Well I thought that it had been longer since we posted here! Anyway as usual I’ll blame time and the lack of it! But in reality the main culprit was BT Total Broadband. Our broadband connection had been on and off – mainly off or slow as dial up for the last 6-8 weeks. It seems to have sorted itself out now. We are still waiting for a courtesy call from BT to see how we are doing! I expect it will be us that contacts them first when we demand compensation for the rubbish service we have experienced.
Some of the highlights of the last week have been as follows:
The kids and Sarah going to the theatre to see Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ performed by the Shakespeare for Kidz company. Evidently it was great! I didn’t go hence the in-depth review!
Sarah has transformed an area of rough ground at the end of the house into a lovely garden. So we have visited a few garden centres and picked up a few select plants which will give it year round structure and colour and later on we are expecting some plants to arrive in the post from earlier offers we saw. Lily of the valley, jasmine, clematis, fuchias, heucheras and others that I can’t remember now!
We have also moved some the potted plants we brought with us in to the new garden which leaves most of the plants in the back yard of a Mediterranean style. So we are going to continue that theme with hot / dry planting in pale terracotta pots – we haven’t finalised the plans yet so this will be a long term project. We did get the OK this week to hang our baskets on the house so we are looking for to a fab display again. We have got some trailing sweet peas coming so fingers crossed they will look and smell great!
We had to order 1000 litres of oil this week as our December order was running out – hopefully this order will last until the end of November.
I have finally found a resting place for my laptop in the kitchen so I set up pc desk with my TFT monitor and 2.1 speakers and then discovered I couldn’t get a wireless signal – it was only two feet away from the previous place but no, it wouldn’t connect so I dug out some Ethernet cable and wired a connection from the router to my laptop. Which is great – it feels like I have a real home for my computer now! All I need to do now is clip the cable properly to the skirting board! More importantly it frees up the kitchen table for the kids studies!
Edward has been making lots more cute noises this week – mainly based on the mwah mwah, ma ma MA, da dwah daaaa, mwah theme but he has been much more vocal! He is desperate to get on the floor and crawl around, he almost got on his knees this morning, when he does I’m sure he’ll be off, racing around. Then nothing will be safe! He has already developed a fagin like approach to removing things from drawers when you’re not looking (he would make a great pick pocket) the funny thing is that he opens the drawer first then has a look and chooses something he fancies and picks it up. It is not a random rummage it is done with real purpose! He will be nine months next week. I just can’t believe where the time has gone. I know the pregnancy seemed to race by but now it is going so fast.
Our washing machine stopped working last Friday, it was over five years old and had been fixed a number of times before so this time we got another one. It came on Thursday at 7am! And has been in constant use ever since, although now I think we are pretty much up to date with the washing! The great thing is that I still don’t really know how to use it as Sarah has done all the washing! The thing lights up like a Christmas tree but is as quiet as a mouse – shh, super quiet technology. It also washes much more per load and only has a cold water feed so it will save us a fortune in oil. The previous one had a hot water feed and every time it wanted some hot water the boiler would fire up and drink some more oil! And that was only for a 30 degree wash – but we do do loads of washing. Now with the warmer weather here we will get a rotary line for the garden so we won’t have to run the tumble dryer so much. The new line will probably pay for itself in just a few months!
Next time I post I will go through some figures about electricity consumption. We seem to use more electricity than any one else in the country, at least twice the average household according to our bills.
I think that has covered most things for now!