Silence in the Library – Doctor Who 4:8 (major spoilers)

Mrs. Lacer just finishes bowing down and kissing the ground that Moffat types on, that was absolutely brilliant, as you would expect from a Moffatepisode, I can’t wait for him to take over! Although will I be spending the entirety of Moffat’s first season hiding behind a cushion like I did just now?

The Silence in Library was set in, um well a library, the most utterly brilliant, every book published in 51 centuries, covering an entire planet in musty booky goodness, bliss. I’d like to go there but um maybe not right now, as the planet has been infested by the Vashta Nerada, the real reason why mankind is scared of the dark. Suddenly every shadow takes on a whole new scary meaning.

Some brilliant lines, some jokes about spoilers at the beginning when the Doctor tells Donna not to look in biographies from the future, then the discovery that the sonic screwdriver “doesn’t do wood”. And then of course there’s Dr. River Song (played by Alex Kingston), someone who seemingly knows the Doctor very well but the Doctor hasn’t met her yet. Who is she? The next companion? That would be one fantastic way of introducing her (and for her to appear again at a later date). Plus I think Alex Kingston would make a fantastic companion.

And of course there’s the cliffhanger, the Doctor has sent Donna back to the safety of the Tardis (surely he should know by now, that that never works!) and then she turns up as a ‘dead face’ on a statue! What’s happened to her?

 

Saturday

I took Girl Lacerfor a hair cut today, it’s been long over due, last cut last September into a short bob, it had grown into shoulder lengthhair. We went for another short bob again but this time with a fringe (her teachers’ said she had a habit of hiding behind her hair, so she can’t now!). As it was such a cut, we had to pay the adult rate and go for a hair wash, conditioning treatment and hair dry. She did so well, having your hair washed and blown dried is hardly a comfortable experience in a hair salon for adults! And she now looks so grown up with her new hair cut, really smart. She looks like Cate Blanchett in the latest Indiana Jones movie, except she has pale blond hair instead of jet black and doesn’t look quite so much like a Russian!

After the hair cut and a McDs, we stopped by to watch some local kids from the local stage school perform in the shopping centre, they were pretty darn good, including a kid who must only have been Girl Lacer’s age singing a solo from Oliver infront of massive crowds. Me and Mr. Lacer have been thinking about a stage school at some point for Girl Lacer, by stage school I mean part time stage school of course. Although Girl Lacer is a confident child with us, she’s not very confident at all in large group situations and we think a) she’d enjoy it, she’s always been a little diva and b) it would do her confidence a world of good. There are two big stage schools in my area, both on Saturdays as far as I know, problem is at the moment Girl Lacer does ballet on Saturdays which she enjoys and there’s also the money aspect, stage school fees make our expensive ballet school fees look cheap! But she was watching the kids perform with quite rapt concentration.

Now we’re home, I have a stack more books from my local library to get through on the 17th century, they were ordered online with me giving up on my chosen reading list out of desperation and just generally clicking on anything that came up under the search term “17th century”, so now that I’ve seen them at least one of the books looks a dud, the other three are possibles though. I’m currently reading a fascinating book (brought through Amazon) on 17th century magic and religion which I’ll talk more about in Sunday Salon tomorrow.

Mr. Lacer is now in the garden with Girl Lacer building the trampoline we brought on the advice of occupational therapy the other day, now that our garden is clear from the workmen who finally came to fix upstairs guttering, hooray! The guttering had two massive holes, just above our bedroom window sill, so it would cascade down like a waterfall causing a racket that kept the whole block awake everytime it rained at night. I am still very behind on my gardening jobs, must try and do some this afternoon but at the moment it seems to be solely trying to get rid of snails!

From the treetops

Me and the kids went to Kew Gardens today. The weather started out surprisingly beautiful, good enough for us to have a picnic lunch when we arrived and got steadily greyer and drizzlier after that, until by home time it was full on rain. But we still had a good day. Girl Lacer is a big fan of the greenhouses, so we visited there first;

Kew Hot House, there’s also another photo on my photoblog

After that it was the attraction everyone was there for, the new treetop walkway, the crowds round the normally quiet wooded area of Kew were alot bigger than normal! The attraction opened last weekend (click here for news story) and I’d heard there was a lift. I got there with one excited 4 year old and one 2 year old in his buggy and the lift wasn’t yet in action. However I couldn’t disappoint Girl Lacer, so I parked up the buggy and planned to carry Boy Lacer up the 180 (apparently, well that’s what I heard someone say) steps. However, within two flights of stairs, Boy Lacer was having none of it and he was wriggling so much I was in real danger of dropping him, he’s a big boy now, so I had no choice, even though his stair walking skills are not good, to help him climb the steps himself and this was a really slow process on an already crowded staircase, so sorry all those people behind us! Getting up to the top though was worth it, you’re literally amongst the treetops.

The structure itself, by the same people who did the London Eye apparently, is excellent, if a little wobbly in places :S ! Very industrial looking but it blends in beautifully with the wood, as the girders and other metal components it’s composed off are all rusted, so they’re brown, it looks great and to be walking amongst the tops of trees is fantastic. Definitely something we’ll be revisiting over and over again, if anything just to see the differences in the trees as the seasons change.

I will not go up there again without a lift though, Boy Lacer (despite being naughty and not letting me carry him) did do well on the steps though considering, although on the way down by the end he was literally slipping down each step rather than stepping down and when we got to the bottom, he immediately staggered to a nearby fence and clung on, supporting his whole body by his fingers, his legs bless him probably felt awful, needless to say he went straight for the pushchair after that!

 

Premonition

I’ve just inflicted a girly movie on Mr. Lacer, Premonition, a Sandra Bullock vehicle. Ms. Bullock plays a wife living the week of her husband’s death out of order, affairs are suspected and mysterious injuries appear on one of the children. I thought it was a fairly clever idea and quite a sweet ending. Mr. Lacer thought it a predictable chick flick where he “guessed the ending after 5 minutes”. There you go, probably one for the ‘ladies’.

Busy day

It’s mid way through half term holiday now and considering Mr. Lacer has just been paid today, I’ve been using it as an opportunity to catch up with some jobs. Plus Boy Lacer also had his first occupational therapy appointment today.

The day started with more snail wrangling, Girl Lacer is getting very good at it and doesn’t even mind touching the ‘slimy bits’ now, so she insists I leave it all to her. She rescues them and puts them in the back of the garden near the compost bin, making sure they ‘don’t fall over’. She’s been thinking about it though and reckons we should put them somewhere else and we both agreed the front garden would be a good idea (nothing I don’t overly object to them eating in there) but for the moment the snails are treating my greenhouse like an all you can eat buffet, my poor aubergines are full of holes. Shockingly though I saw a snail actually on my slug tape, so they obviously don’t hate it that much, useless stuff then. I also found two snails on my french beans and those arn’t in the greenhouse, so the only way they could have got on is over the slug tape. I saw over on The Edible Gardener that they’re having a similar snail problem, except their chosen method of snail dispatch I don’t think would be permitted in this household, even if it’s alcoholically pleasant, Girl Lacer would never forgive me. Boy Lacer is quite a snail fan to, the other day he was struggling as usual over the front doorstep and only once inside did he remember that he’d seen a snail underneath the doorstep earlier, so he was inconsolably upset that he thought he’d squashed it, he combed every inch of the doorstep trying to find it. It was actually back on our upside down recycling box which lives next to our doorstep, so all was well, now everytime Boy Lacer see it, he has to give it a pat.

Anyway, after the snail wrangling it was of to the children’s unit for occupational therapy. I’d warned the kids that the occupational therapy lady was ‘fierce’, well I’d heard she was but thankfully for all of us, the fierce occupational lady had moved on and the new one was rather nice.

It’s always a bit of a disturbing sensation when you walk into a room, with someone you’ve never met before and they know all about you and your child, although at least they’re doing their job. Anyway lots of advice, Boy Lacer needs to sit straight legged on the floor more (that will be easy – not), that will help his hips and for his sensory issues, mainly involving water these days, we need to make a list of things he avoids and encourage him to do them as it’s the things he’s avoiding he has issues with and if we leave it it’ll only get worse. So with the water, it’s playing with bowls with thin layers of water and some toys, which I had thought of but the weather has been so horrible the thought of doing it in the garden at the moment. With blankets, it’s doing massages through blankets, Girl Lacer demonstrated that and was liked a blissed out cat. For jumping, it’s bouncy balls and trampolines, we have a quite large collection of large bouncy balls, aka our space hoppers, we have two kid ones and a grown up one but no trampoline (as in a little one with a handle). The occupational therapist actually gave me a whole long list of toys and we’re not getting all of it but I do realise some of their suggestions about purchases can be very useful, in physio for example they recommended a small table and chair set, this was when Boy Lacer wasn’t even cruising, we got the table and chair set and he was cruising within a few days as he got from the chair to the table and onto the nearby sofa. So I did go out and buy a trampoline after OT today. Girl Lacer is going to be far more pleased with the new garden toy than Boy Lacer will be. The occupational therapist also said his shoes (Clarks Doodles) weren’t fitting very well and they weren’t really. So I took him, after OT as well, to a different shoe shop, discovered that after being told from the previous shoe shop that his feet were close to a size apart different in size and that he needed a size 7, that actually his feet were both the same size at 6 1/2. So the second pair of shoes in two months, these are a bit more substantial than Clarks Doodles and with this weather they need to be.

Finally it was home but a stop off at the barbers on the way. Boy Lacer hates having his hair cut, consequently his hair always has been rather long. We’d been to that barbers before but it had changed ownership, but I thought at least it was still physically the same barbers and that trick worked, even though I personally wasn’t impressed with the attitude of the male barber who said in his thick Polish accent that he wasn’t going to do it, but the female barber was good and because Boy Lacer was familar with the building, although he still didn’t like it, at least this time he wasn’t sobbing hysterically.

Chilli flowers and snails

Photo also posted at Lacer’s photos

My chillies are really budding well now, with a few flowers appearing. Judging by the number of buds, I’m going to have a glut of chillies, I do use them quite a lot but not that much! I may have a go at drying them if I do have to many, I tend to use dried chilli far more than fresh.

I still haven’t managed to re-pot my chillies and aubergines, they’re beginning to really need it but I haven’t had time. I also have a new collection of herbs from the Green Fair yesterday, more coriander (a small but already very fast growing plant), flat leaf parsley (much prefer that over my curly leaf parsley), mint, oregano and thyme, all these will need re-potting to.

The chillies and the majority of my herbs, being inside, are escaping the menace that is currently plaguing my little greenhouse, snails. We found two in there yesterday and I was a big girl’s blouse and got Mr. Lacer to evict them, unfortunately today Mr. Lacer was at work today and I found five! So, for the first time in my 33 years I had to pick up a snail and I deposited them on the lawn. Girl Lacer, who witnessed this, was very impressed that “Mummy was being a brave mummy”. A little while later, Girl Lacer, who had earlier said she was only going to touch snails when she was a “brave mummy”, disappeared back out into the garden, she then came back in and said “I moved the snails to the earth (my borders), because they like the earth and there’s food there. I stroked one first and then I picked it up and moved it!”, ahhh bless her and supports my theory that sometimes if you want your kids to do something, you have to do it first yourself, I didn’t particularly want her to be squeamish about snails, like I was am, and now she isn’t!

So my poor greenhouse occupants are suffering from some eaten leaves, I think the local snails think I’ve parked a buffet in the garden for them. I use slug / snail tape on my pots, which does seem to be doing the job (it’s on my salad trough, carrots and french beans, which are all out of my greenhouse and don’t seem to have a problem with snails). It’s also on my pots in the greenhouse but the greenhouse is quite crowded now (and will be even more so when I re-pot, groan) and I think the snails are climbing up inside the greenhouse plastic and then ‘leaping’ over the rims of the pots. Girl Lacer had a rather smart idea when I was talking about it with her, at the moment the slug tape is around the pots, Girl Lacer suggested putting the slug tape on the rim so they couldn’t climb over, genius (spot of motherly pride there, she’s only 4). So I’ll do that, although we’ll still have a problem of them getting on by leaves brushing the plastic.

Die Hard 4.0

I’ve finally got to see Die Hard 4.0 and as a big fan of the Die Hard films I was more than a little disappointed. Credit to them, they’ve tried to bring it into 21st century by having a computer related threat as the main storyline but it made the film seem more impersonal, you need the bad guy literally taking over the tower / airport / New York, not sneaking into your bank accounts. Although the whole hacking computer scenario was scary. Some of the henchmen also seemed a little too indestructible to, come on, the guy brushing himself off after he’s fallen out of a helicopter in the sky that a police car has just crashed into? Also I kind of missed something with the chief bad guy actually being American, come on where’s your British stage actor after some extra bucks? Everything just added up to Die Hard 4.0 becoming just another standard action movie and not the something special that the first three Die Hards were.

However, there are some excellent action sequences, notably the sequence in the tunnel where the lights are out and the cars are heading for each other unknown and the rather unbelievable but still good sequence with the truck driven by McClane on the overpass being chased by the fighter plane. So it was still entertaining, just not as good.