General Chat

I've been off-colour since Thursday last week, not sure what with, may be a couple of things! It started as I was turning off the house alarm in the early morning. It is at the top of the basement stairs, and I've always been wary of the fact that you are standing at the top of a flight of stairs! Anyway, as I punched in the last number, I started to feel funny and woozy but managed to move myself backwards away from the stairs until I could lean against the door jamb of the bedroom (it's a bungalow with basement).

I felt woozy and occasionally slightly dizzy for the rest of that day but have gradually got better. The only thing I can think of as a possibility is that I opened a new pack of rice crisps to have with lunch and it wasn't until I ate the first one that I realised that they were VERY salty. I hadn't looked at the pack just assumed it was my usual Unsalted type, but these had Sea Salt. Stupid me continued to eat them although I'm not supposed to eat salt.

I did wonder whether too much salt had caused the problem. My bp was very high that day!

Whatever, I feel much better today, and even managed to screw up my courage to turn off the alarm this morning for the first time since last week.

But as a result, I cancelled my appointment for last Friday for my Covid booster, re-booked it for today, but then cancelled that, and have now booked it for April 29th. I thought it wasn't a good idea to have any kind of vaccination if I wasn't feeling too well! I really should have booked for Monday last week, as OH did, and then it would be over and done with!

We also got our tax information all finished yesterday and our financial people agreed to send a courier to pick up the package today to save OH having to go downtown. Our taxes have to be filed by April 30th, and we have quite a lot of forms to get together, plus all medical receipts. It doesn't usually take long, but OH is getting a bit less able to do his part of collating his necessary information so I had to do double duty. I was exhausted mentally by the end of yesterday afternoon!

Anyway we have something nice to look forward to ............. our daughter will be arriving for a short visit on May 2. She has to go to a meeting in Toronto around May 10 or so, has got a cheap one-way ticket (on a sale) from Nova Scotia to us, but the organisers of the meeting will pay her way from here to Toronto and then from Toronto to her home. They'll pay about the same amount as if she had done the trip from home!

She'll take the chance to spend one day with her very best friend from high school, who will come up from her home down near Seattle in the US, and take the ferry another day to visit with a long-time family friend on Vancouver Island, but we will see her for 3-4 days out of the 6. She'll stay in a near-by hotel as our place is so small, but she's looking forward to helping us with some things, including getting in the garden with her dad. There are some maple seedlings (from the street tree just outside) and wild rose seedlings to grub up! The rose is a native one, which is why OH planted it, but it likes the garden too much and is trying to take it over!

The weather is lovely here, but far too warm for April! We have had several sunny days since April 14th with temperatures up around 17/18C, although the nights have been going down to as low as 3C or 4C, because of the clear nights. We had rain from late Saturday afternoon until very early Sunday morning, but then the sun came back and seems likely to last to one extent or another until the end of the week.

But temperatures in the high teens are really unusual ..... just another example of climate change. There are also already some wildfires causing problems, as in evacuation alerts, but much further north as of yet.

Take care everyone.

We are up very high Florence, the river would have to rise about a hundred feet to get to us, so that isn’t going to happen.
It has been really cold here today. I went to the supermarket this morning, but other than that have been inside. Even OH was complaining about the cold and was happy to put the heating on after lunch. It has rained on and off all day. I wanted to get out to start cutting the ivy off the hedge which forms the boundary of our property. Down the right hand side of the house is the wide mud footpath which goes down to the river. There is no fence, just a very old hedge which is absolutely choked with ivy. In one part the ivy is so heavy that the trees have collapsed, so there is quite a gap. You can just see the original trees making a valiant effort to poke out of the top of the ivy. We need to snip through as much of the ivy as possible at ground level and hope that the trees underneath are not dead. It is a very long length so if it needs a fence, it will be very expensive

We have met some of the neighbours, one couple over the road seem to be nice and friendly, but the couple opposite don’t seem to want to bother. Our next door neighbour is a pretty dour man. He seems to work from home and is just coming up to retirement. Sadly his wife is in a care home , he says with a neurological condition which won’t get better. The chatty neighbours over the road said that she has severe dementia of some type. I think that she has been sectioned, she seemed to have been causing problems with her behaviour before she went away.

On a brighter note I am having a day out with my old neighbour tomorrow . We are going to make a fairly long trek north to Whitely Bay, a seaside town where she spent a lot of her childhood. I remember going there quite a lot when I was young. We would get the train from Newcastle . I found a photo of me in a rock pool wearing a woollen bathing costume. We always used to get badly sunburnt :-(. Sunburn won't be a problem tomorrow, but at least there is no rain forecast so we can have a long walk on the beach.

Good morning everyone looking in today.

I woke at 6.45 and decided to get up. Had a coffee and into the shower etc. Then around 8am whilst full of energy lol decided to clean the kitchen and mop the floor and all before 8.30. So whilst it was drying, went off to dry my hair.

Its misty and damp today with drizzle so not great but good for the ground. Bin went out last night but thankfully no wind to blow it away.

Linda hope Eves herbs grow well

I meant to say the other day, how lucky to have a walk along the river bank close by and somewhere to stop for a drink or bite to eat. In summer, it will be lovely but I hope you are not so close that you may be at risk of flooding at any time? Have you spoken to any of your neighbours yet or got to know them? Always difficult moving to a new place.

When I moved hear nearly 3 years ago, the lady 2 doors down came over and introduced herself and straightaway, I could tell she was going to be a lovely neighbour and she is. She pops over sometimes on a Sunday afternoon for coffee whilst her hubby is watching the football and she's taking me to another bingo on Fri night. So we have indeed struck lucky with our neighbours.

Well whilst I still have a burst of energy, I had better crack on with some chores as per before 11's morning coffee lol.

Hope all is well with everyone today :-D

Well, the large shed came apart very easily and it has now gone. The garden looks so much better without it, partly because it had been painted with orange decking paint. Someone is coming this evening to take the other shed as well

Eve planted all of her herb seeds this morning, there were eight different types. Some of them, I haven’t got, so I hope they germinate. It is very cold today, but they should be OK in the greenhouse.

OH will have to be up early tomorrow as the plasterer says he his coming about 8.15. The painter was supposed to be starting tomorrow as well, but he has put it off until Tuesday

Good morning, unicorn bookmarks sound good. It is a strange craze, but Esme loves unicorns as well

Later this morning, I am going to bring Eve here so she can plant her herb seeds. She has had them for a while, but hasn’t done anything with them. We will get them going in the greenhouse.

Later on, someone is coming to dismantle the shed next to the greenhouse and take it away. I put it on the free Facebook site and have had lots of people wanting it. I hope it comes apart easily as there seem to be an awful lot of nails in it. We actually have two sheds, so once this one is gone, I will offer the other one to one of the unlucky losers. We don’t need any of them as we have a double garage, so plenty of storage. The back garden is on a slope, so OH is going to use the flagstones which are under the shed to make some steps to get down to the bottom level where the greenhouse is. At the moment, there is a gentle lawned slope, but it is slippy and muddy when it rains. The area where the shed is and another section behind the garage will become a veg patch when he gets round to it.

Morning everyone sun out but cold


If hands are okay will carryon doing the unicorn book marks that I am doing for Caitlin Sian and Savannah but are all the same.

Also may put laptop on. Print some cross stitching pattern out.

My son Duane is at racing his remote control car hope weather stays dry.



Have a good day one snd all

It wasn’t me who stole the page, honestly :-D
It is sunny here, but very chilly. I wanted some potting compost , so this morning I drove to Aldi because theirs is cheapest, but as I drove into the car park, I could see that they didn’t have any, so I didn’t stop, but continued on to Morrisons. That meant going through the town centre, the traffic was dreadful, so it took ages. I only wanted a few bits in the actual shop, but they have an outside gardening section with its own till. I got three bags of potting compost as they were on offer and two grow bags for the greenhouse. I ended up being charged three pounds less than it should have been, naughtily, I didn’t say anything :-D

This afternoon there was a community event at one of the local schools, there were supposed to be lots of community groups there, so I thought that it might be a good place to find some volunteering opportunities. We drove part of the way and parked up, then walked the rest. There wasn’t much of interest to us when we got there, so we walked into the town centre and indulged in coffee and cake. I bought some wall planters to put on the side of the garage and some tomato plants. They are in the greenhouse, so hopefully will be protected and will survive until they are large enough to plant.

We had just got back home when my daughter, SIL and the two girls dropped in. They had been to the local retail park to buy a side table for their sofa. Esme had a new Barbie doll, not that she needed one, given the huge number she already has. She was just winging to go home , so they just stayed for a quick cup of tea. That was a nuisance as I hoped SIL would have time to sort out an IT problem for me. He will have to do it later on

Of course you had to buy things in M&S Ann, it would have been rude not to :-D

We have our Covid jabs booked in for April 30th. After we had booked them through the NHS app, we got texts from the doctors surgery, but they are only doing them on one date much later in May. It would be a nightmare trying to go to that as we need to drive and they only have a little carpark. We have booked a pharmacy in the town centre, so can either walk or park up nearby for free and walk the last bit .

It's sunny here and very little wind, so quite hot outside. I have been rigging up our new hosepipe, and was removing layers of clothing!

I had never noticed how many pages there are. When I open the thread it says 1-10 at the top, then I click on "post date" and the last entry comes to the top and the pages are still 1-10, just in reverse order. As I look in most days there are rarely enough new posts to fill more than one page.

We received our appointment letters about covid boosters at the end of March, with the actual jabs on 30 April at the local surgery in the village. All very efficient - for a change.

Well I thought I was going mad lol as yes I thought there was a page missing too not that it matters but we are all creatures of habit I guess and when we visit here most days, we do notice the page numbers etc.

Daughter washed her fleece duvet with minimal laundry liquid after the last disaster! It is on the line as there is a good breeze but oh my, its absolutely freezing now and very grey and overcast.

Earlier, I went round the garden back and front with my grabber and a bag and amazingly, I found a few bits of rubbish like broken pegs behind the bins, broken bungees and some litter that must have blown over from a neighbours as I dont eat chewing gum! Anyone a wee job well done.

Trying to decide what to make for tonight's evening meal and right now neither of us can make up our minds, decisions, decisions.
I'm also going to have to put the heating on a bit later which I was hoping not to but I'm just too cold.

Right off to the freezer and cupboards to make a decision, a curry might warm us up!

Maybe somebody else deleted a page AG. Strange.

Sunny here now and 12 degrees. I popped into town on the 0930 bus and it was not busy then, but by the time I left there at 11.30 it was beginning to get much busier. I mainly wanted to go to the post office and it was lovely as I didn't have to queue. Stopped and had a coffee and pastry, then really only visited Boots, Holland and Barratt and M&S. The latter seem to have a lot of spring stuff in so just had to buy a T shirt and a three quarter sleeved top.

We seem to have lost another page!
There were 155 pages to this thread earlier today, but now only 154.

Afternoon everyone sunny but very windy
Been to moaning coffee not too bad today

Back in flat pj's on going to do some family search while watching the snooker.

Caitlin got her comp tomorrow Hope she wins in some of it as being her last one for under 18.

Have good afternoon everyone speak later <3

Good morning all.

Change from yesterday's nice weather as it is grey and overcast but still dry....for now. The wind is nowhere to be seen so it's very still outside which in some ways usually signifies the calm before the storm!

My grass is just awful. Hardly any new growth and also lots of moss. We haven't bought the grass seed yet as with my last Tesco order it was unavailable grrr. My grasscutters confirmed they will be available again this season starting in May. I'm jolly pleased with this as there was some doubt whether the service would continue but all is ok now.

So glad I got all my washing out and dried yesterday too, makes such a difference. On my Utilita App, it said I only used 5 units of electric yesterday instead of the normal 9-10. I also had no heating on either. So that had saved a few pounds.

Argyllgran, that was nice all going together for your jabs and then having coffee & cake. What a lovely outing really. Hope you don't have any side effects so take it easy for a few days.

Ann O degrees oh wow that's chilly!! But they have been banging on about this snow which is supposed to hit us but hasn't yet so maybe it's coming eeek!

I guess I shall just potter doing the usual chores today. I don't have a huge amount of energy for some reason so shall take my time. My head has been quite sore for 3 days but not a migraine. I don't seem to be able to sleep very well and at best 3-4 hours if I'm lucky. I so wish I could go to bed say at 11.30pm and sleep right through until 7am, that would be bliss.

Well better be productive and keep busy.

Have a good day all

Florence in the hebrides

Four of us in the village were scheduled for our Covid jags at the same time - 11.29 precisely! - in another village 7 miles away.
We all travelled together, and went for coffee and cake in a café afterwards, so as to make it a bit more of a social outing for one of us, who has health problems and isn't able to get out much.

And to my surprise and relief, I managed to cut most of the grass/moss yesterday evening. I hadn't expected it to have dried out so much after only one dry day, as it usually takes a lot longer.
It was hard going, as the first cut of the season always is, because of the moss, but I'm so relieved that it's done.

And my washing all dried outside - so yesterday was a satisfying day!

The sun is shining again today, so I'll be able to finish off the final bit of grass-cutting .It's a less mossy area, so much easier to cut, but it's littered with twigs after recent windy weather, and they'll have to be cleared away first.

Good morning all only 0 degrees here so far but it is early. I couldn't sleep.
Good to see you posting Joan. As Argyllgran says it will come in waves. Hopefully better weather will help when you can be busy in the garden.
AG that was an early booster, mine is not until 27th so another week yet.

Linda typos/spellcheck sometimes make for a bit of a giggle. (moths).
I do hope that Esme is feeling better ear ache is so painful. Hopefully it will ease off quickly.

Quite difficult to catch the two moths to cure it, Linda!

A lovely warm sunny day here - the same as you have, Florence.
It's supposed to be dry all weekend, I do hope that turns out to be true, as I need a couple of dry days so that my moss-infested "lawn" dries out enough to let me cut it.

It hasn't had even its first cut of the year yet, because of daily rain, and is becoming so long and mossy that cutting it will be an exhausting nightmare.

Had my Covid booster jag this morning.


You just have to ride the waves of grief, Joan. It'll come back and hit you every now and then.
But it does pass, in time. Or at least subsides to a manageable level.

It’s good to hear from you Joan, even if you aren’t feeling well. Hopefully come the better weather, you will be able to get out in the garden more and pass the day on.

I went to play with Esme this afternoon as her mum had another work call. We had a washing up bowl of water on the table which was doubling up as a swimming pool for Barbie and Ken. We played for about forty five minutes with that before her ear was hurting her again and it was time for more pain killers. Unsurprisingly they had a bad night with her last night. It can take a couple of moths for a perforated eardrum to repair itself, I hope the pain subsides faster than that.

Afternooon everyone.
Florence, the weather hasn't beeen nice at all this week, bright but cold, & windy & of course rain every day at some point, so no gardening for me.

I did pop out a couple of times on Wednesday & cut back some more off the hedging but I couldn't get much done as the wind was annoying & my hands were so cold even with some gloves on so I gave up.

I have felt rather fragile this week,& shed a lot of tears for one reason or another !
I am not coping well just now, & I can't get motivated to do anything, be it my Crosstitching or housework, our daughter took me for my weekly shop on Thursday but my heart wasn't in it & i just wanted to get back home.

Daughter had to telephone the Tax Office yesterday as the re-issued cheque had not arrived, it was supposed to be here by the 17th !!
After being on hold for yet another good hour we were told the cheque had been re-issud on the 17th & should be with me within 10 days !! Let's hope so.

Well I think I should make a start on my tea, I am making the usual Fish & Chips today, not really hungry but I have to eat but it's not the same eating alone !

Linda, your house renovations sound lovely, you will be upside down atm but it sounds as though you will have a really lovely home once evrything is finished.

Florence, I hope your Red Robin replacements grow well for you this time, it's not a plant I am familiar with but our eldest son up in the Forres area has a hedge of Red Robins which he planted up 2 winters ago & have done really well with just one plant failing.

Bye for now.

Joan.

Afternoon all.

What a beautiful sunny and pleasantly mild day here about 14 degrees. Washing is out and drying the breeze.

I replanted my Red Robins into bigger pots and now hope they grow better than the last plants. I planted what I thought were lavender seeds and the plants that grew...well they are some sort of trailing plants :-S :-S :-S
Im so sure they were the right seeds but I thought lavender grow tall??. Anyway I managed to untangle the straggly plants and put them into a larger pot and shall have to wait and see what flowers if any it produces, bit of a mystery that one!

Linda, hope Esme is feeling better and not in so much pain with her ear, poor wee thing. Ear ache and tooth ache are just the worst pains you can have.

Joan, hope you are having this nice weather and busy in your garden. When you get outside, the day passes so quickly doesnt it?

Well I am going out for a wee walk round to get some lovely fresh air and get my leg muscles exercised. Hope everyone else looking in is having a good day,

Florence in the hebrides

It is very chilly here this evening. We have had a bit of an odd day. We decided to have a day off and drive to Ikea which is about forty minutes away. Just as we were leaving my daughter phoned and said that Esme was off school because she had earache. She had a GP appointment in the morning, but wanted to know if I could help out in the afternoon as she had online meeting from 2.30 to 4:30 :-(
So we decided that we could still go to IKEA but when we got there, the store was closed because all of their servers had gone down. They were trying to fix it, but didn’t know how long it would take. So we looked round some furniture stores and had a very early lunch. Luckily Ikea reopened in time, so I was able to get the things we wanted, plus things you didn’t know you wanted which always happens there :-

OH. dropped me of at 2pm so I could play with Esme. We played for an hour and a half, but then her pain killers were wearing off, so her ear was hurting again. The poor thing has a burst eardrum probably caused by an infection from the awful cold they have all had. She has some antibiotics, so hopefully will feel better in a couple of days.. She snuggled up on the sofa and had some more Calpol, but she wasn’t very happy until it kicked in. I foresee a bad night for my daughter and Esme if course.