Sally Traffic & Chris Evans saved me a good one hour plus stewing on the motorway tonight - but there was a price to pay…

Scaffold : Lily the Pink

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhhhhhh!!

Pass me the medicinal compound…

I achieved 20 minutes on the cross trainer at the gym today!!!

And I didn’t fall off it a la Bridget Jones at the end!!!

In fact…I think I could have done even MORE!!!

OK, so I had a face the colour of beetroot for about an hour afterwards (gets you some strange looks as you walk back), but I feel I have turned a corner (which is quite a good trick on a static cross trainer…)

In honour of it being Mum’s 75th birthday on Friday, we treated her to a big day out at Cadbury World today - I last went in 2001, Chris has never been and Mum’s always wanted to, so off we went.

This was the first time we’d manouevered Mum around in the wheelchair I got for her off ebay, it performed very well, and Cadbury World really do cater extremely well for disabled & elderly visitors. Mum had a printed script to follow as we went round, as even thought they had a loop system, it was hard to keep up at times (and hear above the chocolate crazed kids!). We were able to access about 90% of the tour, as the old factory building itself wasn’t deemed suitable. Free samples galore, very friendly staff, a (not too expensive) trip around the gift & factory shop - what’s not to like??!! All topped off by a meal out on the way home. We’re all stuffed, and have retreated to our respective sofas to veg for the rest of the evening.

Happy Birthday for Friday Mum!

Mini is back, mini is fixed. Mini had something wrong with an inner wheel bearing (you would have thought, considering the nature of the damage, that they’d have done a proper road test before handing the car back to me in the first place, but hey), and this time it’s *really* nice to have her back, as they made me drive a Ford Ka all day. As and when the time comes, I will not be replacing Minifer with a Ford Ka.

In other news, we’ve had the sad job of sorting through and packing up all the Bones paraphenalia this evening. We do have a nice box of goodies and practical stuff to donate to a worthy cause though, and tomorrow Mum and I will be visiting the St Francis Hospice for Cats, a wonderful one-off charity run by a little old lady in Derby, who is looking forward to taking the box off our hands

Got the Minifer back on Saturday, and spent the rest of the weekend tootling around town remembering how to drive it - nearly sounding my horn rather loudly when a favourite song came on the radio and I went to turn the volume up on the steering wheel stereo controls my lovely little mini doesn’t have…

Finally got the hang of it all again by this morning, just in time to drive to work, got to the motorway and as soon as I went over 30mph - thrmmmmb, thrmmmb, thrmmmb - the strangest, oddest pulsating noise from the engine.

So the car’s going back in tomorrow morning. Phooey.

We bade a final goodbye and God bless to Mum’s cat Bones today - he’d gone sharply downhill since the weekend. Still, at somewhere around the 20 mark he’d had a good innings, and his passing was as gentle and peaceful as these things should be.

He’s going to leave quite a hole in this home

If you get the chance between now and the end of August, you HAVE to go and see the Banksy exhibition at the Bristol City Museum. It’s free admission, the queue takes about an hour to get through but is SO worth it!!!

It is done.

We is knackered.

But before we collapse in a heap, a huge thank you to Jan and Andy and Pete without whom we would still be struggling with a concrete base and a spirit level.

And also to Pickle, Button & Eric, who have inspected the works and pronounced the new scratching post / sun terrace Very Good.

G’night!

There are two bicycles in my dining room, a hole at the bottom of the garden and a stack of rotten broken up wood outside the kitchen window.

We seem to be past the point of no return…

I have a cheerful little Ford Fiesta as my courtesy car whilst poor Minifer languishes at the garage for the next 10 days - and I’ve had to sign an agreement which includes a maximum weekly allowance of 250 miles (can just do that as I only work 4 days), and an understanding that I won’t smoke (fine) or transport pets.

Ah.

1) Unscheduled visit to the vets tonight (at seven minutes to their closing time, they really are very good) with Button who’s done something to her eye

2) Trip to vets tomorrow evening with Mum & Bones for a how frail is he now check up

3) Back to the vets Saturday lunchtime with Button for a post inhections and eye drops check up

Ooops.

Head off to work only to arrive back home 4 hours later via a breakdown lorry - and not because you broke down, but because you had a 30pmh argument with a kerb which your two driver’s side wheels, steering rack and suspension system definitely lost.

Fek

Ever since I moved into this house - and certainly since I bought it - I’ve been concerned about the garden shed, which seemed to bring new meaning to the word decrepit, and was largely held together by cobwebs.

Soon I will worry no more! The component parts of New Shiny (well, golden oak Cuprinoled as of this afternoon) Shed are stacked up against the side of the house, and next weekend - providing the current good weather forecast is accurate - we will be having a shed party to a) knock the old one down (30 second job) and b) put the new one up (bound to take hours; I suspect the instructions are in Taiwanese). But the barbie will be going, and the drink will be flowing, and hopefully by the end of Saturday it’ll all be done.

Last Friday I had the MRI scan on my neck - which had to be held still in exactly the wrong position for 20 minutes, resulting in a painful weekend and a day off work yesterday. Today I had the results.

The good news - it ain’t anything serious. It’s a bulging disc between my C3 and C4 vertebrae (vertebra?) and explains all the acute pain, referred pain and hot flush sensations I’ve been experiencing.

The not so good news - there’s bugger all they can do about it - time, more time and loads of yummy drugs are the way forward.

So, all in all, it’s good. Mostly. Yes. No I didn’t want them to find anything serious, but I did want some kind of definitive action plan!! Ah, never mind. I’m bloody glad I’ve got one of those prepaid prescription certificate thingies!

For I am surely without them today.

Seeing as it was such a nice day, I decided to be all environmentally friendly and (mindful of yesterday’s ahem/eek experience) health conscious, and walked to Mum’s/vets/town/back home - a round trip of about 4.5 miles. I put some sun lotion on my arms, but forgot all about the v shaped expanse of skin left by my t-shirt…

The redness would be bad enough - I’m always banging on at Chris about sun protection when he goes to football, so red chest matches red face. The icing on the cake was the fact that I’d been wearing a flower shaped pendant, so now have a corresponding white shaped splodge in the middle of the redness…

There I was, wandering round Matalan, eyeing up some nice summer tops, knowing I was somewhere between size *ahem* and size *eek*, and choosing a few in size *ahem* to try on because size *eek* looked enormous…and then finding out that size *ahem* was never going to happen whilst size *eek* was a good fit…

Bah

Ever since Chris moved up here, he’s been itching to get his hands on our cupboard under the stairs and turn it into a library for all our cd’s, dvd’s and videos (remember them?!)

Today, his dream came true, and the new room was unveiled. Having emptied it some weeks earlier, ripped all existing rubbish woodwork out and redecorated it, Chris’ mate Pete finished the shelving last week and Chris put the carpet down today. He’s since been in his element, emptying boxes and boxes of stuff, filling the shelves and making sure everything’s in alphabetical order (and he says I’m anally retentive!). I’m not left out, I have a section of shelving all of my very own, becayse I can’t be trusted to keep everything in alphbetical order!!

Anyway, it look really good, and is an excellent use of the space. We haven’t lost the junking storing capability either, there is a smallish cupboard right at the very end (where it would have been ridiculous to have shelving) where various things can be stowed. Just not everything that originally came out of there, so I predict a mass sort out!

This is the first housey project we’ve done for ages (that’s the royal we, I did nothing towards this!) - and we’re hoping it’s the start of a fresh drive to Get Things Done. Next up on the agenda is the garden shed, we’re actually planning a shed party for the end of the month (weather permitting) as I think we’ll need outside help on that one. Then sometime over the summer we’ll make a start on the spare room. Oh, and then there’s the damp in the dining room, a possible problem in the main bedroom, re-pointing work outside…eeek, we seem to have opened a can of worms!!

Yes, I’m calling time on this joke of a government, and this abomination of a parliament. Root & branch reform should begin with a hefty dose of weedkiller.

General election please.

I laughed out loud when I read Hutters’ comment on yesterday’s offering - have (any of) you any idea just how many innocent bystanders would be at imminent risk of death if we allowed Mum in a scooter? It was bad enough in Tesco’s the (one and only) time she took to the aisles in one of their scooter/trolley contraptions - truly, she needed a lorry beeping thingamybob - “stand back, this pensioner is reversing”

In other news, a customer informed me on the phone this morning that I have a very defensive and confrontational telephone manner. That’s a first in over 20 years of dealing with people over the phone!! I should get him to ring Chris…anyway, on further discussion it transpires that this person is a twat of the highest order, so I feel slightly appeased but still more than a tad miffed.

Finally my day off coincided with Mum being in a good frame of mind and a nice sunny day, so we took ourselves out into town to road test the wheelie walker I’d bought her way back before Christmas. And what a transformation! We easily halved the time it normally takes to get from one end of the high street to the other, and Mum was moving much more smoothly. She was significantly less out of breath by the time we got to the Cheesecake Shop for a pitstop (yum!), and made it back ot the car in good time too.

So I’m forgiven for buying her one (because Vera - Mum doesn’t like Vera - in the home has one) and she’s looking forward to more outings

The information leaflet for these new tablets warns they may call drowsiness - various medical sites on the internet use the phrase “spaced out” in listed side effects - and the internet is a damn sight more accurate! The feeling will apparently lessen as I get used to them & the dosage, but yesterday evening I was floating!!!

They’re pretty good at blocking the pain too