Sunday and we go away tomorrow...

Sunday was a fairly normal Sunday - Mum came up for lunch and I did a sort of shepherd's pie thing but with cheesy smashed potatoes on top rather than mashed and for pud we had rice pudding pimped up with some sultanas and cinnamon and grated lemon zest.  It all seemed to go down very well and Mum took a Red Cross Food Parcel back home with her.

After she had left we were action stations because tomorrow we are eventually going to use the voucher that she and Lilian gave us for an overnight stay at the Almyra.  Originally this was to be used to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary but had to be postponed because Mum fell and I was living down with her until we got her sorted.  We had rearranged it for this year on John's birthday but then we had not one but two lots of visitors here at the same time and so we pushed it back to tomorrow.  The world will probably end tomorrow morning that being the case - not funny really when you look at the situation in the Ukraine at the moment with Putin threatening nuclear bombs in retaliation for the bridge to the Crimean peninsula being blown up.

One of the things which I wanted to do before going away was to clean some lovely silver Jewelry which has been sitting in my box all tarnished and unloved.  I bought a necklace and a bracelet when there was a shop called Hi Ho Silver in Princes Street in Yeovil.  It was heavy and quite expensive and I thought it would look nice with what I planned to wear on my posh day out.

I found a 'hack' on tintyweb which advised cleaning it in a solution of white wine vinegar and bicarbonate of soda which actually did a pretty good job and the beauty was that you could see the bubbles lifting off the dirty.  I should probably need to do it several times because it has been a fair few years that the items have been sitting tarnished but it was good enough for tomorrow.

John and I got our bags packed.  We cannot check in until 2.00pm tomorrow afternoon and we have a surprise visitor tomorrow morning for coffee.  Hilary and Keith are on the island and Keith is off playing golf with Barry so Hilary contacted us to see if she and Barry's partner could pop in for coffee.  That will be lovely - we haven't seen her for the past few years because (a) her mum Eileen has returned to the UK and (b) dreaded covid stopping people visiting.  It will be lovely to catch up, albeit briefly.

We are planning a trip to Jumbos tomorrow before we go check in.  Hopefully they will have more of their Christmas stock out because I am trying to get ready for Christmas nice and early because we still have visitors arriving and I don't want it all to be a last minute dash.  Mum is my problem - we talked about presents over lunch - she says there is nothing she wants or needs but I know she likes a parcel or two to unwrap.  I just don't have any idea what to get her.