Day 200 - nanoo nanoo

200 days of celebrating! That's a lot isn't it. Today's tally brings my total thus far to 688 different celebrations since January 1st. That's an average of 3.44 per day. I have 4 to tell you about this Saturday night so I can legitimately claim to be above average. Nice.

First up is an Australian celebration of Lamington Day. I'd heard of them before but wasn't sure what they were. Sponge cake coated in chocolate and coconut. I prepared the cake last night using gluten free flour it stuck a little but in general it came out fine. Tasted good. The difficult part was  coating them. They had a tendency to crumble so only about 7 actually made it through the process. The cakes were an offering to a charity bake sale at my children's dance school, they were raising money to help one of the students who was involved in an accident. I tried some of the broken bits, pleasantly surprised. I'm not a lover of coconut,  Bounty bars are one of the few chocolates I won't eat (other unpleasant coconut based chocolate bars are available). I'm slowly coming around to it though. Hopefully there will be a Manchester Tart Day which I can build up to.

Junk Food Day wasn't much to get excited about. Other than the large amount if cake consumed we decided to have sausages and chips for tea. At what point does something become junk? I barbecued the sausages so they weren't swimming in fat, we had oven chips and didn't put any salt on. I even had some peas with it. Is that junk food or does it need to be greasy? It's open to debate, feel free to add your thoughts below.

The most surprising celebration today was Invite An Alien To Live With You Day. It was a celebration  about Mork And Mindy so I found the pilot episode on YouTube and watched it with the kids. I've tried to force old TV shows on them before and they generally get bored. Modern TV is all about instant gratification otherwise the audience will change channels. Old TV would build up to something. I expected the kids to reject Mork but they actually lived it. Tbey laughed out loud at him sitting upside down in a chair and went to bed saying nanoo nanoo. Hurrah! It's still sad thinking about what happened to Robin Williams. He left behind a wonderful legacy.

Finally today it was Legal Drinking Age Day. I went to America with my wife before we were together in 2000, she hasn't turned 21 so wasn't allowed to drink. It's so odd being legal in one country but not in another. Some countries don't have a legal age at all. Ours is more complicated than you'd think. People automatically think 18 bugvthats the age to buy it, not to drink it. You can drink at 16 in a restaurant if it's with a meal, but at home it's 5! Under 5s can't drink alcohol at all, 5 and
over at home is legal. It does raise parenting questions about how and when to introduce them to it. Ours happily turn their noses up at it so it isn't a problem but that will change. Anyway, I'm celebrating being legally allowed to drink with a bottle of Langdale beer which was a gift from a friend.  Very nice it is too. The first beer I could stomach was Newcastle Brown Ale so I should be celebrating with that, but it always ends badly. One is never enough.

I must finish with an apology. It was Tug Of War Day today.  I had hoped to organise an event locally but there was hardly any interest and I couldn't source a rope.  Shame, it could have been fun. I'm therefore saying sorry to you for not being able to tell you about it as it didn't happen, and sorry to the two people who did show interest and who's hopes I may have crushed.

Tomorrow is hammock day, hmm.