The Daughter took a year off before going to University. The original plan was to spend six weeks volunteering with the orangutans in Borneo. Unfortunately that ended up being too expensive.
So instead she's heading to the Antipodes - four weeks of volunteer work in New Zealand followed by some time in Australia with family.
She has paid for a lot of it herself - she found several jobs including waitressing, before/after school club assistant, and most recently cricket scorer for a local team. (Having a daughter who's a cricket scorer is slightly surreal since, as a family, we have little interest in team sports and only a slight interest in individual sports.)
Add to that the Boy is heading to France for a week and needs to know how to ride a bike. Which he doesn't. Belatedly (because he says he's got the hang of it and just needs practice) I looked up learning to ride a bike on the Inner-Tubes, um ... Inter-Tubes.
This site is good http://www.whycycle.co.uk/learning_to_ride_a_bike/
This one is okay http://www.sheldonbrown.com/teachride.html
I have not, and will not, be travelling much this year. Except to Birmingham from time to time, but I may be going to the big US of A next year.
The Boy has been choosing his GCSE options: Being a star pupil he didn't get all the choices he wanted, apart from sciences and maths, he's doing music - he's very excited about the composition part - he plays three instruments and in three bands. But, unsurprisingly in our family, he's chosen History. We do tend to shove it down both kids throats - those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it - but they don't seem to mind (the Daughter did Classical Civilisations which she loved). The Boy has a particular interest in WWII and that's what he'll be covering, so he's happy.
On the writing front...
The super secret project has been confirmed as dead (but at least it's confirmed), and I didn't get through the Big Finish new writers thingy. So those can be crossed off. It means I will definitely be using my detective script Tec for the Red Planet Prize, but that needs a page one rewrite.
I did enter the Blue Cat competition with Running and that gets announced some time in June.
I have been working through the page one rewrite of Winter definitely some good stuff there.
Meanwhile I'm also working on three website projects - and now have contributed to the Open Source software project called Drupal (means: water droplet) and my page is here it won't mean a lot to non-programmers but you can see my pseudonym there.
Gosh.
What's on the turntable? "Heartsong" by Gordon Giltrap from "Visionary" (This was used as the theme tune to the BBC's long-running "Holiday" TV programme. So is appropriate for this post.)
2 comments:
Have they actually told you that you didn't get through on the Big Finish opportunity? The one that has been announced is the Short Trips short story (for which I am lucky enough to have my name on the list - whoop, whoop), not the script opportunity, which I also entered and have not heard anything on either way.
Okay - I take that back - it's not over with Big Finish :-)
Must admit I was terribly confused and when I tried to sort it out- it just seemed to get worse. So I just assumed they were the same thing.
So - thanks for that.
And - well done!
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