I love an electrical storm but I would also love getting some sleep! Leo came in around 2am saying he felt sick, which means he's scared so he got in with us. I was lying in the middle, on my back, with my leg propped up on pillows, Rob was smothering me, breathing in my face and Leo was sweating on me. I was watching the storm, listening to the rain and feeling extremely uncomfortable. Leo finally went back to bed and I got comfy. I have no idea what time it was.
Shortly after I got cramp in my bad leg and had to get up for a walk around.
Then I had to get up to shut the blinds as it was getting light outside.
Then I got up for something else but I can't remember what for, toilet maybe. Not a good night. 😴
Considering I'd had little sleep, I actually felt quite energised when I got up. I knew I had a lot to achieve today so that always helps to keep me motivated.
It was tipping with rain so Kelly and I decided against going to the park and she came here for a cuppa instead. I was a bit disappointed that the boys wouldn't get to have a run around and scoot but actually it worked out really well because Leo was tired from playing in the woods and I had so much to get done!
Long story very short, I took Ellis and Leo shopping for their shoes and uniform bits and I came home after having aged about 5 years and about £400 lighter! Still haven't finished yet. Need to sort PE kit, pick up ordered stuff from M&S and finish stocking their pencil cases. 😅😅😅 I didn't really realise how much there was to organise. An endless, thankless task sorting out their clothes and shoes. Won't be long until I have to sort out 3 rugby kits. 😩
Got Karen, Tracey and Linzi over for drinkie poos in less than half an hour! Ellis is just cooking his meal, the other two are causing chaos and I'm sitting like this watching it all unfold...
Because it looked like this...
Oops, think I need to rest it maybe. I'll see how it is tomorrow. It didn't hurt on my jog this morning or when doing my hiit workout but clearly it isn't happy. 🤷
Ellis did an amazing job with his meal yet again. With my friends over he didn't have any choice but to do it alone and he did amazing. I messed it up for him at the end by putting too much parsley in his dish so he was upset with me. I apologised for interfering with his masterpiece. 😕 He didn't eat it so Rob had a double serving.
The girls came over and it was so nice. They always make me laugh which is something, I've realised, I haven't been doing a lot of recently. I might need to watch some more Gogglebox. 😊 They are crazy and I always enjoy our drunken chats about random stuff. They didn't leave until midnight and Ellis was still up. I sorted some washing, encouraged Ellis to get to bed, showered and hit the sack. Can't believe I got through that day without feeling too bad. 👍 I think the busier I am the less I notice how I'm feeling as I'm in my head. 😄
Where they to? 14th August Quebec City
Following our abortive attempt to visit the museum in Victoria a few weeks ago, we were hopeful that the Museum of Civilisation in Quebec's Basse Ville might provide us with an opportunity to soak up a bit of culture and history.
It didn't start well. Thy first exhibition is about, of all things, salt. Yep, salt. 30 minutes of facts, figures and interactive displays about the stuff McDonalds put too much of on your chips. I could taste the stuff as we left the room and had to make a quick diversion to the café to do in a Mars bar, to take the taste away. All I'm left with from that 30 minutes of our lives is that the UK is the 9th biggest producer of salt in the world (the French beat us at salt production - I knew they had to be good for something) and that Japan is the only country in the world that doesn't produce any. Rather annoyingly, we weren't told why that's the case. I wonder if there is a higher incidence of cramp amongst the Japanese than other nationalities, though?
The next exhibition, a significant improvement on the last, had light as it's theme, which may sound a bit dull (did you see what I did there? did you? did you?) but was actually quite good, giving us the chance to play with prisms and stuff. We learned that objects that you perceive as a particular colour aren't strictly what you might think they are. Take, for instance, grass. Grass isn't green, it's just that it absorbs the other colours of the visible spectrum and reflects the green light meaning that your eyes perceive it as being green. The reason I'm telling you this is that I can finally prove to those of you who have mocked me for years about having red cheeks that you're wrong. My cheeks are simply more efficient at absorbing the other colours of the spectrum than your's and are, therefore, better than yours. I knew I'd have the last laugh, in the end.
Next was an exhibition about the history of Quebec where the glorious victory of General Wolfe was tucked away in the corner in favour of some more monumental displays in the centre of the room such as an upright spinning wheel and a wicker chair - clearly they were far more decisive in shaping the province and making it what it is today.
The Russian exhibition was informative but you know when you walk around it that all of the best, relevant pieces are thousands of miles away in Moscow or St Petersburg so we skimmed through thinking, in the backs of our minds, that we would hopefully see the real thing in 8 months or so.
The Money exhibition was fairly routine - Roman coins and stuff - but there was one particular display that was quite interesting and a new idea to us both. There is, it would seem, a thriving network of extreme organisations around the world who seek to spread their word by defacing bank notes. It's quite a cheap and easy way of getting your message out there, I suppose. There were dollars with slogans stamped on them by both pro-cannabis protesters and anti-nuke campaigners but the more eye-catching ones had intricate shapes cut out of the notes where national buildings and monuments were drawn, leaving sillhouettes in their place. It wasn't clear what they were protesting for or against, perhaps they were anti-capitalists, but it must've taken hours to make their intricate creations. Some of them would look very effective, mounted and framed, as artwork - just a shame it's illegal.
There were various other areas such as the Native American exhibition and the Film Awards exhibition (where I rebelliously snuck this picture of an oscar) but the last exhibition was something of a highlight for CSI-loving Mush. You are given a notepad and staked as an investigator with a crimescene to study and a murder to solve. Marching off, thinking she was the next Gil Grissom, I barely got a response from her for the next hour - she took it that seriously. Look at her face on the picture below - so stern, it's verging on being her poo face. There were prints to match, fibres to analyse, spectrograms to compare, ballistics to study, interviews to observe - they had a whole range of forensic tests for you to complete. Fortunately for me, as I don't think I could have dealt with her disappointment otherwise, Mush picked the right suspect. I think she said it was Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the library.
On the way back to our room, we stopped to rest on a wall and witnessed a real-life crime. A shady looking character in his 30s stood his getaway BMX against the wall of a confectionery shop and walked in taking great care to see where the staff were and if they were watching him. He then picked up a packet of popcorn and rustled it between his hands to flatten it out, before shoving it down the front of his bermuda short, slinking out of the side door and making good his escape. We briefly thought about telling someone but our new-found expertise in forensics lead us to conclude that there probably wasn't enough evidence so we just left him to cycle off into the sunset with his loot.
We made one more sightseeing stop on our way back - the Basilique-Cathedral Notre-Dame de Quebec with it's towering gilded statues and painted ceilings. We didn't stop long as it has a history of being burnt to the ground and rebuilt quite often and we didn't much fancy a premature cremation, even if we were in the right place.
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