Thursday, 2 February 2023

Wednesday February 1st 2023

As predicted, this turns out to be a fairly awful day, but at least it has one nice bit in the middle. 

06:30 We roll out of bed in our new-build home in Malvern, in order to get to our dental check-up appointments in Cheltenham at 9:15 am. 

YIKES! And on the way we have to fight not just the rush-hour traffic, but also a dazzling winter sun shining directly into my eyes from about 6 inches above the horizon. What madness !!!!

our dental surgery in Cheltenham

I always knew that our encounter with our dentist today was going to be bad news, especially for me, because I've developed (not intentionally) two wiggly-jiggly-joggly teeth, right in the front of my mouth, on the bottom row. It turns out I'm going to have all 4 of these teeth out, to be replaced by a partial denture. Yikes (again) !!!!! I'm never going to be able to cope with the practicalities of that, that's for sure. I'm hopeless with anything like that.

And I'm even more nervous now about those teeth falling out by themselves. However, Kesh, our dentist, says it will reduce the bill if any of those teeth decide to come out anyway, of their own accord. Plus, who knows? I might get something from the tooth fairy, do you think?

Sadly the South West is the area where the tooth fairy pays the least, which is annoying - just my luck!!!!

12:00 We come home, have lunch and then go upstairs and squeeze a nap into our hectic schedule - this is the nice bit of the day. 

15:30 However, when we get up, Lois happens to go from the living-room into the kitchen (or vice versa), and guess what happens? Well, you won't guess this one - the glass-paneled door that leads from our living-room into the little lobby, comes off its hinges - just jumps off them, just like that, if you please. Luckily this big heavy door manages to wedge itself into the door-frame, so that it doesn't fall on Lois. 

My goodness! You don't expect that with a new-build house do you! Or do you? Perhaps you do!

I judge this to be a potential safety risk, so I try to get Neil on the phone. Neil is the local customer service guy, but he's not answering his phone, and nor is Graham, the building site manager. This is slightly concerning, to put it mildly, because I know that most of these guys start going home about 4 o'clock.

In the end I have to phone Bradley at the builders' regional office in Redditch, who somehow manages to get Neil onto the case, probably through Neil's "bleeper", and a carpenter arrives at about 5 pm to fix the door firmly to its hinges. It seems that they didn't finish the job off properly in their haste to "sign off" our house. 

But what a madness it all is !!!!

the door that suddenly "jumped" off its hinges: my goodness!!!!

In the background of the above picture you'll see Lois in the kitchen - just before the on-site carpenter arrived to fix the door back on its hinges, we got a big Morrisons supermarket delivery. Lois has realised that we've been running a big freezer with not much in it. In our old house we had a huge garden which produced a lot of fruit and veg through the year, but now we've just got a small lawn behind the house, so it's not producing fruit and veg at all, not surprisingly.

So we have decided we might as well stockpile bread, meat, fish, and frozen veg in the freezer and make it earn its keep, and at the same time save us petrol because we'll be making fewer shopping trips. Makes sense to us haha!!!

As always there are a few "snafus" in our ordering process. We tend not always to notice the quantities of what we order, and when we came to order a bottle of Comfort conditioner this week, we didn't notice we were asking for the 3 litre size bottle, which Lois can barely pick up. Out of curiosity I put it on our kitchen scales, and I found that it weighs about 7 lbs.

It's just more and more madness all the time, isn't it !!!!!

Oh dear - we're going to have to find the old little empty bottle of Comfort in the recycling waste and decant a bit of Big Comfort into it every time we want it. And who doesn't need a bit of "Comfort" from time to time, as I told the Morrisons delivery guy. And especially so in these difficult times haha!

by mistake, we ordered the giant size 3L size Comfort conditioner
- it's madness, I tell you !!!!!

And I cast my mind back to another of these "snafus" - the time we thought we were ordering 6 sausages from the local Prestbury butchers, Waghornes, and we discovered that they had brought us 6 packs of 6 sausages, so 36 sausages in all.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!! [That's enough madness! - Ed]

20:00 Lois disappears upstairs to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the sofa and finish another crossword from "The Times Book of Crosswords" that we started on this morning. The puzzles in this book are all challenging. We call a crossword "challenging" when we get the answers but find we still can't always understand the clues for them.

Have a go yourself! Go on, it's a real mental workout - you look as if you need one haha!!!




See what I mean haha!!!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session. We both feel drained and a bit burned-out, so we just watch the last half hour or so of "The Beast from the East", a documentary about the Big Snows of Feb-March 2018, a programme we started watching yesterday.



Whoever did the graphics for the programme's title screen, seen at the beginning and after each commercial break, deserves an award, we think.


Isn't it great?

The "Beast from the East" came at just the wrong time for Lois and me, because we had to drive to Birmingham Airport and take a flight to Dubai and on to Australia, to stay with our daughter Sarah and family for a couple of months. Luckily everything turned out all right, and we got to the airport and the plane took off, whisking us away from all this snow-drift madness, which was nice!

And by the time we got home to England, the snow had all melted, perhaps unsurprisingly, and the "Beast from the East" seemed like just one horrible dream.


safely back from Australia, but threatened now
only by fake dinosaurs outside the County Museum, Woodstock.
What a relief!

At least I assume it was a fake dinosaur - it looked pretty scary, but we checked and noticed that it wasn't moving very much, which was pretty reassuring, to put it mildly!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!


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