The Sexist Book of Cakes... and Rich's birthday

To celebrate Rich reaching the ol' halfway to 50 landmark last week, we thought it would be nice to bake him a cake. So we had a little Eurovision/Cake Baking session on Saturday night. Browsing through Marion's Cake Decorating Book (1970) for inspiration, I soon noticed it was more than a little sexist...

Under the 'BOYS' section, there were the following cakes:

A football













A cricket bat













And a racing car...











All of these were fine. But under the 'GIRLS' section of the cake book, we found:

A sewing machine











A baby













A dressing table













And my personal favourite... an oven:











Oh, how times have changed... anyway, in the end we decided on a simple train design, complete with any small objects Ben could find in his cupboard. Here is the end result:






Yes, those ARE dinosaurs sitting amongst a forest of chocolate eggs. There's a deep and meaningful reason behind the design- if you can guess it, you win a prize... ;)

Rich was very impressed. We then had a lovely meal at Rayleigh Lodge, which is a very nice restaurant (the double chocolate fudge cake is to die for!) I'm the one blocking out Anna's head:

All in all, a lovely weekend.

AAAARRRRRRRRGGGHHHH!

What a cruel, cruel trick to play on somebody at 8.30am in the morning...

(My assistant teacher Louise decided it would be hilarious to plant her son's rubber snake in my bag whilst I was taking the children over to assembly- I jumped so much that my hand whacked against the top of the shelf and I now have a lovely purple bruise!)

What a cow.

The Snake

It was a normal Saturday morning. I was sorting the clothes in my washing basket when I noticed a flash of bright orange underneath it. 'That's weird,' I thought to myself, 'I don't have any orange clothes...' As I picked up a towel near the bottom of the basket, I could've sworn it moved in a slithery way. Strangely, I didn't panic (probably because I assumed my imagination had gone into hyperdrive again) and instead went downstairs to seek a second opinion.

Katie: Dad, you're gonna think this is crazy, but I think there might be a snake in my room.
Daniel: Cool!
Dad: (disbelivingly) A snake. Not a belt?
Katie: I know it's not a snake, but if you could just check...

So the three of us trudged upstairs, me armed with a garden hoe (not completely sure why). Dad rummaged through the pile of washing and there it was: a 2 foot long, bright orange, hissing SNAKE!

We stood there in shock for a little while, then shut the door and went back downstairs. What were we supposed to do now? It was at this point I began to freak out...

I phoned the RSPCA, and after a few minutes of 'If you have found a stray cat, press 1. If you have found a stray dog, press 2...' I was eventually put through to somebody, who said she would pass the matter onto a local centre who would call me back. After waiting for an hour, we called back and the woman apologised and said she'd get back to us. We're still waiting for that phonecall now.

We rang the vet, who said they didn't deal with snakes.
We rang the zoo, who didn't have any 'snake specialists' available.
Eventually, we got through to the reptile centre in Colchester, who said that if we threw a towel over it and trapped it in a bucket, they would send somebody round to come and get it.

They had to be kidding.

The problem was, we just had no idea where it had come from. The RSPCA woman asked if I'd been anywhere, at which point I thought I must've brought it home in my suitcase from Spain last month, or even Lithuania last weekend... (I quickly dismissed it coming from Lithuania- even I would have noticed that, surely?!) The neighbours were out and my brother was convinced that they didn't have a snake as they had a rabbit. So we didn't have a clue if it was poisonous or not.

Two hours later, my brother tried visiting the neighbours again. It turns out that the hissing creature in my bedroom was a friendly corn snake called Wesley, who had escaped a couple of weeks ago from his cage. Because we live in a semi-detached house and I have built-in wardrobes, one of which has loose floorboards, Wesley had slithered his way up and made himself at home in my room! Our neighbour was very apologetic and asked if I wanted to hold him, at which point I very politely declined and asked if he could remove it from my house. My brother was much more keen though:

Impressive, isn't he? I still can't quite believe it happened. I'm scarred for life...

Get your popcorn ready...

...because I have made my first ever short film!

I recently bought a new camera and have been wanting to test out its video capability for a while. Then last weekend, the perfect opportunity arose when we boarded a bus at Kaunas International Airport, Lithuania. The plan was simple- as we caught our first glimpse of Kaunas, I would capture the initial sights and sounds of a bustling city on a beautiful sunny day.

One hour later, and it would appear that all was not going quite according to plan...

Check out the upper body strength of this little guy...

So, I was sitting at my computer this evening, trying to find some kind of blog inspiration (in other words, avoiding doing work). As I sat thinking, I kept hearing a 'clang, clang, clang, THUMP, clang, clang, clang THUMP!' So I looked out into the hallway and saw Nibbles II (my brother's hamster) doing this...

If you can't be bothered to watch it for the whole minute, just skip to the end when the camera makes a noise and he lets go in surprise.

(More interesting things have happened this week, but you'll have to find out about those another time...)

Two Stars and a Wish

Two Stars and a Wish is a marking technique we were taught during teacher training. When marking any piece of work, you're supposed to list two really good things about it (the stars) and one thing that wasn't so great and could maybe be improved next time (the wish). I never really get around to it, but it's a nice idea. I'm going to blog about two really good things that have happened and one not so great, so I thought the title was more than appropriate...

Star One

Scottish Night!

Another fundraiser for our ball, this one wasn't quite so well organised as we decided to hold it on the same weekend as ROOTS. So lots of people couldn't make it. Still, we had a good turnout from our corps and it was loads of fun. It involved some Scottish dancers demonstrating a routine and us attempting to copy it. Here are a couple of photos, just so you can feel like you were part of the magic:

A Scottish dancer showing us some moves.

A wheel.

The biggest turkey I've EVER seen! (Nothing to do with Scottish dancing, but we kept hearing him 'gobble-gobbling' from the farm next door whilst we were setting up...)

Star Two

Those of you who watch GMTV will be aware that a guy called Alan Mechem beat 5000 other hopefuls to win a TV presenter competition last week. Well, on Friday night Heather and I met him out in Leigh! He's a very funny guy and we enjoyed chatting to him (although I had no idea who he was at the time). I know he's not really famous, but thought I'd mention it in case he makes it big one day...

Actually, I just watched a clip of him presenting on GMTV, and I'm not sure he's going to make it all that big. But who knows?!

A Wish

I have a Cocker Spaniel called Boysie. He's 14 years old and starting to feel his age a bit... for the past couple of weeks we've had to take him to the vet because of an ear infection (£70 for some ear drops that spilled all over the floor) and various other minor ailments. Today I had to take him back for a check-up, all by myself. Which was a huge mission as Boysie is TERRIFIED of travelling in cars. He becomes a dead weight so it's impossible to drag him anywhere, and refuses to move. So I spent a good 10 minutes trying to lug him onto the seat and then over onto the passenger side. Here was the outcome:

Useless lump. It took another half an hour before we finally made it to the vet, who took one look, smiled and said 'He's getting better, best bring him back next week just in case!' and showed us the door.

Grr.

(There's no actual wish in there, but it's one thing that hasn't gone that great for me this week. So it does count...)

Pronunciation Problems

Yesterday, on the tube, two Americans said to me:

'Excuse me, do you know if this train stops at LIE-cest-er Square?'

After correcting them ('It's LESTER Square, innit!') they started chatting about the journey they were making the following day, to a place called 'Looga-Borooga'. After racking my brains for a few minutes I realised where they were talking about.

Loughborough.

We do have a pretty strange language at times. The above conversation reminded me of a chat we had with our stalker, Chris, in Hamburg last summer. It went a bit like this:

Chris: I go to live in Ips-ich.
Katie: Oh, I have a cousin who lives in Ipswich.
Chris: Does she know you don't pronounce the 'w' in 'Ips-ich'?
Katie: Um...
John: (helpfully) You don't pronounce the 'w' in 'Norwich'... Maybe that's what you mean?
Chris: No, I mean 'Ips-ich'. I go to Ips-ich.

The mistake was understandable, but he refused to believe us! (He then hinted that he wanted us to drop him off in Ipswich, but we managed to make our escape...)

While we're on the topic of funny pronunciations for place names, my Geordie friend Laura pronounces 'Great Yarmouth' and 'Bournemouth' as 'Great Yar-mouth' and 'Bourne-mouth' (as opposed to 'muth'). And there's no arguing with her, because that's how it's spelt.

Weird.