Lilies

An emergency blip I am afraid - it has been just one of those days....

I never made it to the camera group meeting last night, I decided that by the time I had driven there and back it would be too long to leave Xena on her own, and as she had ended up sleeping all afternoon after her second walk I thought it would not work if she also slept all the time I was out. A pity as we always have a bit of a Christmas celebration at the last one of the year, not sure if they did that again last night.

Today has been a very frustrating day. I did not collect the car last night as they phoned to say there was an oil leak and the brake pads also needed replacing, so we decided to leave it there overnight for them to repair today. I then phoned all morning to find out when it would be ready so I could book a taxi to go collect it - it took a few phone calls and promises of calls from the service manager before I found out I could collect it at 5pm today, and by then I struggled to find a taxi that was free to take me - living in the countryside it's not like London with taxis everywhere.

I also had some errands to do today, including grocery shopping as tomorrow I will be busy driving to and from Cambridge to collect Thomas so can't go shopping - but the TV man came early this morning to fix a problem with Netflix not working on the TV, and it was a very frustrating day for him too as nothing he did would get it to work. Living in a modern, 'smart' (as in smart systems not the other meaning) house everything is wired up through one system called Control 4 and when one aspect of the technology systems has a problem it is a real pain to get rectified and only specialist technicians can do it. Anyway finally at about 4pm after trying various methods and many phone calls to Netflix he solved the problem by bypassing the system and using the usual Netflix login via the smart TV app. I had to stay home with him as he was constantly logging in and out of our Netflix account and Sky account and wanted me to put in the passwords. Modern technology, hey, it's a bummer when things go wrong.

Xena was walked by the dog walker today and she came home a dark brown dog, covered head to toe in mud! I was very unkind and washed her down outside with the hose but she did not seem to mind at all - unusually for this breed of dog she does not seem to feel the cold. She had a warm towel rub afterwards and was perfectly happy!

Gavin has had a difficult visit to SA and is back tomorrow. It has also been very depressing to hear how frail Gavin's mother is - in fact he had no good news from SA at all. Both his mother and his aunt have deteriorated so much since he last saw them, and all the friends he saw were all very negative about the country. One of his closest friends is emigrating with all his children and grand children, tough to do this at 60 years of age, but he cannot stand living there any longer.

So no time for photos today other than this emergency shot of lilies I have in the house.