27th February

The glorious spring weather continues and I now have a flowering poppy outside the back door - it has self seeded in an awkward place which drives John nuts.  I hate to pull up anything which has made an effort to survive - the poppy is just an annual so once it has flowered then I am happy to remove it.  Everything is springing into life and there is a tangible increase in temperature.

It was a bit like Christrmas today as we went through all the things which Janet had taken in for us and brought over in her suitcase.  I now have a new iron it is a Philips Azur 7000 which I chose because it got really excellent reviews and when I came to order it from Amazon it was half price for some reason.  I have yet to use it obviously because ironing is not my favourite past-time, hopefully this will make it a more pleasant experience - I shall report back!

Also in amongst all my goodies was the second part of the gifts I had ordered in memory of Joani.  She had a thing about witches and had a weather-vane which featured one so I decided I would get one and put it on my shed.  I hadn't expected that it would arrive in time for Janet to be able to bring it with her but it did.  

This will be part of our garden project along with the terracotta warrior and the new table and chairs.  We just need to agree what we are going to do about the shingle and slabs as we need to discourage Miss Minnie and Charlie from using it as their own personal toilet.  Strangely Cats don't usually go in their own garden but these two do - maybe now that there are so many cats around they feel intimidated going elsewhere.  Who knows?

We had a really slobby day today which is most unlike us.  Because in amongst all the parcels were the firesticks which we had purchased to replace our android boxes (one of which got zapped in the last thunderstorm) John wanted to get at least one set up to see how that panned out.  He got it done quite quickly and we decided to trial it out by watching a film.  He chose some action packed Gerard Butler film called Plane which I thought was dreadful but at least it proved the firestick was working well.

I did do a bit of craft this afternoon.  I am disappointed that I had planned to make something for Nicky's birthday later this week and ordered the decoupage papers I wanted in plenty of time and paid the extortionate fee to get four bits of paper in from the UK to here only to find that the Royal Mail had posted them to the US of A for some inexplicable reason and having paid for the import duty vat and handling if they replace the package I will have to do this all again.  I have had to rethink with what I have already got and it isn't really what I wanted.

We had a make-do meal this evening.  I had some spare ribs left over from our trip to Sonny's on Saturday and two small pork loin chops from Shuks.  I marinaded the chops in some hoi sin and soya sauce and made an Asian coleslaw with carrot, peppers, onion, apple and mint in a mango and mayonnaise sauce served with some lime and coriander flavoured rice.  It was absolutely delicious and actually quite unexpectedly so.

We had a lovely lazy evening binge watching the remaining episodes of The Gold which we thoroughly enjoyed only trouble is that having finished watching we will now have to find something else.  We were all in, John, Me and the three cats and we had no heating on - it was a lovely warm evening in the house and the forecast is excellent for tomorrow.