Lamb potjie, rollercoasting, and FIRE #littleloves

Camping has been the main theme this week. Actually talking of themes, Alton Towers has also featured heavily. And fire. In separate places though, obviously.

Read

One of the great things about camping is that I get more time than usual to read. It also means that I roll out my kindle paperwhite, rather than reading on my iPad, as the battery lasts a lot longer and it has a softer backlight which doesn’t irritate everyone else who is camping.

I decided to complete reading the Killables trilogy, with The Disappearances and The System being two of the several books that I happily ploughed my way through whilst sitting in the middle of a field in front of a camp fire. Actually, not that far from the environmental circumstances that the characters in the books found themselves in. Although my social surroundings were far less perilous.

Watched

Sitting in a field means no TV – but when I got home the final episode of Game of Thrones was the first thing I sat down to. I did enjoy it (dragons, zombies, DEATH) but it felt a bit rushed. I’m fairly sure they could have dragged it out over a couple more episodes and it would still have been awesome (and provided me with more Game of Thrones to watch).

I’ve also been watching Little B play with her Casdon Henry Deluxe Cleaning Trolley, which has just about everything you’d need to clean a house but in miniature cleaning form. It comes in a number of pieces but it was quick and easy to put together and Little B loved sticking on all the Henry decals to the cleaning solutions, bucket, trolley and dustpan. The broom is the perfect size for her to help with cleaning and the bucket is great too. I was a little bit disappointed with the mop – all the other items were definitely usable aside from the two mock bottles of cleaning stuff, but the mop is made of quite flimsy material that looks like it won’t last long. Obviously it is a toy rather than a hardcore cleaning set though, so as long as it’s just used for make believe cleaning I’m sure she’ll be happily mopping for weeks whilst I do all the real work.

Talking about real work, there is one extra special element of the Henry Deluxe Cleaning Trolley that Little B is really, REALLY pleased with (and me too) and that’s the handheld vacuum cleaner… which actually works! It’s obviously not high powered, but it has enough suction (once you’ve stuck a couple of batteries in it) to pick up small crumbs and the like – and since Little B is the main crumb creator of the house, it is perfect for her. For what you get (a mostly functional cleaning set which means I can take back charge of my more unwieldy adult sized broom) I think the price is very reasonable, with an RRP of around 27 quid.

Made

It’s been 10 years since I last made one – actually maybe even longer – but given that we had a big wood fired barbecue for camping, and I had my cast iron cooking pot, I decided to give cooking a lamb potjie a go. It’s a South African stew made up of layers of meat, potatoes and then vegetables – no stirring, just keep on adding ingredients and make sure the fire is stoked and hot but not too hot for a couple of hours… and then this is the result:

Wore

Camping = eclectic clothing. I mostly wore my Joules Wellibobs which are my go to foot coverings on slouching around days, because they are fleecy, comfortable, and waterproof – and very easy to put on and take off. I wish I had some that looked smart enough for work, I think I’d just never wear anything else.

Also making an outing was my Minnie Mouse hooded throw that I finally tracked down a few weekends ago in Manchester, again perfect for camping because its big, and warm, and fleecy and of course it makes me look like Minnie Mouse (not that you could tell most of the time, because I was wearing it whilst sitting by the campfire in the dark).

Heard

Being a campsite, I overheard a lot of other people’s music and talking and general noise.

The best thing I heard was sheep baa-ing in the morning, a sure sign that I was indeed on holiday and in a field in Derbyshire.

Played

We took travel Monopoly camping with us, which I am never doing again. Yes its compact and good for travelling. NO IT IS NOT GOOD FOR FIVE SMALL CHILDREN IN A TENT.

After two days of picking up tiny houses and counting and recounting the cards to make sure they were all there, I gave up and hid it.

And we played zombie dice and camping twister instead (which is exactly the same as normal twister except we used my cool twister rug to play instead of the official plasticky game version).

And lastly…

I’m going to check out another local board game club this weekend, and then next week I have the London Board Game Club and the second evening of my own Board Game Club to go to. Exciting!