11 days to go

The countdown is on until the lovely, sexy, gorgeous, supremely talented, French, rugby playing men from Stade Francais arrive in Belfast. (Yes, the link is definitely worth checking out again!)

Oh happy, happy, happy days!

A volunteer is worth a hundred conscripts

Most teachers spend their entire teaching careers trying to avoid being inspected. And who could blame them? I've had my fair share of inspections and they can be pretty stressful events.

It just so happens that one of 'my schools' is having an inspection this week. Lo and behold, I got 'the call', and yes - tomorrow I am voluntarily walking straight into the lions den!

May the good Lord have wired their jaws shut ... a la Daniel.

New role

Guess who has been asked to join the Board of the YMCA locally??!! I know, how unbelieveable is that? Especially considering the General Secretary reads this blog occasionally!

I hope they let me be the Red Indian

Fun Monday

This week Heather at Heather's Recipes asked us to write about 'the sports team that you are rabid about'.

French rugby team Stade Francais; words fail me ... see charity calendar pictures:

Of course, those who know me or who read this blog on a regular basis will know that I am absolutely, genuinely nutty about rugby as a sport. The fact that there are players who look like this is merely a bonus!

Whose idea was it?

I am just home from Ravenhill where Ulster have had their third defeat ... nay ... thrashing in as many Magners League games. We are now bottom of said league, below even Connacht, who beat Glasgow Warriors tonight to leapfrog us in the table.

The team are playing like amateurs, schoolboys even. Performance, unbelieveably, is getting worse week by week and, with only two matches before the Heineken Cup starts, the future is looking very bleak.

And somebody, somewhere with a sick sense of humour or a death wish chose this music to be played at the end of the game.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Tagged again

Judy was obviously feeling sorry for me as I suffer 'Pluto Syndrome' and tagged me so I would have something to blog about. I'm going to try and make mine follow a theme, so here goes (apologies if I have covered some of these points before)...

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.


2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.


3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.


4. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

1) 20 years ago this year I travelled to West Africa with a Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme Gold Award holders group to work on a building project in an isolated village in Gambia

2) I spent a summer working in Poland with UNESCO teaching English to young people at Summer School. That might explain why so many Poles now live in the UK, and if any near you speak English with a strong Belfast accent ....

3) Last week I was escorted through Manchester Airport with great urgency and at very high speed because I thought I was late for my flight. Turned out the information I had read on the departure screen was for another flight to Belfast from earlier in the day that had been delayed, and eventually left only 20 minutes before my plane

4) I was flying home from a ski trip to Bulgaria when, during take off, the seat beside mine fell into the central aisle and started sliding towards the rear of the aircraft. Only that someone was sitting in it at the time, it might have been quite funny

5) During the war in the Balkans, I worked alongside UNHCR distributing humanitarian aid to Croatian refugees in Daruvar, Sector West

6) I have only ever flown Aeroflot once. They made me take my case onto the plane with me and sit with it on my knee for the journey

7) I travelled half way round the world to Indonesia to take a friend a cheese and jam sandwich made in a barmbrack. The sandwich was a bit squashed by the time it got there, but then having flown Garuda (and lived), so was I

8) When my daughter was sick in bed whilst on holiday in Dubai, I asked could the bed pleased be changed. They actually brought an entire new piece of furniture into the room ....

Now I need to tag some people, do I know eight?? Lets see:

Cosmo Jessie Jewel Kelly Pluto Steve Wils Mr Gnome

Thought for the Day

Handle every stressful situation like a dog. If you can't eat it or play with it, just pee on it and walk away!

Fun Monday

The hostess for this week’s Fun Monday is Rayne at Crunchy Bits and she wants to know what junk thing or things I hang on to. Well, here they are : Receipts ... literally thousands of receipts. I have more till roll in my receipt box than Tescos have in their local supermarket!

I went through a few of them to see what they were for, and apart from several hundred grocery receipts, I found one for a toilet seat we bought in November last year (what, did I think we were going to return it after all this time??), there was one for a jumper from Next which, having worn to a frazzle, I sent to a charity shop last week and one for an eyebrow wax in a beauty salon that has been closed for 18 months!

I didn't take time to work my way right to the bottom of the pile, but the oldest receipt I found was one dated 16/09/06 for some cushions I bought in Dunelm Mill. How ironic, that's two years nearly exactly to the day.

Goodness!

I've not blogged for a whole week!! I'll be changing my name to Pluto next :-)

Singlive!

I love singing. I used to sing in a choir, and I really, really loved that. As I watched the recent BBC competition Last Choir Standing I developed a real 'pang' to sing again. In a choir. OK, truthfully, what I actually wanted was to sing in Only Men Aloud, but I can't afford the surgery.

A quick Google search indicated that finding a choir to join might be easier said than done as any choirs listed locally were recruiting men only, were a bit highfalutin / hoity-toity, required individual auditions or sang in latin.

And then the other half discovered Singlive Belfast! Who just happen to rehearse 2 minutes drive from my front door. So I wandered down tonight to their recruitment night to find out a bit more and see if they'd have me, and ... I'm in!

Rehearsals start on Monday night for the performance of 'Sing Swing' (Mac the Knife, Fly me to the Moon, Chattanooga Choo Choo and the like) at Belfast's Waterfront Hall on Sunday 7th December. Gotta wear 40's clothes ... anyone got access to a wartime nurses uniform??

113 sleeps til Christmas

and yet of all, today, in the NPO at the Carryduff Centre, you could buy your christmas cards. Racks and racks and racks and racks of them they had.

Can't we at least have Halloween first?

Content of a (slightly) sensitive nature: men you have been warned!

My Dolly is a great shopper. She can go through a rail and find a size for you faster than anyone I know. In fact, there's nothing she likes doing more. So when I needed to buy some new underwear last week, I took the Dolly with me.

We have already established that I experience difficulty in the underwear buying department; the situation has got worse since I was recently remeasured as 2 inches smaller and a cup size bigger. In fact, it is nigh on impossible to acquire a bra in my size, let alone one that does not look like it was built at Harland and Wolff shipyard. So the Dolly came in very useful as we trawled through rails and rails of undergarments.

Eventually we found one (that looked like something coco the clown would wear, but no matter, it was my size) and Dolly immediately started to look for a matching pair of knickers. There were only one pair my size, which she pulled out triumphantly, and then the expression on her little face turned from one of joy to one of complete shock as she noticed she had indeed lifted a string (or cheese-cutter as a good friend likes to call them)

'Oh mummy' she exclaimed at full volume. 'You couldn't wear those. They'd give you an awful wedgie!'