WORKING WEDNESDAY

I quite like being able to get up and please myself what I do - it certainly beats having to go out to work and I enjoy being retired and can honestly say I am never bored at home.

Yesterday, I made about 200 cards using my photographs but I must admit that after signing them all, which I like to do, I was very surprised that even after writing my name 200 times, it still looked the same - I well remember one of my sons, who shall be nameless, forging my signature on a school document, but he didn’t have the tell-tale, distinctive line at the end, so although he had the copied my actual signature well, it wasn’t quite right without that line - mind you, having told him this, I don’t doubt he had perfected by the time he left school!

Anyway, I digress - this morning, as our neighbour had given me more apples yesterday, I thought I should do something with them, so I peeled quartered and sliced them, put them in with the bowlful of blackberries that Mr. HCB picked before I was up, and in a few minutes, had cooked them so we have desserts for the next few days.

I also chopped courgettes and beans from the garden, onions, carrots and peppers, ready to roast for our meal this evening and then set to work on the huge bowl of tomatoes, again picked by Mr. HCB, before I even got up this morning.  As well as the wonderful aroma of stewed apples and blackberries, the tomatoes are now in a bowl in the kitchen with lots of garlic and basil, again grown by Mr. HCB, ready for our lunch of bruschetta and feta cheese - so more wonderful smells.  

Just to update you on Mr. HCB’s TV adapter - IT WORKS!!  Adam, from Leightons, came to the house on Monday afternoon, dressed, as he said he would be, in full PPE, bless him, and sat for well over an hour, trying to sort it out - he had his laptop and updated Mr. HCB’s hearing aids and then changed the cable on the adapter and it now works perfectly.  This means that I don’t have to listen to football or cricket commentaries, they just go straight into the hearing aids, which is great.  It also means that if there is a programme I want to listen to, if Mr. HCB presses a button his hearing aids, he can listen again, through the hearing aids, at his volume and I can have a reasonable volume on the television.  So well done, Adam!  We were very grateful to him for all his hard work in trying to sort this out, particularly as this was the third adapter box we had had, because it had never worked properly.  I gave Adam a jar of Blackberry and Apple chutney so he was happy and so was Mr. HCB.

Mr. HCB is still working in the garden and it’s almost midday, so I think I may go over to my field for a walk while it's still sunny - and to get away from the competing smells in the kitchen!

“It’s difficult to think
     anything but pleasant thoughts
          while eating a home-grown tomato!”
Lewis Grizzard