Jonathon Wardman

House, cat, grandma, holidays, etc

Well there goes another entry (heh, it seems to be calming to write this from college after exams, lol).  I should be in general studies now, but I’m not going to go – my excuse is that I’m stressed about the exam I just had (or something…).  That’s one thing that is odd – we don’t have exams leave as such.  They decided that they would carry on running lessons up to the exams, but we get the day before any exam off so we could revise.  I think generally people are taking that as being ‘it doesn’t matter if you don’t go to lessons, no one will complain’.

Anyway, enough with talk of exams (that was the last entry!).  Its spring bank holiday next week, hurrah.  It will give me chance to have at least some kind of rest, even if I have promised to go into Age Concern at some point over the holidays (rather was nagged into it by my mother, lol).

Now, I don’t remember if I have talked about this before in here (I think probably I have in passing), but my father, being the adventurous, daring and thrill seeking man that he is (umm, read: slightly mad, but dead set when he gets ideas into his head) wants to build what will be, apparently, a revolutionary ‘underground’ house.  He doesn’t work (actually there is something I definitely haven’t written about before in here because he only decided in the last month that he wasn’t going to work anymore – he used to do supply teaching a bit, but finally decided to pack it in because he was fed up with it.  He also does property development (buy to let, buy to refurbish, etc.).  Well now he doesn’t do much.  The property development is all very well and good, but it doesn’t take much work – the odd viewing of a house that he might want to buy, every so often talking to our builder about how much it would cost to do some work, making phone calls to the estate agent to tell them he either will make an offer or will not.  So he spends most of his time at home (which doesn’t affect me all that much except when I want to come home and put music on stupidly loudly to make myself feel better after a long day or something…and I can’t).  True he does some work on our house, but other than that he doesn’t seem to do much), and so has this as a pet project to manage the building of an ‘eco-house’ on some land we own.  We got planning permission for it a while back, so he is making plans for getting on with it.  Now, to bring the story up-to-date, we got a telephone call from someone who is, apparently, a famous architect the other day.  My dad was really excited about it (sorry, I fail to get excited).  Anyway, this bloke rang because he wanted to feature our development in a journal that he is the editor for.  Umm, yey?  No, I don’t want to be all over a architecture journal.  He also did a little bit of a pricing on the build, and, umm, its going to be a bit expensive (I don’t remeber the exact cost, but I do remeber thinking that it would be far more than he would ever dream of spending on a ‘real’ house, let alone building one.  Personally I think its too much risk, and so does my mother, but he is still set on it…and we will have to see.

My parents are at planning holidays again – they pretty much only just came back from the one they are on and out come the brochures.  This time they are looking at a canal holiday.  We have done canal holidays quite a bit in the last few years (well boating holidays – we have been on rivers as well).  Its one of the holidays I actually like going on with them.  I’m not so keen on going off on the foreign holidays with them because they usually end up being pretty dull, but when we go on boats I quite enjoy it (actually, I really enjoy it).  I have something to do, because I usually drive, and its nice and slow and a nice change from real life and fast things and things.  Anyway, they are looking at getting a long weekend the weekend after the exams (or a few days in the week in the week after the exams).  One problem is the cat though – there is no one to look after him if we all go away (we don’t put him in a cattery any more, he is too old now for things like that), one of the options is to either take him down to my grandma’s house and let him stay there (its quite good because he is happy in the car as long as we are on motorways and things – last time we took him down there he looked out of the window for a bit, and then fell asleep in the footwell for the rest of the way (although he didn’t like coming back when we went over the country roads), or my grandma could come up here to look after him (and its a bit like a holiday for her, she can meet the people from my mums church and things).  I can’t think of much else we can do really because there is no one else who can look after him.  We will have to see.

Talking about my grandma – I need to send her the pictures I took of the deer on our land the other day (actually a few weeks back now).  My parent’s had seen a deer before on there, and told me about it, but I hadn’t believed them.  Then when they were on holiday I was walking down the hill above our land and I saw two of them just sitting amongst the grass.  They were really cute!  I had to go and get my camera and take pictures of them, and they came out not so bad (although the weather was a bit poor, and you can tell).  My mum thinks that she would be interested, so I should send them to her (it will also keep her happy – she likes to get email from me for some reason, likes to know what I am up to and things – she likes me sending pictures of things I have been up to, like th catings from theatre school).  Oooh, look, it all leads on – talking of theatre school…

We have another 2 weeks off.  Its a shame really because its good fun, and I get to see all my friends from there which I don’t get to see any other time.  I’m going to miss it when I go off away, but they said that we can come back next year in the summer and go to Epping with them (as leaders no less, worrying…), and some of my other friends from school who also go to theatre school are staying here and going to Huddersfield uni, and want to stay on and do some sessions with the younger years, so I don’t suppose I will lose all contact (at least I hope not!).  I want to keep in contact with the people who go as well on a personal level so finger crossed it wont be so bad!

Okey enough for one entry, I’ll return and write more (just one more big entry, then back to more frequent focused things).