Another quiet morning - Lois and I are still feeling rather flat after our elder daughter Alison cancelled the visit that she and Ed and their 3 children were planning to make to us next week. The upside of it all is that the house is much cleaner and tidier than usual, which is some compensation at least!
Lois "saved the life of a toad" yesterday, as you do haha! And she's been getting some kudos for that today from her whatsapp buddies, especially the ones that like toads, or feel sorry for them.
She picked up what she thought was an empty watering-can yesterday and dipped it into one of our water butts to fill it up with rainwater, when suddenly a large toad jumped out into the water-butt and began to swim furiously around, unable to scramble out. She "saved" him by catching him in a water jug and scooping him out, finally tipping him onto a flower bed.
Although I told Lois yesterday that, as an amphiban, the toad wouldn't drown, there's been a bit of a debate today about whether the little chap could have scrambled out of this plastic water-butt or whether he would have been condemned to stay in there until he starved to death maybe?
We don't know, but we think we should be told!
a typical toad swimming underwater
Not much is happening in the house this morning, no doubt about that. But the hole in one of the knees of my jeans is definitely getting slightly bigger, that's for sure, although I think it'll be a while till I can "look cool" like some of the youngsters you see in town or on buses.
the burgeoning hole in the left leg of my jeans
included for comparison purposes: the kind of "look"
I am aiming for at the moment.
This kind of "look" could definitely help me to become more popular, I've no doubts about that!
14:30 The fortnightly meeting of the U3A Danish group that Lois and I run, starts on Skype. We're reading a Danish crime novel, and we've just got to the part when advertising guy and amateur detective Dan, the novel's hero, catches sight of his boss's wife, Henriette, with a bright red, bloody hand-print all over her left breast, which Dan suspects is the handprint of brothel-owner John Frandsen Frandsen had just been bitten by a dog - so makes sense !!!!
Everybody in the group has the same thought - we've seen this scenario somewhere before. But where? Not for the first time I'm grateful for Lois's memory, which is like an elephant's. Lois remembers that a similar episode featured in an episode of Fawlty Towers, where Basil, who has just stuck his hand in some tar, tries to stop a female guest from leaving, and unwittingly leaves a black handprint all over the woman's right breast. The scene is unfortunately witnessed by Basil's wife Sybil.
Poor Basil !!!!!
16:00 The Skype meeting ends and Lois and I relax on the sofa with a cup of tea and a Chelsea bun. We feel completely exhausted, as we always do at the end of what we call "a Danish day".
A text comes in from my sister Gill in Cambridge. Thanks to a DNA test, Gill and I recently discovered a "new" cousin we didn't know anything about, David, an online journalist, who was adopted as a baby, in 1959.
David has sent us today a photo of the 1917 wedding of his grandfather Maurice, who was wounded in France in the First World War, and ended up marrying the nurse, Annie, who looked after him.
the 1917 wedding of David's soldier-grandfather, Maurice, to his nurse Annie
How touching !!!!!
20:00 Lois and I unwind on the sofa by watching the first episode of an Australian "comedy drama", called "Bump". We're usually suspicious of anything called a "comedy drama", because in our experience this label is just an excuse for the writer(s) not being able to come up any really good jokes. But we'll see !
From the early scenes we imagine that this series is going to be on the well-worn theme of the serious-minded and career-focussed adolescents having to cope with their crazy hippy-style parents - what Lois and I call the "Family Ties" syndrome.
In the opening scene it's the teenage daughter Olympia, "Oly", who's downstairs trying to work on her homework assignment, and who has to go upstairs to her mother's room to ask her to turn down the music. Her mum is making a lot of noise dancing to salsa music and playing with a sex-toy. My god!!!!
We imagine that Oly's going to be the straight-laced teenager working to get her HSC (Higher School Certificate), but we get a surprise when later the same day she goes into labour between lessons at the school: she didn't even know she was pregnant. And the father isn't her similarly scholarly boy-friend, because they both agreed not to have sex until they had both passed their HSC exams.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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