The blind man comes...

We were up early this morning because we had the blind man was coming - by that we mean the man from Euroblinds who was coming to measure our windows before the blinds are made and then fitted.  He had said he would be at ours between 9.00am and 9.30am and we had the old blinds to remove and furniture to move and a list of our requirements to double check before he arrived.  I had told him to ring the minute he turned off the main road heading for Droushia and not to go into Droushia as it can make it difficult to navigate to our house and true to his word he rang from the Droushia Hills Taverna - from there it is easy to find our house.  Had he known the last little bit he would have been here at 9.30am as promised but we will let him off.  His name is Mr Vreonitis and he is a nice happy chappy and he fitted the blinds mum had in the sunroom.  We are having five blinds all the same material as per the example above and I am scouring tintyweb for ideas of how best to dress the windows afterwards.  John says we should see how we feel with just blinds for a while and have taken the existing curtains down and left the cream blinds in their place.  It is unbelievable how much cold comes off the glass of the windows if there is nothing up against them.

It was a nice bright start to the day and as you know nice bright starts fill us with enthusiasm to get on and do jobs - the blind man was only with us about 15 minutes so we were raring to go and good job as the weather deteriorated and in the afternoon we had steady and heavy rain.  I completed the job of thinning down my craft stuff and getting into the old TV cabinet - this is so cathartic.  I have got rid of some stuff and can now see what is left - I just have to open the doors and voila!!!  Before when everything was stacked in the brown garden box I couldn't see anything and had to lift it in and out - now I feel more inspired but will reduce down my 'stock' still further until I get anything new.

Moving furniture around inevitably involves cleaning and so having given the lounge area a good sweep where furniture had been pulled away from the walls for the first time since I don't know when I turned my attention to the conservatory because having replaced the big brown box with the smaller cupboard there were areas of the floor which had not seen the light of day in eons!!!  We also had a very large fern in front of the mirror which was naturally doing a 'shed' and in so doing was making a right old mess on the floor and Charlie loves to play with a leaf so we would find them all over the place plus the undersides of the fronds were covered in 'spores' which cover the tiles in an orange film.

I have decided to put it outside - it was initially outside anyway but got a bit ravaged in the winds - hopefully the worst of that weather has passed.

I have moved some of the other plants to fill the space - it looked a bit bare without something there - so much for aspirations to be more minimalistic!!!

I had planned to spend some time in the garden but that went out the window when it started to rain heavily - I was glad I got to do some tidying on Thursday because it broke the back of the big pruning I had wanted to get done.

As part of the tidying of the items in the TV cabinet project I tackled something I have been meaning to do for months and the weather meant I had no excuse not to do it this afternoon.  We had a number of external hard drives knocking around two of which were a bit 'iffy' so probably had bad sectors somewhere which I would be unfortunate enough to encounter.  One housed nearly 100,000 photographs which were rescued from a hard disk that decided to corrupt itself.   I wanted to empty the two dodgy drives and then make sure that we had one drive with a back up of all the music we have ever owned courtesy of a million ITunes libraries dotted around on these various drives and then to start going through the 100,000 photographs sorting them into some semblance of order and removing the hundreds of duplicates that are on there.  This will be a labour of love with no timescale but it needed to be started - it felt like being back at work surrounded by IT equipment!!!  Scrolling through the photographs is going to be time consuming because I have stumbled on photographs from the very earliest time we had a digital camera and they are of things quite often long forgotten.  As we have been here eight years I am guessing that some are almost 20 years old - I cannot tell as they are all now date-stamped with the date of their rescue from the corrupted drive.  Sadly they often contain the faces of people no longer with us.  By the end of the evening I had managed to sort through some 5,000 putting them into more relevant folders - the duplications will have to wait!  I did all this whilst Mr Wiseman was huffing and puffing and shouting his way through an abject performance by the Mighty Blades who decided to throw away their chance of securing second spot in the Championship table with an indifferent performance against Swansea.  I shall tackle more photographs the next time SUFC are televised.

The bloody bloody football only dampened his spirits for a little while.  A big old steaming bowl of last night's chili cheered him up and it was equally as good if not better this evening.  We settled down to a bit of TV - my boys all taking up their various positions on the small sofa leaving me and the girlie to spread out on the large sofa.  We have Mum coming up tomorrow and the meal I have planned can be prepared and cooked in the morning so I didn't have to feel guilty that I hadn't done anything towards it today.  I am now beginning to run out of ideas!!!