Weekly Blog - W/E 31st July 2021

This week got off to a very wet start. Here in London, we experienced very heavy rain on Sunday afternoon, and many parts of London flooded, which was the second such incident here in the last two weeks, as there'd been some flooding whilst we were away on holiday too. Fortunately, we weren't actually affected where we live, but I heard that there were some basements that had flooded a couple of streets away, which wasn't good news for the householders. 

I spent a bit of time watching videos of the situation as it developed. I've never known such flooding in the 25 years I've lived in London, so it was quite shocking. 

On Sunday night we watched the film Tolkein on Disney+ channel which was very good. 

On Monday morning, I had booked to go to a class at the gym for the first time since the last Lockdown. My knee was feeling so much better that I thought I'd give it a try. I plumped for a Body Conditioning class to start with, as it wouldn't be too strenuous and put too much strain on it. 

I saw my friend leaving the earlier class. It was good to see her, as I've seen very little of her for the last six months, so we had a quick chat. The teacher teaching that day wasn't the teacher I'd hoped would be taking the class, but it was okay as she was pretty understanding and told me to take it easy as it was my first class back. I had to avoid some exercises altogether, but got through the class okay and felt much better for it. 

When I got home I had arranged to attend a Zoom class on Visual Merchandising for work, so I had some lunch whilst doing that, as I had the camera and microphone switched off. Afterwards, I was tired after a pretty sleepless night the night before, so  I had a snooze on the sofa for an hour and then spent an hour or two reading before making supper and then getting a very early night. 

 

On Tuesday, after a good night's sleep, I rode to work on my bike again. I wasn't looking forward to the day, but it didn't turn out too bad, save for having problems with the internet and the card machines not working properly for some of the day. 

I got a lot of stockroom work done, but I ended up having to stay until 8pm to reconile the takings, as using two different card machines had complicated things and I couldn't get it to balance. Eventually I got it sorted, but got home at nearly 9pm feeling completely shattered. 

 

Thankfully, on Wednesday I managed a bit of a lie in. The day started off bright, so I took the dog out for a walk. I spotted some ripe blackberries on the walk and decided to use a clean dog bag to collect some. I found enough to make another big pot of jam, which felt very satisfying, but we did get caught in a very heavy downpour at the end of the walk. 

I thought I'd lost the dog for a while, as she wandered off in the car park to shelter and I couldn't find her. I was fraught, calling her name and shaking her treat pot, until she eventually surfaced looking wet and bedraggled from behind a bush. I was so happy to see her. I've heard such awful stories of dogs being stolen throughout Lockdown, I'd never forgive myself if anything happened to her. 

Anyway, later I did some laundry and then popped out to Lidl to do a quick top up shop to last us through until I get paid on Friday. 

It rained heavily for most of the afternoon on Wednesday, so I stayed home and did my financial reckoning for the month. My spending wasn't too bad in July, considering that we went on holiday this month, but some of my shares fared very badly this month, which meant that the final figure for my investments actually went down. I don't take this too much to heart, as it always varies from month to month, especially with Covid and other things that are happening in the UK at the moment. 

On Wednesday evening, we all watched a couple of episodes of the new series of University Challenge. It's one programme that we all watch together as a family and we participate by trying to answer as many questions as we can. LB always keeps score and we compete against each other. For once, I seemed to be able to answer quite a few questions on one episode, which is not a common occurrence. It's usually OH that does the best of all of us. It's good fun though, and has become quite a family tradition that we enjoy.

On Thursday, I was only due to be at work in the afternoon, as I'd worked a full day on Tuesday and would be doing the same on Saturday. The Deputy with whom I share a post was on leave for the week, so the Shop Manager and I needed to change our hours a little to cover the shop between us. As a consequence, I had a leisurely morning walking the dog, getting ready and getting myself to work, which made a nice change. It almost seemed like a lot of effort to ride my bike into town for just 4 hours of work. I much prefer to do a longer day when cycling to work.

In other news, this week has been very quiet on our street, mainly due to the start of the summer holidays. Both of our neighbours went away as soon as school finished and it felt like we were living in a detached house for the week. Just a pity the weather was so bad that I couldn't really get out in the garden and enjoy the peace and quiet.

On Friday, it was another intermittently wet day. I did a bit of shopping at ASDA and Poundland and then came home and stayed home for the rest of the day. 

In the afternoon, I read for an hour, in order to finish a book before the month ended and then later I decided to do a bit of work on my current quilt project. I tacked the finished quilt top to the woollen blanket that I'm using as wadding and then trimmed up the edges ready to attach the backing fabric.

I think I've managed to find a fabric that I can use for the back of the quilt in my stash, which means that I don't need to buy any more fabric and furthermore, I can use up some of what I already have, which is even better. I will have to sew two pieces together in order for it to work, but this shouldn't be too difficult and the join shouldn't be visible once it is machine quilted.

On Saturday, I was back at work again. It was perfect weather for cycling in as it was much cooler. The stockroom is looking better than it has in a long time as we've had plenty of volunteers to work on it and the incoming donations are still reduced. As a consequence, today was slightly more leisurely than most days and I could take time to train and talk to a new volunteer who started in the afternoon, whilst still working, of course.

In the evening, OH and I watched a movie about Alfred Hitchcock and his wife on Disney+, which was very good.

A pretty quiet week in many ways, but an enjoyable one.