Not liking our new normal

We had a complete nightmare last night when we couldn't find Minnie.  With everything that had happened at the weekend we are being overly protective towards her, Charlie and Boris because we hadn't been able to protect Chivers even though he was so close by.  Minnie is such a creature of habit that almost every night, without fail, she takes herself off to bed early evening and sometimes even comes back into the lounge and yells to let us know she is waiting for us.

John was watching the footie (yet another poor result for the Blades) and there was no sign of her which was strange.  We searched everywhere and I had the most tremendous sinking feeling that whatever had taken Chivers had taken Minnie but we were not going to find her.  Charlie and Boris joined in the search following John as he walked around the estate with his torch but still nothing.  We reckon about 4 hours had passed since we last saw her and this is most unusual.  I decided I would get in the car and drive round to make sure she had not been run over.  Just as I was closing the garden door John shouted that she had appeared.  I just felt like bursting into tears with relief either that or vomiting or both.  John was grateful that (a) she had returned unharmed and (b) saved him from witnessing SUFC's defeat at the hands of Man Utd.

One thing is for sure is that both John and I have decided that, once the other three have departed, we will not be having cats again - the worry and heartache is just too much.

Earlier in the day John had gone to help Arodes John investigate a water leak and so I had the day to myself and although I had planned to tackle the ironing I had a bit of a quiet one instead just in and around the house - I haven't been sleeping brilliantly so was feeling a bit tired.

I thought people might like to see the progress of our water lily.  This picture shows how the lily looked when it arrived and we set up our little 'pond'  This was on June 1st so just over three weeks ago.  Sadly the flower bud snapped off but remaining leaf grew and it started to add further leaves and when it did we realised that they were rather pretty and multi coloured.

This is what the water lily looks like now - it has put on lots of growth and we can see a couple more new flower buds have formed and so we are hopeful that they will turn into flowers.

The fish are surviving too - now and again I will put a bit of fish food in there and they all come to the top so we know there are a fair few in there.

I have also found out what is causing the other water lily to look so pathetic - apparently water snails eat the leaves and when we put the miniature water lily in a pot we did so with the water plants we got from the pet shop in Chlorakas and I remember that they had a couple of water snails in amongst them.  I cleaned this out, found that the two fish were still in there and put everything back in again and hope it will fair better now.

I didn't feel like doing the ironing so decided I would do some entries for this week's challenge which is nice and simple - Flowers.  My tubes of watercolour paint are old and drying out so I wanted to go through the ones which were good and the ones which were rubbish and chuck those away.  I only really enter something to keep the numbers up.  It is noticeable since lockdown has been relaxed everywhere that people have less time and there are less entries.

Our evening meal was to be a Malaysian curry using one of the Curry Frenzy Kits.  I followed the recipe but when I tasted it I thought it was a bit bland.  I gave it a 'Jilly' tweak with the addition of more chilli and some mango chutney.  John thought it was delicious so the tweak obviously worked.  We had really enjoyed it and were looking forward to a nice quiet evening and then we had Minnie-gate.