Monday - I am faced with a challenge

Today is Monday we have nothing much planned and John is quite gripped by the first cricket test of England v India and I have to admit so am I - we spent the morning anticipating a declaration much earlier than it happened but heyho - what do we know!!!!!  Anyway as I said to John, cricket has become so much more entertaining than I remember it when I was a kid and my Dad would be watching - then a test match was like five days of purgatory except maybe when Beefy Botham was playing because he was a local boy for us coming from Yeovil and he always seemed to make a difference to the game.

I can actually remember serving Beefy drinks on the opening night of The Gardens Night Club in Yeovil which must have been about 1981-ish - in its day this establishment was the go-to place for a night out and for several years I worked the first bar (next to the restaurant) in the picture above.  Yeovil had never seen the like and we had some fun there - not least witnessing some drunk hairy-arsed matelot from RNAS Yeovilton trying to scale the plastic palm trees in the buff!!!  Anyway I digress!!!

Anyway with a lovely day at home stretching in front of me I spent some of it putting some paintings together for this week's challenge which is Flowers in a Shade of Blue.   

The weather today was quite different - we had a hazy mist and the temperatures were well below what they have been.  John even though that it might rain at one point.  Fortunately when John came to clean out the wood burner the embers were still lively so he threw on some 'guff' and he ticked it over on low all day which was lovely.  

I had all the internal doors in the house open so that any warmth generated by the fire or in the conservatory filtered through into the bedrooms.  It worked and the whole house was a really lovely temperature even though it wasn't the best of days.  The cats certainly appreciated it.

Along with doing a bit of art (which for me is a real bit of me-time therapy) I needed to get our evening meal ready and I had some chicken marinating in the fridge  which was using up the kumquats.

This is not my photograph but this is the recipe that I followed - Thai Style Grilled Chicken.  I followed the recipe quite faithfully save for the fact that I used chicken breasts which I cut into goujons and I took the leftover marinade and heated it and thickened it so I could pour it over the goujons and served it on rice.  It was very very tasty.

We realised this afternoon that we had an issue with the monitoring system of our photovoltaic system.  It appeared that we hadn't recorded any statistics since we had the new router installed which was a bit of a bugger to say the least.   We managed to see that actually we had continued to record information after the new router was installed so it was very unlikely to be anything to do with that.  I had to put my working head on because although we had been promised an engineer I wanted to get my head round how the monitoring system functioned.  

Blimey I found out all sorts but I didn't find a fix - what I did find was that I thought the issue laid entirely with the monitoring box which was permanently offline and I couldn't find how to get it online.  I did find someone who claimed to be an expert - no idea where he was based or even if he was still operational but I send an email to him in desperation - fingers crossed he will come back because this could prove to be expensive.  We do know that the panels are generating and we do know that some is being fed back into the grid but we can't drill down any further which is ok until there is a problem.