Family and Friends Old and New

It is exceptionally hot, and this exceptionally hot weather is due to continue for quite a few days yet.  It is a little hard to get up much energy to do anything this was not helped by the fact that I had woken several times during the night and realised that Boris was not in which is odd - he is usually asleep, legs akimbo, on his blinkie or comes in at first light and yells at the window to come in and sleep against my legs.  He was nowhere to be seen when I slipped out and went down towards the carport to call him - he would normally yell back that he was on his way but sadly not this time.  I called and waited, called and waited but nothing came back so eventually, having searched everywhere, I woke John to tell him that I was worried.  He got up to help me look and eventually Boris appeared - I don't know if he had been locked in somewhere and my calling had woken him and someone had let him out.  I didn't really care because all I wanted was to have him home and safe.  I feel sick when one of them goes missing - I am reminded of Chivers and I don't ever want to go through that dreadful experience ever again.  Crisis averted thankfully but only a couple of hours later I noticed that we had not seen Charlie for a very long time and he is always around us when we are in on a Sunday.  I text Persephone because I had seen cars at her house but she told me she was in Nicosia and that the people at 1b were her daughter Nefeli and friends celebrating Nefeli's birthday.  As with Boris's disappearance I began to feel quite sick - Charlie has been really struggling with the heat of late and I was worried about him.  He too pitched up eventually, he had been sleeping under the daybed but not on his mat so when John went to look he did not see him on the mat and declared him not there when in fact he was!

With all cats accounted for I was able to relax and concentrate on lunch for Mum.  I had decided to keep it simple and light as the hot weather does tend to affect our appetites.  Today we were having salad and poached chicken in a light sauce which was made from salad cream and natural yoghurt with orange zest and black pepper - with it we had some baby new potatoes which were sprinkled with smoky paprika before roasting.  It did hit the spot and was followed by some of John's little Red Velvet cupcakes which were lovely and light.

We are approaching our 30th Wedding Anniversary and I had found our wedding album and thought it might be nice to take a look through it with Mum - I have been reading about how important it is to stretch one's memory because apparently, you never forget anything you have learned, you simple lose the ability to recall.  Mum can often just say she doesn't remember without trying to recall!!!  I didn't think it would be too hard for her to recognise all the people at our wedding - aside from John and I there were only 7 others - Mum and Dad, Janet and Hadge, Uncle Gordon and Aunty Margaret and Andy.

We have not heard from Andy in ages.  After he married and moved to the deepest darkest parts of the West Country we lost contact but I did find him just before our silver wedding anniversary and sent him an email and he replied.  It made me determined to do the same again but his old email address bounced back so I had to google him in the hopes I could find him as he is not a social media bod.

Being nice neighbours we invited Nicky and Mark to come and have a swim after Mum had returned home.  Their pool is in the process of being refurbished and we know from last year that their house is the other way round to ours and so their lounge gets full sunshine all day.  Our pool was showing 30 degrees water temperature at 6pm!!!  They didn't need asking twice and so we had a nice swim and a catch up before we went our separate ways.