Connect

Last night, wile sat in the flat, PY showed me an electricity bill that had been emailed.  And none of it makes any sense.  The bill for August showed a whole lot of money credited for bills going back to when we moved into the flat. Then a bunch of new charges were taken out. The flat has 3 different meter readings to send and I am not clear what is what. For some inexplicable reason I couldn’t stop thinking about this all night. Does anybody else get as frustrated as I do when services send incomprehensible bills with credits and debits that seem unclear? It used to be phone companies that were the worst but now that nobody makes landline calls and we all have packages of mobile calls and minutes those seem much more understandable. It’s now the electricity companies that make the whole thing more complex than it needs to be. 

So I was up early trying to figure our what was going on and if we were being over or under charged. It’s very hard to find any explanation of why we need to submit three meter readings. But, thanks to a small phrase  PY noticed on a quiet from an electrician, Superdeal, I managed to locate one article from a different electricity company that seems to explain what we have.  E.on Next is no help and their phone lines aren’t open for customer queries at weekends.  I did log meter readings all day long so I could figure out which meter was counting electricity when.   By the end of the day I had relaxed a little about it all because I think my observations tallied with that article. 

The day started with an early trip to Newport.  We were back at the Town Choice cafe for a pitstop (this time a latte and toast for me) before heading off on the bedding quest that I wrote about when we were last on The Island.  While we were having our breakfast stop, PY discovered that there was a small collection of games in the cafe so we played Connect 4 while waiting. It was quite a lot of fun but nobody won and we decided we should get on with our shopping rather than trying for a definitive game.

We decided to use up the Dunelm voucher and some Nectar points on the purchases and I was happy that we managed to find what we wanted within those parameters. It did mean that we had some full bags by the time we left Newport Sainsburys. Not quite as bad as when we were trying to carry picture frames on the last visit but still bulky. We just missed a bus when we got to the bus station so we sat in the bus shelter with bags of pillows.

Once we’d returned the bags to the flat, we headed out locally. We needed to gran the food for dinner. On the way, we stopped The Works where I ended up with a copy of The Thursday Murder Club because, after my last murder mystery book managed to unblock my reading, I bought it as I was convinced that I was going to finish ‘Till the Cows Come Home’, the Sara Cox book, in the evening (and I did). So, I will need something on the train on Monday. PY also ended up with a stack of books. We spent so long browsing the books in The Works, as in WH Smiths, that Costa Coffee had closed and PY couldn’t get the iced coffee that was one of the reasons we graded out, I felt a bit guilt about that and offered get a pre-packaged drink from the Co-op but, in the end, we wandered home alone the sea front and stopped at The Beach House cafe where an ice-coffee was made. We sat on a bench looking out to sea and it was very peaceful.

On the way down High Street we passed a jewellers, Serendipity Diamonds and, by the time we reached the see front, Serendipity Diamonds was a character we had created in a Wild West story. Totally reixucousl but a lot of fun.

Dinner was cauliflower and chicken korma-flavoured pittas, which were both healthy and delicious, and then we managed to watch Bros on Netflix and I wondered why we hadn’t see more of Luke Macfarlane over the years. Turns out he’s been in a ton of Hallmark movies. There’s a good interview in Vanity Fair, In Bros, Luke Macfarlane Is Finally a Hollywood Leading Man,  which talked through his career since the wonderful Brothers and Sisters.