Advent calendar

Me: Shall we make a chart to count down how many sleeps it is till Christmas? We could make pockets and put sweets in them.

Owen: Ok, let's make it like a flying dinosaur.

Me: Ok

A vicar up a ladder

A good 3 hour stint up a very long ladder. Excellent work In the coffee tots cause. Good stuff James.

Random boy shots

Random boy update

Fancy dress

A school book day means both boys in fancy dress.

Disc golf again.

This time a larger crowd.
The first annual 'Holy Trinity International Disc Golf Invitational'. 14 people fought it out for the prestigious title. I came third, Paul won.

Camping Mk IV

This time an excellent week on a rather swanky site in Woolacombe on Devon with Team Brandt.

Good times, beaches, rain etc etc.

Happily the tents were yards away from a field being harvested providing endless hours of free entertainment for the boys.



The rather excellent 'Tunnels beaches' in Ilfracombe.











Owen's first stab at proper crazy golf.

Disc Golf

Mark, James and I got stuck into 18 holes of Disc Golf last night. Unbelievably we have championship course right on our doorstep in Leamington. All three of us were pretty rubbish but really enjoyed it. It looks fairly addictive with lots of nice geeky detail to get stuck into. One guy on the course had a bag with 15 different discs for different shots! Happily the whole shooting match is overseen by the PDGA. Excellent. I strongly suspect a second visit is not far away.

Brilliant

New Wine

Just got back from New Wine. Apart from a major lack of ethnic diversity it was great. Good kids stuff. Good talks. Good seminars. Probably the best seminar was Mark's washing up seminar for 0-4 year olds...

Camping pt 2

A weekend at Cotswolds Farm Park. Good stuff. Jetboil proved excellent.

New School Uniform

And suddenly he could be a teenager. Holy smokes time goes fast...

Super Gran(ny)

Aidan's birthday

Cake plus presents. Owen not at all jealous.

Aidan and catherine

DUDES!!!!

Camping

The first of four camping holidays this year was a roaring sucess. Four days of blazing sunshine in the New Forrest.

Contrasting reactions

While out on a damp walk in the woods...





We saw the wonder of creation...



Aidan seemed excited...




Owen did not.

Double readybed

In anticipation of a camping trip Aidan gets an upgrade from a travel cot. Here they both are 'practicing' for the big trip.

Top (hat) man

My Uncle John is a good man. Attending a wedding (Kate & Dave) he maintains a certain level of class by wearing top hat and tails. Never mind that no one else is... Awesome.

Coventry Sports Tour pt 5

Mark and I embarked on leg 5 of our coventry sports tour. This time we returned to Brandon Track, (the scene of the the Speedway triumph and the dogs shambles) for some Stock Car F1 and banger racing action.

We left our respective dwellings expecting something small scale along the lines of the basketball "2 men and their dogs" crowd, but were very pleasantly surprised to find a full car park and around 3000 people there. All in all an excellent night, top racing, crashes, the ability to wander round the pits and look at the cars, and an unusually high ratio of normal coats to high vis coats. More on the scores later. Here's a few snaps to give you a flavor of the evening.

















So, to the scores. A reminder that a complex scoring system gives us a number between 6 and 13 where 14 is best. So far Ice Hockey scored 10 ish, Rugby 8 ish and the Dogs 6 ish. Basketball comfortably leads the way with 13.51.

Stock cars scored as follows (each category out of 5):
Refreshments - 5 (Burgers and tea followed by little bags of sweets. Experience significantly improved by Mark ordering his burger in his best "geezers" voice - when in rome...)
Transport - 4 (3000 people = lots of cars but parking free and no real queue's to get out)
Merchandising - 5 (a wonderful range of stock car related tat. Not to mention the rather excellent looking autobiography shown below)



Quality of game - 5 (some great racing with top crashes, and we were rarely sure who had actually won but it didn't seem to matter!)
Entertaining extras - 5 (mainly the starter using ridiculous hand gestures and a wide range of flags)
Value for money - 4 (Good stuff, but a little pricy at £16)
Springfield Factor - 1 (Not much here, Coventry through and through)
Fellow Spectators - 3 (lots of them, many of them carrying random engine parts, but not enough banter to score 4 or 5)

All this gives 11.92. A good score but still lagging behind Basketball.

Mark has blogged some stuff about it too.

Remember, as Barry "Briggo" Briggs says "If in doubt, flat out..."

Fun fair

A random fun fair arrives at memorial park so we wandered on in. A couple if rides followed by ice cream.