Flick's Journal

Mmm, Zelda

flick — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 21:57:54 GMT

On Friday, the nice young men from the tree surgeon came to visit. They took out the last few leylandii (we are free! Free!), and the variegated conifer by the front gate, which was getting a bit too big and squashing the ornamental cherries (we now have a much better view of the road, as an added bonus).

They also took the top off the beech hedge along the side of the house, so now it's hopefully at a height we can keep better in check. (Unlike all the letlandii, the beech is actually useful, acting as a windbreak.) Unfortunately, doing that involved standing on the roof of the very dilapidated shed, at least until one of them put a foot wrong and did the comedy disappearing from sight thing.

We'll be looking for a new shed, then.

Yesterday, the Nintendo Switch arrived, so I was mostly playing Zelda when not moving the contents of the shed to a different outbuilding. First thoughts are that not only do the controllers indeed frequently drop their connection but that they do it in a bloody stupid manner: rather than just stopping moving, Link wanders off in a random direction, eg: off a cliff. It is quite fun so far, though.

Today, we went to see a horse. Either we've been lucky or we've got a lot more picky about which we actually bother to go and see (probably a bit of both), because we both liked Galahad enough that I'm trying to set a date to go back with our riding instructor to see what she thinks. (Unfortunately, she's in France without her diary. Back on Tuesday, though.)

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Living room!

flick — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 19:54:27 GMT

After a hard afternoon and evening of furniture rearranging and assembling, it's all done other than putting the pictures back up on the walls!

(I very much hope that that rug will start behaving. It's currently got a Wii balance board and a side table holding it flat in an attempt to give it the idea.)

(Jo seems to like the new rug. It's already showing signs of her presence....)

(Sinister Ducks.)

(Aaaand I've just realised that the new sofas aren't really visible in any of those pictures. The blue bit in the front of the last one is the pouffe (it's got a storage space inside!), the sofas are the same colour.)

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That was quick!

flick — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 18:13:43 GMT

Quicker than expected, in fact: the new floor's all done, when we were expecting it to take until tomorrow. Unfortunately, we'd ordered things like new shelves, rugs and little felt pads to go under the furniture to stop it from making scratches for delivery tomorrow to tie in with it, so we're still a little short of furniture in here. Hopefully, we'll be all sorted by tomorrow evening. Hopefully.

Jo is pleased that she has her sofa back. The sofa bed was just not a suitable substitute, her legs were always hanging off the edges.

Both the anemones and the horses have been making the most of the sunny weather we've been having recently:

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Springlike

flick — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 08:58:31 GMT

(Only not today, when it's currently rather foggy. Does seem to be clearing, though, and at least the fog is a sign that the wind has died down!)

We've been seeing lots of little flowers appearing in the woods, including wild strawberries and cuckoo flower/ lady's smock. There's a fine patch of violets up a tree, as well:

After the usual sense of weeks with little progress (sewing together piles of small bits of fabric to make piles of slightly larger bits of fabric), I got to the stage of sewing together the blocks for my Storm At Sea quilt (started on a workshop a few months ago) so all of a sudden I've got a quilt top ready to start the actual quilting:

I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out, although Mike says that he can't look at it for too long without his eyes going funny. (Also pleased that, in the end, it turned out that I didn't need to get more of the fabric shipped over from the US!)

Today, we're having the new garage door fitted, as well as having the old living room and hall carpets removed and the floor levelled. The floor guy just said "You might want to look at this..." and showed us a drain cover in the hall. We're guessing that it's at the point that was once the back door to the house, and that it isn't actually connected to anything any more, but we're really not sure. Fingers crossed that it never needs to be opened up!

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Bits and pieces

flick — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 14:14:30 GMT

My parents have been to visit, which was nice, and short (possibly the two are related!). They brought us new living room lights (we saw the ones that we wanted in John Lewis, but they were out of stock when we went to order them online. A short panic that they were being discontinued later and my mother had bought them in her local store, as she was going there anyway. They are, of course, now back in stock online), which was good, and then put them up for us, which was better. They're much less fussy than the old ones, and removing the centre light from the ceiling fan / changing the blades on it has also made that look much better.

Just the floor to go, now, and it is finally booked for next week. We went for the middle ground, in the end, and are having laminate from the guy who did the third quote after the other two had annoyed me too much. I honestly couldn't have told you which of the sample books was wood and which laminate, so hopefully it's going to look nice! And then we need to buy some rugs. And new shelves for DVDs. But other than that it's nearly done....

In the less successful home improvement department, we were supposed to be having a new garage door today but the chap phoned first thing to say that his minion had called in sick. Hopefully that will get rescheduled in the not too distant future.

(My parents broke their journey home at Ebbsfleet, in the end, on account of not wanting to get up very early. It all worked ok.)

Following my failed attempt to listen to a bloody mp3 on my bloody phone, I bought the album (digitally, for £7, as the CD was £40!) and then remembered that I no longer have an optical drive in my laptop, so couldn't burn a CD to listen to in the car. In theory, I can use the drive in the desktop as an external drive, so we fiddled around trying to do that but, although I could see the drive, I couldn't see the blank CD that I put into it. (The next day, Mike messaged me from the office to ask why an untitled CD had appeared on *his* laptop. Sigh.) In the end, Mike bought me an external drive, so I spent an afternoon ripping and burning copies of all the CDs that have come into the house since I ceased to have a means of doing so: actually not that many, but it does take a while.

Yesterday, presumably to be blamed on one or other of the parents (although they claim not), I had some sort of odd twelve-hour lurgy: I woke up with a sore throat, got increasingly shivery as the morning went on, spent the afternoon wrapped in a blanket while each of my joints individually got more and more achy, developed weepy eyes and a splitting headache, didn't finish my dinner and felt a bit sick afterwards, felt a bit better by (early) bed time, and woke up this morning with a slight headache but otherwise feeling fine.

In between all that, I've mostly been playing The Last Guardian, which is exactly like the reviews say. It's very pretty, very Japanese, and very random. You are a small boy who is accompanied by a giant cat-bird, over which you have very limited control, while you wander around a mysterious and largely abandoned complex of towers and dungeons. The controls are utterly terrible, and this is a sadly common conversation in the house these days:
Flick: [repeats $keystrokes over and over for five minutes in an attempt to make the cat-bird do a $thing]
Flick: Can you see what I'm doing wrong here? I think that I need to get cat-bird to do $thing but he's not doing it.
Mike: It does look like that's what you need to do. Do you want me to look it up?
Flick: Please.
Flick: [continues to repeat $keystrokes, throughout the conversation]
Mike: It says you need to do get cat-bird to do $thing.
Flick: That's what I'm trying to do.
Mike: You need to hit $keystrokes.
Flick: That's what I'm doing. That's what I've been doing for ten minutes. This game has the worst controls ever.
Cat-bird: [for no obvious reason suddenly does $thing]

I have no objection to tricky puzzles, but these aren't, they're just capricious. Or, possibly, the cat-bird is capricious. Either way, it's a bit tedious. Very pretty game, though.

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Am I missing something here?

flick — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 20:02:58 GMT

I just downloaded an mp3, and thought I'd pop it on my phone (to join the other three on there; I very rarely listen to music on my phone).

Rather than open iTunes (which a) takes ages at the best of times and b) keeps crashing on open, really must restart my laptop one of these weeks), I thought I'd just airdrop it to my phone.

Yep, no bother, seconds later it's there and... the phone opens the Dropbox app, which asks if I want to upload the file to Dropbox.

WTF?

Opening the download link on my phone just plays the track in Safari. Am I really going to have to reboot my laptop and then plug my phone into with with an actual cable in order to get an mp3 onto it?

Edit, as Mike just sighed in a 'how dumb can you be' way: there's no option on export from Dropbox to put it into Music. I did try that!

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Navigating London

flick — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 14:16:12 GMT

If you were driving from Darkest Kent (M2) to The Frozen North (probably M11 but maybe A1 or M1), and wanted to break the journey, park the car and tube / train into Liverpool Street before carrying on, where would you do it?

I'm looking at the map and thinking maybe Ilford, or Woolwich, or Walthamstow Central, but I don't know what parking is like at any of them.

Anyone got any suggestions?

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1 dpi

flick — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 20:14:20 GMT

I'm getting to the stage where I have to decide what I'm actually going to do with them....

I've vaguely thought about making a bag from them, in which case I'm pretty much done. Or I could go on and make an actual quilt, in which case I'm very much not! Decisions, decisions.

Jodie's sofa has arrived, sooner than we expected. It didn't arrive in Ashford on today's lorry, and when they did some digging they found out that it was actually in Dartford. Rather than drive it to Ashford to then drive it here, they just brought it directly. It's rather bigger than the old on, Jo looks positively small curled up in the corner of it!

We've given up on the Dettol automatic hand wash dispensers, because they start having hissy fits after a couple of years and spew soap everywhere until you take the batteries out. However, we've still got three soap refils: does anyone use one and want them?

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Bits

flick — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 18:22:46 GMT

We're still rather up in the air about the new living room floor. In fact, I've just booked another quotation: wood-flooring guy replied to a request to quote for vinyl with cheaper wood options, vinyl-flooring guy a) still hasn't actually produced a quote and b) lost a lot of brownie points when he looked at our upstairs bathroom flooring and pronounced it to be cheap B&Q stuff. That didn't quite ring true with what we know of previous-owner's decorating habits, so we checked the box and it's actually the brand he's pushing us towards, admittedly their cheapest range....

On the plus side, we do have a new sofa. On the minus side, we don't have two new sofas: one of them didn't make it onto the delivery lorry and is in the wrong warehouse somewhere, although we're assured that it does actually exist. At least it's only Jo's one that's missing, not ours!

My mother has panicked me slightly by revealing that she's got her outfit for my sister's wedding all sorted. I did have a look in the shops in Canterbury this afternoon, but the only thing I was ever slightly taken by was a £200 (in the Hobbs discount shop) beige linen trouser-and-tunic combination. Given that I have at least one much nicer beige linen trouser-and-tunic-and-jacket combo in the wardrobe upstairs, my next mission is to rearrange enough of the living room furniture currently in the spare room to actually get into the wardrobe and see what I have that might be suitable. As my parents are coming to visit in a couple of weeks, I may enlist mother's help. (Father is tasted with putting up the new living room lights, which should do to keep him happy for a few hours.)

I think I have found some suitable shoes, though: some lacy Skechers, which look vastly nicer in the quick snap I took in the shop than they do in that official website photo.

We were supposed to be going to look at a horse this morning, but then the owner sent me a message to say that they'd decided they couldn't bring themselves to sell him. This, I suspect, will be the down side of trying to buy someone's beloved but no longer needed middle-aged horse.

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Free stuff

flick — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 16:21:30 GMT

We've got various bits of surplus stuff that will be going to either the tip or the charity shop unless someone wants them!

- 1 x 80cm wide beech Billy with six shelves
- 2 x beech Benno

- a Morphy Richards steam floor mop, which works fine but isn't really up to Jodie's level.

- an adjustable rolling pin, a hand mixer, a pepper grinder, a copy of The Force Awakens on bluray.

- two printers, a very elderly HP business inkjet 1200wn and a fairly elderly Canon. Both still work as far as I know.

- coffee table, a bit knocked around but made of actual wood and assembled in a factory by the talented Mr J Lewis

- a nest of three tables, of which those are the largest and smallest, also non-flatpack John Lewis

Other than the Billy and Benno, we can probably take stuff to Eastercon (unless the car fills up).

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Ducks and flowers and decorators and seedlings

flick — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 20:12:45 GMT

I've just been looking at the bird 'flu guidance for when the current control order runs out (at the end of the month). Given that free-range birds can only be kept in for twelve weeks before they become barn-raised, which happens at the start of March, I was expecting some changes and had my fingers crossed that I'd be able to start feeding the ducks properly again. Actually, though, they're just officially permitting what I was already doing on animal welfare grounds....

So, it looks like they'll not be getting ad-lib food until at least April. They don't like this at all, and my first duck egg of the year is getting further and further away. I'm very jealous of Mrs Farmer, who moved her hens into an unused polytunnel and is getting far better egg production than usual for the time of year.

In more pleasing spring-time news, yesterday we noticed that one of the dwarf irises on the drive was about to flower and a few more had green flower spikes. We went out at lunchtime today to see that half a dozen of them had suddenly burst into bloom. Oddly, the flowers last year came out the day we went to Eastercon and were pretty much over when we got back. It's been a cold winter this year, and was warm last, so I can only think that it's because they're better established this year: last year was their first.

The decorators have been hard at work on the living room today, and there's one coat of fresh paint on everything. We're camping out in the study: it's not a very small room, and would probably be fine with just the two sofas and coffee/side tables in it. Those plus the usual two desks and masses of books, though, are making things very cosy. Jo is bemused but coping.

Tomorrow, I'm going to pot on the first of this year's veg seedlings. Fingers crossed for a better spring / early summer than last year, and resultant shelves full of passata and other bottled stuff.

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Ah, spring....

flick — Sun, 19 Feb 2017 10:16:07 GMT

It's amazing what riding GB on a warm, sunny spring morning will do for my mood, especially when he's going really well (for a geriatric!) and we get to have a nice session!

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The fridge man cometh back again....

flick — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 19:35:03 GMT

This morning, Mike woke me with the worrying news that the fridge and cupboard doors were not longer properly attached.

This afternoon, the fridge man came back and moved the attachment points to ones that are, in retrospect, far more sensible (we were both a bit "yeah, should have thought of that").

Fingers crossed....

Also this afternoon cameth the second guy to measure up and quote for the hall and living room floor. The first guy said "The floor's a bit uneven, we'll need to put something down first to level it off". The second guy, who was actually a floor fitter not a salesman, was really worried about the unevenness of the floor, and thinks we should get fake (vinyl) wood instead because it's cheaper and will work on an uneven floor.

I'm actually quite tempted: I'll be able to use a steam mop on it, for a start, which you can't do with actual wood (you have to use a very-lightly-damped cloth/mop, which sounds like a marvellous way to turn muddy paw prints into a thin even coating over the whole floor). When I asked first guy about dealing with mud, he said "you can wipe it up with damp kitchen roll", which didn't really seem like a satisfactory long-term solution when Jo's left a trail around the room: I think he thought I meant actual lumps of the stuff. Second guy, on the other hand, immediately said that he didn't think we should go with the kind of (fairly rough and grained) wood surface we'd been planning because it's a nightmare to keep mud-free when you have dogs.

Mike's slightly coming round to the idea, but wants to see it in a house. We shall see.

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Note to self

flick — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 19:41:05 GMT

Defrost the ice box in the old fridge more frequently in future.

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The fridge man cometh!

flick — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 16:02:31 GMT

After a saga of epic proportions, six months of varying degrees of faffing, and six weeks of putting up with the fact that the fridge wasn't in the kitchen, I finally have my shiny new fridge:

Not only is it significantly bigger than the old one (and we've kept the old one), so that fridge tetris will be less of a common game, but it's also actually attached to the cupboard door, so that you only have to open one door!

I am probably more excited than I should be by this.

One of the things we'll be replacing when we have the living room redecorated is the side tables: if anyone would like a nest of three pale wood side tables from John Lewis, please say. Also up for grabs: a hand blender/whisk and a rolling pin with a set of interchangable thickness guides. We can bring them to Eastercon. (There is also our coffee table, but it's pretty battered and would need a good sanding and re-varnishing, as well as being a bit big to conveniently bring to Eastercon. Say if you've a particular desire for it. Again, pale wood from JL.)

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Oops

flick — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 16:55:00 GMT

For a lovely change, although the wind's bitter, it's been lovely and sunny today.

I celebrated by taking GB for a little ride in the school, where he was doing really well (to the extent that I had to remind myself not to push him too hard), and then we trimmed and tidied up the willow fedge.

After lunch, Mike had to work so I took Jo out for a nice, long-ish (for convalescent pooches) walk. As we started back down the hill opposite the house, Mike appeared on the drive and frantically shouted "Hydrotherapy!" at me.

Oops. We'd forgotten that Jo had a swimming lesson in, um, fifteen minutes and, of course, I'd had no signal when Mike tried to call me to get me to come back early.

The ducks got a rather hurried lunch and then we headed off in the car and only arrived a minute or so late. At which point I looked at Jo and just about managed to see her under the layer of mud.

Lots of hosing her down with the shower did help somewhat, but the water in the tank was rather murky after she'd been in it for a few minutes. "It's a good job I like you..." said the hydro lady, before conceding that it didn't matter too much given that the next (and last for the day) dog was the one with something of a problem controlling his bowels.

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The kindness of strangers

flick — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 20:15:41 GMT

At my last quilt workshop, I started making a quilt (duh) and then realised after I'd come home and carried on with it that I didn't have enough of one of the fabrics. And that the piece I had left didn't have the selvedge strip on it.

(Fabrics designed for quilters often have fairly detailed product information printed on the selvedge, to make it easier to get more when you get half way through and realise that you don't have enough. I dare say that sensible people make sure to keep the selvedge just in case....)

I thought I'd bought it at the craft shop in Canterbury the week before, but wasn't sure. The next time he went into town, I sent Mike in with a piece of it and he and the shop assistant looked but couldn't find it. I also went online and looked through all the fabrics sold by the supplier that they usually use, but didn't find it there.

Bugger. No idea where it came from.

This afternoon, Mike was tidying his desk in preparation for having the living room redecorated (we're going to decamp to the study while it's being done). I went and got a bin bag, as the bin was full, and when I emptied the bin into it I saw... a strip of selvedge! Admittedly it wasn't the one I was after, but did it mean that I'd not emptied my sewing bin at the workshop but instead brought it home...? It did, and a bit of rooting produced the one I was after.

Ten seconds with Google found me the (US) manufacturer's website (and the depressing news that the fabric's two years old and discontinued), and an hour or so more revealed that no one in the UK seems to stock it, nor did any of the shops listed on the manufacturer's list of 'shops that stock this fabric'. I did, however, eventually find a shop in Maine that had it in stock!

I crossed my fingers and sent them an email asking if they'd be prepared to send it internationally, and got a very nice email in response that said they would but wondered about payment: could I send them a US money order? Argh. Another look at their website showed that they do take Paypal for online orders, so I've emailed back and asked if I could just pay like that instead.

Fingers crossed, and if there's some reason why I can't then I suspect I'll be asking around for people coming from the US to Eastercon!

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I don't think we're going to be generating much power today....

flick — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 13:34:13 GMT

Snow Jo!

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1 dpi

flick — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 17:16:05 GMT

Can you tell who it is, yet?

The little old ladies at Little Quilt Club were utterly bemused when, having spent a while making perfectly normal square-in-a-square blocks for the storm at sea quilt, I whipped out my EPP box and started sewing together lots of brightly coloured squares. They were none the wiser when I showed them the printout I was using to remind me of the layout!

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Quilty

flick — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 14:42:55 GMT

(LJ app still letting me post to my LJ even though it won't log me in. V mysterious!)

It has stopped being quite so cold, for which I am very grateful. It is rather misty, but I suppose you can't have everything.

I seem to have been quite busy, with living room redecoration arranging, pooch wrangling, failing to find a new horse, and several quilt-related things.

We've been doing miserably at getting the new living room floor arranged, having tried two shops in Canterbury. The first, when we said "we've decided that we'd like hard flooring but don't know anything more than that" waved vaguely and said "it's over there"; we did eventually coax some more information out of the sales guy, but weren't very impressed. The second, when I first tried (on a day when the car said -2 in the centre of Canterbury), had a 'back in five minutes' sign on the door; I waited ten then gave up and went to run other errands that were quicker than expected so I tried again later: the sign said 'open' but the door was locked, so no sale for them either. I have got a painter coming to quote tomorrow, though, so that's some progress. And my new curtains are here, and the furniture-other-than-the-sofas. Getting there.

Pooch is in fact doing very well. She's having her swimming lessons once a week, and is still on slightly shorter walks than usual, but otherwise she's back to normal now. All seems to be healing fine.

I thought I had a lead on a horse, but it turned out that I didn't. Thinking of trying a dealer who does a finder service (for a fee), but I'm waiting to hear back from a couple of people I've asked for gossip from, first.

On Saturday, I went to quilt club. It was the annual session where various people demonstrate various techniques and you choose which four of the eight demos you want to see. Moderately interesting, but I didn't really learn anything much and came away from a couple of them thinking 'that was not only a needlessly complicated way of doing that thing but also involved a slightly expensive material that could have been just as well replaced with an incredibly cheap one'.

On Sunday, I went to an all-day workshop to learn how to make Storm At Sea blocks. Mostly, what I learnt is that my instinct when looking online at designs using the blocks, specifically that the class was going to involve a lot of fiddly cutting of fabric and I'd be much happier using a paper template like I usually do to sew onto instead, was entirely correct. I think I'll be doing that for the rest of the quilt, and further think that there's a better than 50/50 chance that, when I've done so and come to sew the whole thing together, I'll end up taking apart what I did in the class and doing that on paper as well so that it looks more consistent. It was interesting, but my hands were very unhappy by the end of the day.

To be fair to the class, my hands didn't start the day entirely happy: the quilt made up of all the little folded squares is finally finished! I (very minimally) hand quilted it in the end, because I didn't want to risk quilting over the folds, and that went very smoothly with a doll needle and embroidery floss, but then I came to do the last little bit of it: blind stitching the top and bottom of the quilt together around the edge. I've learnt, over the years, that some fabrics are harder on my hands than others, and it turns out that linen is one of the bad ones. On a good day, I was managing to do two sessions of about a foot and a half each.... Still, it is now finished, so have some pictures:

The down side of my being out at weekend was that Mike had to horse wrangle by himself when they were coming in to bed. They behaved on Saturday but on Sunday went charging off, spraining a couple of Mike's fingers in the process. They were also behaving like idiots list night, trying to get to the new mares (even GB!): possibly they've come into season. To be on the safe side, even though it's going to be a bit slippery I'm going to just let them run down the hill on their own tonight rather than try and lead both of them in along the road.

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Fine weather for quilting

flick — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 18:04:03 GMT

Weather and Mike playing Skyrim mean I've been making great progress with a hand quilting project: it just seems like the right sort of weather to be sitting with a quilt on my lap. And a blanket underneath it.

The boys didn't get any carrots today:

They nearly didn't get any water, but fortunately we decided that we didn't quite believe the Met Office's assurances that the freezing fog would clear Real Soon Now and saved the left-over water from yesterday. That meant that, when the garage tap failed to thaw out in the non-existent sunshine, we only had to carry a couple of buckets over from the house to top things up.

(As I usually do, I posted the picture into a private LJ post using the LJ app and then edited the post to copy the html to a DW post, before deleting the LJ post. (Shh, this is actually the easiest workflow I've managed to find). Oddly, today when I opened the LJ app it gave me a message about authentication and demanded that I log back in, but repeatedly failed to let me do so. On a whim, I tried posting anyway and it worked. Suspect that this is not the intended behaviour.)

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Still chilly

flick — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 18:14:21 GMT

Part of the reason it's so chilly down here is because this is what it looks like at 9:30 in the morning:

We have one of the horses' water buckets by the school, for when they're turned out nearby. This afternoon, we were intrigued to see how frozen it was, so we tipped it out to have a look:

(I managed to ride GB a little this afternoon, for the first time in a while. I was going to try yesterday but the school was still like concrete when they were due to come in. He was doing ok other than occasional stumbles when he stepped on a lump of sand and it confused him by not squooshing down like it normally does.)

Still, the good news is that "temperatures are set to plummet to -7C in rural areas" tonight, so at least it'll be warmer than it has been. Um. Right?

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Brr

flick — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 18:56:14 GMT

It's been quite chilly here (yesterday, on the evening weather forecast, they mentioned that the afternoon had been sunny with a high of 13 in Scotland, and sunny with a high of 1 in Kent...), and we think that last night may have been the coldest since we moved here: the ducks' water bucket, inside the duck house inside the stable, was frozen over this morning, and when Mike did the animals' water this afternoon the garage tap (which gets the sun, unlike the stableyard one, which he didn't even try) took a while to run: both pretty much unheard of. (The weather station seems to be broken, so I don't have an exact figure. At least -10, maybe -12?)

Mike bought new carrots for the horses a couple of days ago, and yesterday I forgot to put some water in the bucket to store them (carrots keep better under water if it's -- ha ha -- warm weather). This morning, they were rather frosty looking, and the bucket of water from GB's stable that I poured over them had ice floating on the surface, with the end result that the carrots in the boys' dinners looked rather... chilly.

It turns out that the new people in the flat, who we've still not spoken more than a few words to for largely weather-related reasons, actually have three horses, all mares. Bugs was very interested in going to say hello when I brought the boys in past their field yesterday.

Jo had her first (this time around) swimming lesson today, a very easy session to get her back into it but she seemed happy enough and the physio was happy with how she looked in the water.

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Bloody hipsters

flick — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 18:53:33 GMT

My fortnightly box of flowers arrived today (we have a brave DPD man, and his route to get here doesn't involve the hill. As he was leaving, I asked where he was going next and after some discussion, including my describing the van I'd watched take three goes at it before giving up a little earlier, he decided to go the long way around to avoid having to try it).

They are, as ever, lovely -- roses and wax flowers, which are tiny wee things with a lovely lemon scent -- but this week's box included a special free gift as well! A good friend of Freddie's has just launched a new company, and here was a sample of his fabulous new artisanal... toothpaste.

They offer a subscription service, or you can buy it in Waitrose.

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Ponies in the snow

flick — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 15:01:21 GMT

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