You are never too old for a snow ball fight

It wasn't snowing when we went to bed last night but oh boy! did it make up for it while we were sleeping. And it continued to snow all day long so we not only had to dig our way out to take the kids to football training but we had to dig our way home again. Poor Sharan, the Mum-mobile we drive around in, is seriously not up to the job of getting us safely from A to B if conditions are less than perfect. I think she was manufactured by British Rail: the wrong kind of leaves, the wrong kind of rain or any kind of snow and you may as well walk. We've ordered a 4X4 as our next car but, this being Hungary and my life being governed by Sod, it will probably arrive just as everything thaws. I may yet have to work out how the hell these snow-chains fit.

So what can you do in the face of a half metre of snow outside your door? Go play in it of course. Pickle has made snow angels up and down the road, Nobby used the snow shovel to make a piste for the toboggans and Boy-Next-Door and I had a superb snowball fight; actually after a while there weren't so many actual balls of snow involved after Nobby showed him the advantages of using the shovel to fling maximum snow at one time and completely cover the opposition (me). I got him back pretty good though. And he was the first one of us to head inside, the wimp. Pickle and I made a snowman on the side of the road (I would say on the path but there is so much snow there is no way to tell where the road ends and the path begins, we were literally wading through it) and we've taught Boy-Next-Door's dog to catch snowballs when you throw them at him. Tiggy had a wonderful time getting thoroughly dug into the drifts and dragging Ike through them with her.

Poppet, on the other hand, has decided that she does not like snow and stayed indoors making bracelets. She has recently developed an allergy to fresh air and exercise in general; it's amazing how many stomach aches she's been having when the bell rings for break or lunchtime at school. Lucky for her the school secretary is as soft a touch as me and lets her read a book on the sick bed while all the other children play outside until her miraculous recovery when lessons resume. I did offer to take her to the doctor but apparently it's not bad enough to bother a doctor about. Hmmm.

I am not sure what this means for our skiing holiday - Poppet told Nobby today that 'Mummy said I can go in the club on the ski holiday, I hate skiing and I'm not doing it.' Of course I said no such thing. But I have a secret weapon up my sleeve - we are going on the school-organised trip so a lot of her friends and peers will be there and I reckon the desire not to lose face might spur her into her snow-trousers and out onto the piste. Fingers crossed anyway.

Anyway, now I reckon its time to complete the ski-trip rehearsal with a nice cup of Vin Chaud and a chocolate crepe. Oh yeah.

Pickling

When Pickle is busy at something - Super Mario Brothers on the DS, reading the Beano, watching Kid versus Cat - it can be difficult to get a response out of him. So Mummy frequently resorts to humour giving it:

'Earth calling Pickle! Come in Pickle!'

Sometimes you get a mutter in reply, more often than not you might as well bash your head against a wall.

However tonight I got a reply I wasn't expecting, proving his nickname is entirely perfect:

'I'm afraid Pickle is busy right now, please leave a message.'

Nine

It's bedlam here. I nipped upstairs to print off some lecture notes and sneak a quick face-pack while the kids were noshing their tea. You know it was a recipe for disaster.

First Poppet decided that her pasta would taste better to the dulcet tones of Charlie's Angels Full Throttle. At full surround sound volume.

And now, while my visage gradually solidifies under a mound of clay, Poppet is bashing out a tune on the piano, apparently having forgotten how to plug in the headphones (I knew it was worth paying all the extra for an electric model...) Pickle-meister is smacking marble chess pieces around the marble chess board, the dog is barking and the phone is ringing...

Well, at least my blackheads are finally getting zapped.

But, you know, I got through another birthday party yesterday so I am surprisingly Zen about the whole Picadilly Circus routine. If I can survive sixteen sugar-loaded hyped-up crazies zooming round my house and swinging off the decorations then I can cope with just my two doing their normal thang.

Although to be honest I am pleased to announce that parties get slightly easier the older they get. I only had to lay on a moderately complex Treasure Hunt - which the girl's team breezed through whilst the boys were still trying to work out 'You go here to wash up if you don't have a dishwasher': silly me thinking they'd have a scooby doo about where anything to do with washing is located. I also made a fishing game having finally said 'Nuts' to the party bag idea; they get to 'fish' for a parcel instead. It's the French take on the old Bran Tub we had when I was little and only slightly more hazardous if the boys decide the rods can double up as light sabers and start hooking chunks off their fellow guests.

Poppet was more than happy with a bag-load of make-up and hair-colouring to entertain all her girly friends in her room. Pickle went feral as usual once he got a few lads under his cabin bed but the ensuing girl-bashing was mercifully short this time. Boy-Next-Door was quite happy to come and play referee with our much younger ones... until he heard a familiar voice in the hallway and realised his class teacher was also here (his son is in the same class as Poppet) and we didn't see much of him after that. Nobby presided over the Wii games in the basement so I just had to see to the death-by-chocolate cake her Ladyship had insisted on and the rest was all tea and biscuits.

Somehow I don't think Pickle's will be as sedate; I reckon I'm searching for a 'bring a cake and a wallet' venue come July.

The bank melted my ice cream

One quickly learns the places to avoid when one moves into a new country. In Hungary the list is threefold - the Post Office, the bank and public hospitals.

Sadly in my case I can only avoid the first one thanks to the power of modern technology and the wonderful services of Moonpig.com. And hopefully the hospital trips may tail off now we have a decent contract with a clinic that will actually treat children on days other than Thursdays.

The bank, however, is turning out to be a necessary evil given that cash is still the normal way of paying for most items here. You can get a debit card with a chip and pin and many stores have the keypad at the till. But don't be fooled - you'll only get to use the 'OK' button to confirm they typed in the right amount, you still have to sign the receipt by hand. And there's no guarantee that your particular bank card will be accepted. The Post Office, where utility bills are paid, only accepts its own debit card, which is why the queue is always full of people with huge wadges of cash to pay for their gas and electric.

Which is why I found myself at the bank yesterday on my way back from Tesco in order to withdraw 620 euro to part-pay for our ski trip, 11,200 forints (about 35 euro) to pay for accident insurance and 19,600 forints (almost 80 euro) for piano lessons. Given that the cashpoints only dispense in multiples of 5000 forints searching for the correct change is a national past-time. But I thought I'd enlist the help of the cashier at my bank to make the process simpler.

Oh what a bad idea.

You know when you're standing in front of a glass screen and the other person is click, click, clicking away on their computer, ostensibly dealing with you request while you gradually lose the feeling in your legs and your face switches to screen saver during the wait... I am convinced this guy yesterday was either playing Solitaire or harvesting his crops in Farmville. Yes, I'm judging him by my own standards but seriously, how many boxes did he have to tick over the space of five minutes to then turn round to me and say 'computer says 'no''??

Here's how it went.

'Can I have 620 euros from my account please?'
'Sure, do you know your account number?'
'No, but here is my bank card.'
'Please fill out this form. Can I see your ID?'
'Here is my passport, here is your form.'

Click, click, click, 'A lonely brown cow has turned up on your farm, would you like to help him?' click, click, click, 'Your neighbours have fertilised your crops, would you like to return the favour?' click click click.

'I can't find your passport number in the computer.'
'Oh. Is that a problem? I have withdrawn money like this before.'
'Yes, I can't find your passport number in the computer.'
'Oh. Maybe I gave my driving license as ID last time. But I don't have it with me.'
'I can't give you money if I can't find your passport number in the computer.'
'So what shall we do?'
'Go to my colleague over there and she will put your passport number into the computer. Then come back and I will be able to find your passport number in the computer and give you the money.'

So I found myself at another glass screen with another bank worker clicking away at their computer, possibly even a farming neighbour of the first one and volunteering to adopt the stray cow...? Who knows. But after much clicking I was finally told the passport was now in the system.

Back I go to the first window and.... he's called another customer, who appears to be withdrawing the Gross National Product of Luxembourg - in cash. It is seriously unbelievable that people are expected to wander around with hundreds of euros worth of banknotes stuffed in their pockets in order to pay for their electric or buy a sofa. Yes, a sofa: I once went to a furniture shop to buy a lamp, handed over my debit card to be told 'Oh no, Madam. We only deal in cash. You're in Hungary.' We were surrounded by expensive leather couches for which they would only accept cash??!!

Anyway, I eventually made it back to the front of the queue, waited while he finished the paperwork for the previous customer, waited while he fished out the form I had already filled in, waited while he planted a few potatoes and bought a new fence on his Farmville and finally received 620 euros.

Next I asked for the 11,200 forints for the insurance bill, assuming it would be a mighty sight quicker now all the right numbers were in the right boxes.
But I was wrong.
Apparently to withdraw the money from the cashier would incur a charge. But if I went to the cashpoint and withdrew an appropriate amount the cashier could change it to different denominations for free.

So I trotted round to the cashpoint, trotted back, mercifully no-one else had taken up my place in front of the cashier window, and started the whole waiting game once more as he tried to work out how to convert two 10,000 forint notes into 11,200 in change.

All in all I think I was in the bank for forty minutes whilst my shopping languished in plastic bags in the boot of my car.

And that is how my bank melted by ice cream.

DM

You know they say bad things come in threes...
Well, three bad things happened on Monday with distinctly suspicious timing given it was the night we were off to see Depeche Mode -indoors this time, our little treat to ourselves to make up for getting drowned at the stadium gig last July (yes, *July*, just our luck to get the one rainy day all summer).

Well whoever Sod may be with his sodding Laws of Sod was having a right laugh on Monday. In fact he was probably doubled over clutching his belly and turning purple after what he dished out.

First, I couldn't find the tickets. You know how it is: you buy them six months ahead of time, you're going to put them somewhere safe. Now, although I would tell you I am an organised person, when it comes to paperwork that organisation consists of lots of piles round the house, some complete with plastic wallets with hopeful titles such as 'To-Do' or 'For Filing' on them. Yet still the filing cabinets I purchased at great expense some time ago lie pretty much empty, apart from all the tax forms which are diligently hidden away because Nobby's in charge of taxes.

Well, I searched high and low, getting more and more depressed at the amount of crap that I will have to file one day and more and more worried about how I was going to break the news to Nobby that I'd lost the tickets. I sent him a hopeful text in case he'd spirited them away having been through this routine with passports and driving licenses once or twice before. But no, he hadn't a Scooby Doo where to look. My system is a mystery to him (and me it seems).

The last place I looked was a file in the filing cabinet marked 'Pending'. And there they were. Doh.

Then I gaily drove off to attend a training meeting at school and collect the children afterwards, leaving Tiggy in the garden with her bedding all cosy inside the kennel so she could snuggle up if she was cold. I was sure everything would be fine for a couple of hours.
To quote David Gahan sometime later that evening: 'Wrong'.
I came back to an empty kennel - completely empty, not just lacking a dog - and there was Boy-Next-Door's puppy ripping the dog-bed foam innards to shreds all over the lawn.

I have to say I had a slight rant at that point. OK, I blew my lid, telling Boy Next Door just what I think of his hole-digging, bed-chewing, dirty-paws-on-white-walls, over-excited, out-of-control, bouncy puppy. A month's worth of frustration in a few short minutes, poor lad, he got both barrels.

Then I had to tone it down a little remembering that my kids were due to be staying at their house while we went to the concert... oops. Just like me to open my mouth and fit both feet in.

Anyway, all was well in the end, although Nobby got stuck at work so had to be picked up on the way and change into his jeans in the Budapest traffic giving all the other motorists a cheap thrill (and me) and we made it to the Arena and hung about with a drink and a snack before heading to our seats...

...then the phone rang.

It wasn't the babysitter. It was the car alarm company - wanting to inform us that the car alarm had been tripped and could we tell them if the car was OK. Now, this alarm can be the bane of my life some days. It has a mind of its own and we've had about fifty instances where its gone off even if we've opened it, got in and started it up, which should in theory deactivate the alarm, right?
Again: Wrong.

But given we had left the car parked by the roadside thirty minutes previously we were a little worried that someone had decided to have a root around and had broken into it. I'm not sure there's much dosh to be made from second-hand child seats, chewed up tennis balls, old sweet wrappers and a pile of Pickle's snotty tissues but it was dark and perhaps someone reckoned a VW Sharan Mum-Mobile was fair game for some decent loot.

Trouble was, the alarm company operator didn't speak very good English and kept insisting I had to input some pin code or insert the keys and try as I might I could not get her to understand that we were nowhere near the car and it wasn't another false alarm on our part. Argh! Then of course the girl at the turnstile couldn't let us out to go check because our bar-coded tickets had already been waved over the infra-red so we had to call out Security for permission to leave the building and potentially go and confront some car-jackers. Nobby bravely volunteered to jog over there, my hero.

And when he arrived there was nothing wrong with the car. It had just decided that now was the time to spit its dummy out and have a honk for no better reason than it didn't like being parked at the side of a busy road in the dark. Or maybe a speedy passing lorry gave it a wobble and it decided to have a tantrum, who knows.

Finally Nobby returned, puffing and panting and hot as hell in the ski-wear we'd worn for the stroll from the car park, we raced to our seats and one second later Depeche Mode appeared. We made it.

Wrong no longer, I Just Can't Get Enough of that amazing band; it was just A Question of Time before we jumped up and danced, thank goodness they weren't Walking in my Shoes.

(Yes, I'm a geek, and an eighties one at that).

And OMG it was worth it.

Wet

We got the snow-plough. And I was about to put out the call for a bin-lorry after having to haul Tiggy away from all the smelly bags that have been sitting banked up in the snow since Wednesday when one suddenly appeared in a Mr Benn stylee.

Now it's raining.

But... I'VE FINISHED MY ESSAY!! and submitted it two days early. Actually only about 36 hours early but who cares, I am smug as anything. This marks the halfway point in the course as well so double reasons to celebrate.

Rose has invited me to sushi and coffee in our fave shopping centre over her way so I am just off to break out the private helicopter; better make it the one with the mini-bar.

Cheers xx

White

A snow-plough! A snow-plough! My kingdom for a snow-plough!

Yeah, dream on missus, the chances of getting a plough out here are slim to anorexic at the moment given the depth of white stuff around the city. But I am very smug in the knowledge that Hungary is at lot better prepared for the arctic conditions than some countries I could mention, where nannas and grandpas are digging in for the long haul. At least I know at some point there will be a snow-plough steaming up the ski-slope which is the road to our house at the moment and I won't have to risk permanent back injury extending my shovelling activities further down the hill. Oh, and we have LOADS of salt. Nyer.

Still its all very pretty innit. I am planning another sledging extravaganza later, if I can get this essay in the bag before school turfs out. Yes, I am on another deadline and no, I haven't done enough work for it so I am sweating a bit. I am only on my Blog so people will see that I didn't run off with the man in red over the festive period and to practice my typing (at least that's my story, I am definitely not procrastinating or avoiding...).

By the way, Happy New Year! We had a quiet one as usual in this house, well as quiet as it gets with excited children and a nutcase puppy under your feet. We bravely took on Boy-Next-Door's bundle of energy while the family went back to Portugal for Christmas and oh boy will I never ever volunteer for that again. A lovely dog, when he's sleeping. He's like a coiled spring and has been re-christened The Destoyer after chewing his way through three dog beds, three garden chair cushions, copious amounts of cardboard, a plastic ball, a doormat and a pair of shoes. Still, Tiggy was very chuffed with the replacement bed his embarassed Mummy presented us with when she came back and The Destroyer now has to sleep on the floor. The dummy.

Santa was very generous in our house and Nobby now has a new passion in life - Wii-fit. It has been such a hit with the whole family - best scene of the holidays was Pickle finding the box on Xmas morning, his face lighting up and him running round the room yelling 'Santa got me a Wii!! He got me a Wii!!' before running upstairs to write a thank you letter before he'd even switched it on. Now that's precious (and I am so glad he has it in him). I think both my siblings and my parents each have one as well now. Even if we can't meet up more than once or twice a year we can still challenge each other to unlock new yoga moves or get professional status on the hoop-twirl. Nobby now has no qualms about my studying into the evening as he can easily go and work out or enjoy a leisurely round of golf all in the comfort of his own basement. And Pickle thinks creating ugly effigies (avatars) of his enemies on the Mii function is super sport.

Well, I think my typing has had enough practice now, back to the slog, the end is in sight, I think. And if I need motivation I can just look out the window at all the cars stuck in the snow and be grateful how much I need to stay by the laptop.