Monday, July 21, 2008

Leak, tooth, visit and meeting


Well lookie lookie here…it’s finally out! After supper, which was chicken nuggets on rolls for the boys, Aaron commented that he could get his tongue underneath the back of his tooth. I felt it, and nearly pulled it out, but said he should try himself, which he did, and it came out with a little pluck! He was very excited to have it out – he gets excited about strange things. He and Caleb decided that it should be kept a secret from their dad, who was out at a deacons’ meeting when it happened – Nick will only find out tomorrow morning when he sees Aaron! Meanwhile, the Tooth Fairy has come and gone.

Our sewerage removal system has been leaking for a few days. It leaks from the handle, so we have an ice-cream tub underneath to catch the drips, which almost amounted to 2l overnight. It was getting a bit annoying though, and Nick and I have both been looking in the cistern to see if we could figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. Prestik wasn’t doing it. And so it happened that at 10pm last night, we found ourselves in the bathroom peering into the cistern to have another go at it. Nick had fiddled in the afternoon, which I felt had made it worse, so we unfiddled the fiddle, and after insulting one another’s intelligence for a few minutes as to the other’s plumbing know-how, we established that the toilet was overfilling, and that the floaty ball thing was coming up too high, so that when the cover was on, it was pushing the ball down causing the valve to remain open. Very complicated. Nick removed the arm holding the ball, and tried to straighten it over the bath, but instead broke the whole fixture. Meanwhile, the toilet was still filling, as it now had nothing to tell it when to stop. I was assigned the objectionable task of depressing the button which closes the valve – it was even suggested that I should stay there all night until the shops opened this morning so that Nick could get the replacement part, but we both realized that this should not be considered an option. Anyway, the end of this account is not very exciting so I won’t drag it out anymore – this morning, Nick found the right part and fixed it, and so ends the toilet story!

Now you may be wondering what exciting high-brow events the suddenly-socialised Clevelys had going on today. Well, shortly after 9.30, the Williamsons arrived! We arranged this in church last night – since we are having a non-curriculum school week this week, I didn’t mind rescheduling school for the afternoon. We’d much rather have friends over; somehow it’s more fun than school. The boys don’t seem to tire of tag (catchers, we used to call it, but the boys have caught on to the Saint name for the game of ‘chasin’s’). Then they were outside (it was a pretty good day, weatherwise) for the rest of the time. Genevieve and I sat in the diningroom chatting, never seeming to run out of conversation. Kyle had been up at the hospital, where he was shown every inch of it including the morgue. He was teaching an art class this afternoon, so needed to be home by lunchtime to gather himself up. He walked down to our place, and they all left at about 12.30. Caleb and Aaron both got into the car as well, as Ben and Sam tried to smuggle them home! After their departure, I took the boys to town for the ride, to get bread and rolls, and then it was lunch, and finally, school time. I only wanted them to do Maths, really, but also had Aaron read his sight-words, and then I read a story to them. We only took about 45 minutes on school. Tomorrow we will hold regular hours again, just making up things to do. It should be fun.

At 3 pm I had a meeting at the museum with Printech, the island’s printing company, but after spreading out all 20 pages on one of the big upstairs tables, and discussing the project, it seems that they can’t really help us at this point. They don’t have an A3 scanner, and their A3 photocopier is broken. Still, it was interesting. The next step now is for Lucy to try track down a large format scanner on the island. I was home again in plenty of time for my girls’ group, which I felt was quite good today. We played a toilet paper game, where I asked them each to break off a section of toilet paper, and for each square, they had to tell us each something. I had no plans to do this, but the Lord must have prompted me and it was quite spontaneous. Interestingly, a lot of them said “my ambition is to…”, which tied in exactly with what I wanted to talk about today, which is ‘the most important decision in your life’. They listened while I spoke very seriously about the need to accept Christ, and I explained the watchman in Ezekiel 33. It was a good time. We touched on a couple of other issues today as well, like divorce – they just don’t seem to know anything about what the bible teaches! I excused myself at 4.45, leaving them to carry on chatting, while I went home to make our quick supper of chicken burgers, as Nick needed to leave early for his deacons’ meeting. The burgers were ready by 5.15, and Nick had just finished washing the car by then. BUT – he still wanted to vacuum it, so I quickly helped him with it and we got it done in no time. He left, we had supper, Aaron’s tooth came out, they bathed, I washed up, and that’s that!

Nick went to gym this morning at the AVES centre. Harry has gotten him into it. The gym has been there for a few months already, and although small, is suitably furnished with treadmill, weights, rowing etc. This is about the third time he has been. The rest of his day was spent in preparation for his deacons’ meeting, and reading.

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