation depth is now acceptable, however once the area had been cleared it became evident that the original structure had never been pinned to the house in any shape or form.  No wonder then with the combination of the lack of foundations and lack of pins that the whole thing didn’t come crashing down amongst us.  It is rather like a treasure hunt seeing what is underneath the ground now there is a huge hole.  I seem to have discovered a landfill site judging by the amount of plastic, general rubbish and brick bits that had been buried.  There was even a note saying “Good luck to the troops, love from Florence Nightingale” secreted in the mud.  Actually I am lying about this, but just about every other imaginable object can be found.  The concrete should be going in soon and once it has set the rebuilding works can carry on.

The glorious weather of late has been very welcome and I have got used to having the air conditioning on full blast in the car, wearing fewer layers than usual and enjoying the beautiful sunsets.  Today though this has come to a halt, the temperature has dropped by about 10 degrees and rain is forecast for the weekend.  There is even talk of possible snow over Easter..........no thank you, all I want is chocolate eggs, certainly not anything that requires me to get my winter weather gear out again.

In the UK we love to all jump on the bandwagon like a load of lemmings and this week has been no exception.  Apparently there might at some point in the next year or two be a fuel strike and this has resulted in everyone panic buying petrol and diesel.  The local garages are either running low of the stuff or have run out altogether; people are becoming abusive to the filling station staff and in some areas fisticuffs between motorists have broken out on the forecourt.  Well done government ministers for telling us to fill up our vehicles and not let the levels drop below three quarters of a tank.  The queues formed in turn create tailbacks right along the main roads, and everyone has had enough already.................God forbid what will happen if there ever actually is a strike.  Perhaps I should stock up on some basic provisions now so I can peddle my wares to the folks in the queues. Of course hot pasties are out of the question due to the new fat tax on them. 

Once more the Great in Great Britain is missing and has been replaced by nonsense and plain stupidity.  Don’t even get me started on the official Olympic kit with the blue Union flag.......