American kids are better !

I was talking to one of the counselor from the camp where i do climbing instructing. Kelly's from Australia, she doesn't like what passes as Summer here and she finds that the kids here are not as good as what she expected. Well, she's a fitness instructor the rest of the year so it's no surprise if she's disappointed by the lack of energy and motivation that English kids have these days. She said that next year, she'll go to the US because, in her words, "American kids are better". They choose to go to camp.

I managed to sneak a picture to show you what i do at the moment. I had to frame it so that we don't see children face/feature. The guys you can recognise on this are 2 counsellors, 23 years old Graham and 24(?) years old Noamh. Pronounce Nieve, it's proper Irish, the kind that would not bow to the Queen...

Counsellors also come from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, the Netherlands... Not many English, and if like Graham they want to work abroad, soon camp YHA will be able to teach kids foreign languages as well as other outdoor activities.

Now some more news to fill you in on the last couple of weeks. The mystery machine is still not running properly. I took it to the garage that converted it to LPG, it's one hour driving away but if they can't tune the engine then no-one can. Meanwhile, i've bought a 10 year old Skoda Felicia for a song. The challenge is to sell it when i get the Mystery Machine back without loosing any money. Now that i don't waste time sorting out the car, I have picked up the diy where i left it 6 weeks ago.

Meanwhile, my trusty mountain bike has learnt a trick or two from the car and started to rebel. I have changed the back wheel, the chain looks a bit tired and the fork must be replaced before the biking season starts. Because i bike when i cannot climb, that means the rainy season here.

I had to do a bit of work on the bike because colleagues from the sports shop had organised a ride from the store in Sheffield to the one in Stockport 10 days ago. Off course, things didn't quite go to plan as we were supposed to use the Mystery Machine to get there. As the previous garage was unable to tune it, we defaulted to a colleague's 205. Last minute panic to arrange a roof rack meant that we missed the start, here's a picture of us on an empty car park, 20 minutes too late.

And one from the ride:

To finish off with the stream of July Problems, the old computer that i planned to use to run a database for work couldn't be coerced out of hibernation. Perfect excuse to get a quieter, smaller, faster one from ebay. We're talking £100 for a P3 with 160Gb HD and 512Mb RAM. It's running on Ubuntu, with MySQL and other software from the Linux community. Yes, i can be a geek sometimes...

As you see, i didn't have much time these past few weeks. First thing to go, as usual, was sport. So when Mathieu from the ski mountaineering expedition 3 months ago pulled out from our project in the Swiss Alps in 2 weeks time, i wasn't too disapointed. No mountaineering then... Oh well I need a holiday!