Back On The Road Again

Not REO Speedwagon but JayCee and her sunshine band.

Overnighter at our local airport cheap and cheerful express hotel for a stupid o'clock flight this morning. 

Now waiting at London City Airport for our onward flight to Guernsey.

House sitter is in place.  Looking forward to some sun.

Cake Overload

 We invited our new neighbours round for coffee this morning. We needed to discuss with them the plans for taking down the three large trees that border both properties, plus we thought it would be a good opportunity to get to know them better.

I am most definitely not a good baker so I went to the local Co-Op and bought a lemon drizzle cake, a coffee and walnut cake and some Border Biscuits dark chocolate gingers to go with the coffee.

They only nibbled one small piece of cake each so now P and I will be forced to finish off the rest all by ourselves this weekend.

How dreadful.

I Am Not A Nerd

 But it would have helped this weekend.

For the past few weeks we had been having problems with our WiFi connection dropping every few minutes.  There was also  severe interference on our landline - we could hardly hear conversations due to the loud crackling noise.

We reported it to Manx Telecom and an engineer fixed the fault on the line (somewhere out in the street) and we received a replacement router as ours was pretty old and not working too well.

I plugged in the router, entered the passwords and all seemed OK.  Except that P's laptop in the box room upstairs couldn't seem to hold an internet connection for long and kept dropping out.  Pretty frustrating for him on rainy days when he can't get out in the garden.

Yesterday evening I remembered that we had bought a WiFi range extender when we moved in here as the signal struggled to reach the upstairs rooms.  After six months I couldn't remember how I had originally installed it and set it up so this morning was spent rummaging through drawers and cupboards to find the box and instructions.

Eventually I found them and, with the help of Professor Google, I finally managed to copy the new router's settings onto the extender and now P is happily internetting upstairs while the wind and rain lashes down outside.

He did vacuum the whole house for me as a reward!

 

Ruddy Rabbits

 We have been given a plant which a friend dug up from their recently deceased parent's garden. He had no use for it and was going to pave the garden before putting the house on the market.

He has no idea what it is, nor do we, but I thought it would look good in a blank space in the garden.

It was doing quite well until I noticed this morning that half of it appears to have been eaten, and a couple of the blooms were lying beside what was left of the foliage.

We think the culprit was probably the big, fat bunny that visits our garden most evenings.

Hope he gets indigestion.

I had my six month review this morning at the Plastic Surgery Clinic to check that my scar had healed OK and for a skin check.  I had not realised that the skin check was a full body check and would require me to strip down to my flimsies.

Thank goodness they were clean on this morning!

Anyway, all clear so no further excavations required.

The Potting Bench

At the front of the garden shed was a patch of rough, uneven, stoney ground which had chunks of rock and broken concrete  thrown on it.

P had been pondering what to do with it when I suggested that  a potting bench set against the stone wall would be useful.

I envisaged a simple wooden bench made from the offcuts lying around the "dumping ground"  behind the shed.

This is the work in progress so far.....

A sturdy bench with a shelf beneath it for pots and compost and a handy blind at the front made from roofing membrane.

The area in front is currently being paved so that my delicate tootsies don't get muddy.

And for any potential snoopers out there, we now have a little added security...