Founders

First Saturday in July, and so it must be Founder's Day. Jake was off to the cathedral this morning, but no parents got tickets due to works going on inside, so we had the morning off. Nicky did the taxi service, and I finally got around to following Jake's IT advice, and getting Google Chrome installed on the Mac, which is making uploading pictures and posting them onto the blog a little bit easier.

We went down to school in the afternoon, and enjoyed lazing in the sun for a while, listening to the athletics announcing ("will another runner from Pitt please come to the start line as we don't have enough competitors yet") and then watching a little bit of the cricket whilst chatting to Mr Fry, who is now the Chairman of the Old Willies, and will also be around during Jake's silver D of E expedition in a few weeks.

Back at home, Jake managed a quick piano practice before I took him over to Georgie's and then the rest of us enjoyed a barbie here this evening.

Off to bed soon. Early starts tomorrow.

Catch

Just driven home through a pretty impressive storm. Quite hard to see through the rain at times, and judging by the rumbling of thunder it is obviously following me home.

Been at the cricket at Hove this evening - Sussex v Kent T20. Amusingly we spent the first few overs of the match glued to the TV watching the tennis. Someone must have heard about how Heather Watson was getting on, and so got the telly turned on, and when we started watching she was 3-0 up in the 3rd against Serena, but we must have been a bad luck charm for her, because she proceeded to lose 7-5. Mind you, she did still play some pretty impressive tennis, and gave the no.1 seed a real scare. I think some of the cricketers might have wondered what was going on, as the cheering and clapping coming from our hospitality area wouldn't have corresponded at all to what was going on out on the field!

As for the cricket match, Sussex posted a pretty low total of 136 which Kent surpassed with over 5 overs to spare. The highlight of the match was our legendary Indian colleague taking a catch from a Kent six hit into our hospitality area!

Rain

A bit of a break in the weather today, and after a late-ish start, listening in to a training call followed by a very pleasant breakfast in the garden with Nicky, there were a few spots of rain on the way to work, and then I got a bit wet on my wander into town at lunchtime. But still quite refreshing compared to the last few days.

I recently read (from the library) the latest Grisham Boone book (The Fugitive), and whilst it was enjoyable, it inevitably wasn't a particularly chunky storyline, what with it being aimed at kids after all, and so I decided to go back to one of the earlier books, and have just read The Rainmaker, which I no doubt read for the first time pretty soon after it came out twenty years ago. Whilst I have the paperback sat on the shelf, I took advantage of the Overdrive app and borrowed the ebook. This meant that I could  read it in occasional free moments on both the iPad and even the iPhone, as I have the app on both devices, and the two versions even know where you are in the book - all very clever.

Anyway, the book was excellent - all about a young lawyer in Memphis bringing down a dodgy insurance company, and it comes with lots of the typical Grisham trademarks - the David and Goliath struggle, the subterfuge and suspense, the very clear sense of right and wrong, but above all, the delight in being swept along with a jolly good story.

Hot

Driving home from work today (via the M2 to avoid a closed M26 and operation stack all the way back along the M20 thanks to Calais having been closed for a few days) the car's temperature gauge was still reading at 35 degrees, even at 7pm. According to the news, this was the hottest July day on record.

I figured it was time to get back into the blog a bit from the second half of the year onwards. Frankly the first half of the year was a pretty poor show - only managed one entry to post a picture in June, and so missed reporting on yesterday's trip to Jersey, the day in London at the weekend to the Taylor Swift concert, and no doubt a whole lot more besides.

So, will start to try harder ...

Birthday

Project

Been recording from the fab and clever grand piano onto the macbook this evening, and then doing a little bit of manipulation in Garage Band, and importing into iMovie and creating a project there (nothing much more fancy than this initial attempt a few years ago), and the plan was to finalise the project in iMovie, upload to Flickr, and share here, but I have fallen at the hurdle called 'lack of disk space when finalising in iMovie'.

Really need to do that sort out of the MacBook to free up some space!

Ape

Yesterday I went Ape.

Now I just ache.