One in the Eye - Not Cricket

I volunteered to help out at Freya's class camp on Wednesday and Thursday. Thus I presented myself at school at 2PM and was introduced to the class. We drove the kids to the teacher's house, where the camp was to be held, along Papamoa Beach Road. It was a whacking great place, 3 stories high, with a pool, a grassed area and various wooded bits and of course it was only a minute from the beach. One of the first activities was to get on to the beach and collect driftwood for use on the camp fire later on. I volunteered myself for fire duties, since this is most definitely a man job and as the only man there it boiled down to me. I managed to get the thing going with just one match which I found rather gratifying. The idea of the fire was to "cook" some bananas and chocolate in tin foil which the kids prepared. This all passed off OK and the results were mostly edible. However the fire needed to be built up again for a latter marshmallow toasting session, and that's when I managed to poke myself in the eye courtesy of a low hanging branch, dislodging a contact lens which morphed itself into a ball of molten snot as it headed inexorably towards the fire. Fortunately I had packed several spares, and just about managed to avoid swearing loudly in the vicinity of 30 sets of delicate impressionable ears.

I had been scheduled to sleep in the boys tent, but alas two of the boys got really emotional which necessitated the teacher taking my place. Thus I slept in a bed. However, a rather annoying insect, possibly a cricket had taken residence in the pile of firewood immediately outside the window and was most definitely audible. Thus I received various strange looks as I began dismantling the pile of wood (which wasn't actually much more than a barrow load) in search of the offending bug. I failed to find it, but it got the message and kept itself quiet allowing us all to get a decent night's kip. It was quite a late night for the kids, but this didn't stop them waking before 7.

The first order of the day was an enforced run along the beach and a dip in the sea. Sounds cold and horrible, but it was in fact really warm and everyone went under the water. Various activities took place until after lunch when camp was packed up and we took the kids back to school. As the school was chucking out at that time, I assumed Di was picking up Phoebe so I went home with Freya. Apparently this was a bad plan as the terse phone call I got as I turned up at home made me realise. As we arrived home, we noticed the rather large estate agent sign on the fence. Still nothing in writing, but it does appear that we're up for auction on March 25th.

Thursday evening was rather interesting. Two of the wooden slats in Phoebe's bed dropped out onto Freya and resisted attempts to reinstall, seemingly because they were too short for the gap. It turned out that one of the other was slightly misplaced and was therefore bowing the bed frame out allowing the slats to drop through. However the major fun was the remote diagnosis of not one but two misbehaving computers in the UK, with constant updates from the customers and help from others flying back and forth via email. One may or may not have been resolved, the other needs the lid taking off. I managed to get to bed a lot later than I'd planned.