Saturday

Today we had a very unusual day for a Saturday - we had the whole day at home, no ENAD and no requirement to go food shopping so the whole day stretched ahead of us to do with as we wanted.  Dinner this evening was sorted so it was just so relaxing even though we got loads of jobs done!

Now is a good time to do gardening either early in the morning or later in the afternoon when it is not so hot.  It was a beautifully bright clear day so by lunchtime the temperatures were going to have risen considerably even though we are in the latter half of October.

When I was out yesterday with mum I spent some of the money John's mum gave us for the garden and purchased a new passion flower.  We have a beautiful common one which rambles over the stone wall but I wanted a more delicate and more interesting one to scramble up the wooden fencing between us and Gregoris at the front.  I hope that is what I have purchased - the staff at the garden centres do have a bit of a habit of saying what they think you want to hear!!! I often question whether a plant will survive the ravages of a Drouseian winter and they say yes and then they do not, I have asked if a plant will flower with a red flower and they say yes and then it does not!!!  So fingers crossed that this plant will (a) survive and (b) flower differently to the one we already have!

You can tell we are expecting visitors shortly as we are tackling jobs which otherwise can just drift - today I wanted to sort out the fridges and John wanted to get the noisy black one defrosted.

We went the whole hog today and removed them from their cubby holes and cleaned those voids of their resident spiders and tumbleweed dust balls and then sorted and cleaned the fridges themselves.

Order has been restored - John and his OCD is happy - he can look inside and see what is in there without having to move anything!!!

I should have done this sooner - I realise that I have a glut of eggs and some yoghurt that needs to be eaten up so I had a look through the internet to find a pudding I could rustle up to go with tonight's tea.  John likes a pudding and I haven't done much in the way of baking whilst it has been so hot.

I found exactly what I wanted so will tell you all about the Citrus Self Saucing Souffle later...

We were kindly given some olives this week, courtesy of Mum and Dad's neighbour Effie.

We have bottled them up having got some nice jars from Jumbos and added some coriander seeds and some lime from the fallers in the garden.  They look nice at the moment - time will tell what they actually taste like!!!

Our customised gin is still being infused - I give it a little shake every time I go near - I think we have to leave it another week and then we can give it a taste.  Although having read an article in the paper today about how easy it is to become big drinkers in retirement I think we should leave it for a while!!!

I am pleased to report that the long awaited water feature is a success and mindful of how easy it would be for all the water to evaporate if it were in full sun we have located it, and the solar panel, in a shadier part of the garden so it doesn't always have enough charge to run all day.  We don't mind - it just takes us by surprise sometimes when it suddenly springs to life.

We are hoping to tick the garden over so that when Sally and Tommy come mid-November they will get a feel for how beautiful it can be.

We are trying to put together a bit of an itinerary - three full days is such a short time to be together and we don't want to wear them out but we do want them to see some of the places we love.  The only trouble is that by then the clocks will have changed and the days will be so much shorter and once the sun goes down it does get quite chilly at night, or at least we think so but I doubt that visitors coming from the UK will - we never when we used to visit - we used to wander around in t-shirts and shorts and the merest hint of some sunshine and I have to keep reminding John of that.

I cleaned the conservatory today and mindful of John's fear of any visitor being cold in our house I dug out some rugs - actually having seen the state the cats had left the tiles in this morning with muddy little paw prints emanating from the cat flap the rugs were more for them than for any visitor!!  The heavy overnight condensation lingers and the cats come in from the field with dirty feet - in fact Chivers and Boris were soaking when they appeared for breakfast this morning.

One of the jobs which John completed today was the rustic towel rail I wanted for the guest bedroom and I think he has made a lovely job of it so now Sally and Tommy will have somewhere to hang towels or trousers or coat hangers or something!  With not much storage in the house at the best of times and what we have full to the brim with our own stuff I am always conscious of poor visitors having to manage living out of their suitcases.

So after a lovely day of tootling around we sat down to enjoy a bit of TV and our casserole supper and the Citrus Self Saucing Souffle which John viewed with some concern when I was making it - that was until he tasted it and then he declared it to be 'divs' - praise indeed!!  If you look at the 'FOOD' page to this blog you can see how to make it.  Today as I write this John has declared it is even better cold!