Tea day

Apparently today is National Tea Day in Britain.  Well, I'm doing my part over here.

Grandpa's Book Club

Every so often (and lately more often than not) exciting packages arrive in the mail containing fat volumes.  Apparently we have a mysterious Amazon-hating (they're typically via Alibris) bibliophilic benefactor.  Now we need to lie on some beach somewhere for a few months...

Only in Flint

Those first two are self-explanatory.  The second two are of a cricket game that breaks out every time it's nice weather.  We have a sizeable South-East Asian population, actually in the neighbourhood of the AirBnB place mentioned below, and they love them their cricket.

Scouting out AirBnB locations

So Granny and Peter will be visiting in the second week of May, and being the hip millennials they are, they're using AirBnB to find somewhere to stay.  There aren't that many places near us (people aren't, you'll be amazed to learn, flocking to Flint to get that tangy lead-tinted water) but this one is.  I thought I'd check it out to see if it was down a gang-infested alley crunchy underfoot with crack vials, and no, it isn't.  In fact, Frederick and I have walked within about 50 yards of it every time we've walked from home to my office.  It's within a professional-baseball-player-stone's throw from the Public Library and therefore also the Flint Institute of Music.  I pronounce it "shabby but safe".  I saw a Subaru parked in a nearby driveway, so this might be the Lesbian district of Flint.

Finally figured out how to get photos off Thomas's phone onto this blog

And it took so long I don't have time to write comments, so those will be added in a few hours.

Thomas camera dump

I lent Thomas my camera for the trip but he only took pictures on it for what looks like about ten minutes before giving up because "they got blurry". Anyway, here are the non-blurry ones. Maybe he'll explain them one day (yeah, right, as he would say).

That's not to say that Thomas didn't take more pictures - he did, just on his phone, and we have to work out how to download them all.

Old Photos: Meet the Orchestra, February 3rd

Every once in a while I do a google search for Thomas to find out what he has been up to. This morning I found an old news article on the FYSO's Meet the Orchestra Day which was on February 3rd. The kids had rehearsals from 8 am until around 6 pm, then an hour free to eat and change clothes, and then a 2 hour performance at The Whiting. Here are some photos of the percussion session a professional photographer took:

FYSO's return to Flint makes local news

Because of terrorist concerns, we were warned to not discuss any details of Thomas's trip--flight number, concert dates or locations--on any social media. I don't know if such precautions were actually necessary, but establishing these rules seemed to give some parents ease of mind so they allowed their children to go. As Davin mentioned in the interview, there was such strong concern after the bombings in Paris last Fall that there was pressure to cancel the trip. Thomas announced that he would go alone, if it came to it. I guess that's what they call a slow news day.