Ow, ow and thrice ow

My leg hurts today.

It's my own fault. I was fencing with Jamie in the back garden yesterday with the wooden swords that we got from the Royal Armouries museum in Leeds the other day, teaching him the basics of parry and riposte. I forgotten how much strain a fencing stance puts on my thigh muscles and the vein along the top of my left leg is now throbbing horribly.

It didn't help when a large dog came bounding up to Barney this morning causing him to wrap his lead around my legs trying to get away. He's fine most of the time, but some dogs really spook him for some reason and gets really defensive and snarly. I have to anticipate which dogs are going to worry him and get him to sit down at the side of the path out of the way, but this one was too quick for me at seven o'clock in the morning.

Alicia was struggling to get out of bed as well. She has PE first thing on a Monday morning and suffers from Start-the-week-itis, having to be chivvied to collect all of her school stuff, make sure she has her phone, purse and PE kit and be reminded that her mp3 player is not her top priority when we need to get out of the house. Teenagers, eh? Can't live with 'em, and, er - no, you just can't live with 'em ...

Finally, I have discovered the delights of Feedreader. It's a tiny, efficient app that monitors RSS and XML feeds on blogs and news services, and pops up headlines every so often. If you see a headline you want to read more of you can click through to the webpage behind it. For some reason, it only seems to display the headline of the atom.xml files from blogspot accounts but it is a useful little pointer that a blog has been updated and is ready to be read.