Mum and Dad

On Saturday mum and dad came to visit. We ordered Pizza, hugged, caught up, rehased old family jokes, chatted, talked about simple harmonic motion, and got on each other's nerves hardly at all.

Dad and I went to the pub to play pool, where I was mysteriously on form, and beat Dad once, and then together we played a couple who came over from playing hangman, and won twice, although they seemed to know what they were doing, by exploiting luck to the hilt. (In one game the black came to rest right in the jaws behind one of their balls, and while they got ahead at first, we slowly cleaned up our balls until they finally made an unlucky shot and potted the black. In the second, an unlucky pseudobreak potted two of our balls, and we whittled away until we were on the black, and we got the first clear shot.)

Also, I scored seventeen at crib.

Of course, Sunday night, I couldn't hit anything, and Dad was on form, and annihilated me :)

Grafham Water

On Sunday we went out to Grafham water, a reservoir near Huntingdon. It's great -- a two-mile-long lake, whipped to frenzied waves by the seasonal wind like a really miniature sea, with a high sea wall along the side, a few activity centres, a couple of nice little cafes, a pleasant village, an adjoining spontaneous nature reserve, and sludge lagoons! That's nearly as nice a sound as "la brea tar pits" :) I saw a heron, a shellduck, and a cormorant before mum did.

We started too late to walk all the way round, and idled enough on the way out we had to hurry on the way back, until ten minutes from the carpark we were caught in an insane wind/hail combination, definitely hurting and definitely making it hard to walk forward. You gotta love Cambridgeshire in march :)