Coventry sports tour (pt 3)

The latest leg of Mark and I's sports tour of Coventry took us to the Greyhounds. Located at the same place as the speedway and slightly seedy, so no high scores were expected. Here's the track in full floodlit glory.





For those who can't remember Mark and I set up a usefully complex scoring system that spat out a number with many decimal places. The first leg of the tour (Rugby) scored 8.774964387, while leg two (Ice Hockey) fared better at 10.44030651. The categories used to compile the score (all out of five) are:

Refreshments
Transport
Merchandising
Quality of game
Entertaining Extras
Value for money
Springfield Factor
Fellow Spectators

A little excel jiggery pokery and from the average of the square root of each score we get our total. The photo below reveals why the scoring in the 'fellow spectators' category was unlikely to be high -namely there were none. More on scores later.






Mark and I spent ages pretending to understand the complex form guide shown below before placing bets essentially at random based on whimsy. (At one point Mark bet on a little horse "because it shares my bosses name in part" - it obviously lost and Mark will naturally claim the £2 back from the aforementioned boss as really its her fault). In the end some wins did come our way and both of us left feeling like we had not been robbed too badly. (Although I did point out that we could have saved ourselves the trouble by walking in, handing the bookie a tenner, then walking out again)






The ticket stubs below are the loosing ones, the winners you don't get to keep.








The all important scores:

Refreshments: 2 (standard burger and chips, hot chocolate, nothing interesting)
Transport: 5 (parked outside for free)
Merchandising: 0 (there was none)
Quality of game: 1.5 (not massively engaging)
Entertaining Extras: 1 (see shrubs lining the track in top photo)
Value for money: 3 (not bad)
Springfield Factor: 1 (seedy and quite coventry like, no real "bought in" element)
Fellow Spectators: 0 (there were none)

All this gives a predictably low total of 6.5, currently in last place. Oh well...

Kept out of the loop

When your older brother is playing train in the conservatory with the door closed there is no where else in the world you'd rather be...

Holiday fun list v1.0

As we are not going away this summer catherine and I made a list of fun thugs to do as day trips etc. We have loads lined up but started today with a trip to the west midlands air museum. Turns out to not be that much fun and very expensive, ten English pounds to get in and not a fat lot in there. The one saving grace was the Vulcan bomber shown below. Here's to more luck with the rest of the fun list.





The Vulcan is by the way massive, it's not that I am incompetant at operating my phone camera.

Large vegetables

Following last years comically large courgettes this year it's the carrotts turn:

Ooooops

Aidan left a big impression on mum and dad this weekend, or rather on their house. He pulled over a large plant leaving this rather impressive stain...



Dad lept in to mop up but didn't move aidan. Aidan tried to help with the moppin up by splashing and laughing.

The real value of nursery

You sometimes question the value of nursery and feel bad about sending them, but then Owen pops out with something like this that makes up for all our slack parenting. He was sitting in the lounge today with catherine and just sang it all the way through with no prompting, we had not sung it to/with him before or heard him do it before... 100% nursery!!

Oak floor

8 m sq of solid oak floor for sale. See my listing on eBay. Left over from our downstairs floor. Happy bidding.

Like father, like son...

A good stance, a little squared up and pick up a little wide but eyes firmly on the ball and head still. Win.



A raking cover drive, good footwork and weight transfer, high front elbow, too much bottom hand.

(oh yeah, and a nice day at sarah and toms for georges first birthday)

Inside the mind of a seven year old

Here's a link to Sam Jones new blog:

http://samsentertainments.blogspot.com

He decided he wanted to set up a website, being Sam, he had some very specific ideas about what it should look like and do. I managed to convince him that a blog was a good idea. Amazingly (and worryingly for anyone that works in the ICT training industry) he has done everything bar the sign up/set up himself. All the posts, uploading pictures, adding links etc are all his own work. To put that in context, he can only just read, can write some words and yet he can maintain a website! Shame on most of the people I work with who struggle with e-mail!

ESPO

Soemtimes you look at a company and wonder how and why they do so well (curries, comet, PC world), you muse on how serious incompetance does not appear to hamper their profits. Deep down you hope that they might be shut down by the credit crunch. Other companies, like ESPO are the opposite in that they are rubbish but you wonder how they fail to make massive profits. ESPO are an educational supply comany to schools, every school in Britain. Not a bad Market really, especially when you've got it completely cornered. Literally every school buys literally everything from them, so why aren't they up there with tesco in terms of profits? Baffling.

The dullest day of the year

Proffesionally speaking the dullest day of the year is definately open evening. Lets stand in stupidly hot un-air conditioned classrooms answering the dame inane questions over and over again from people who have clearly already decided where their kids are going to school.
In an effort to make it more paletable the geography department struck upon a winning formula;
Air con + "food from aroundthe world" = happy teachers.
Win.