DVT DAY 40
Up early today as there is the excitement of a Sainsbury’s delivery to be had. Very prompt, dead on the dot of 8 o’clock the Sainsbury’s van rolled up. Of course I scuttled out of the way till he had gone. I re-emerged to a sea of blue plastic bags and mystery shapes strewn across the kitchen floor. I set about packing it away, which turned out to be quite a task. The fridge, the freezer, the kitchen cupboards, the downstairs storage cupboard is full and now we have a cardboard box of overflow cans and goodies tucked away in the garage vestibule. We now need to eat like pigs to get through it all before the next deliver is due next Friday. It is ironic that I am trying to lose weight and keep a food diary of everything I eat. I notice that the odd biscuit has become a ritual and the amount is creeping up. At moments of feeling sorry for myself just recently I have gratuitously indulged in at least 7 jelly beans. Where sugar is “fat powder” for others it is “killer dust “for me as it feeds my cancer. Another irony as I am blessed with a sweet tooth.
I wade through the blue bags and finally get to the end of squirreling the goodies away and then realise there are no stamps, I ordered stamps, I check the bill and there they are. No stamps to be seen. I go through the bin and there they are. My “owl tokens” are indispensable to me.
Once clear of the shopping I cook myself a bacon sandwich and get ready to self-stab before being interviewed over zoom. I had completed a workbook about the process of my retirement and the work I have done since then. The research is part of an Erasmus project being done in several European countries with a view to creating a tool to be used with pre-retirement people to help them plan their retirement activity. It was an interesting interview and, let’s call her Sam, was knowledgeable about the area. Apparently people now have Encore careers and Legacy careers, the rest seem to just fall into retirement without a plan to do anything. We chatted about the structure of the workbook until there was nothing left to say. So lunchtime approach and I retreated to the garden shed clutching two runner beans. My partner has been sent them from hr work team as part of the teams strategy to amuse themselves through the restrictions. They are now safely snuggled in pots in the greenhouse sporting their own labels and with a shelf to themselves.
A lunch of soup and teacake and I return to the shed to write letters and organise some EE work. By four o’clock it is getting cold so I pack up, deliver my days letters to the “Owl” for delivery to the post box. I discover that the Windows recovery disc I was waiting for had arrived. So I begin to try and re-run the start-up programme. After several tries it kicks in and then there was the long and prolonged process of instillation. During this time I help to cook tea and end up eating it while I press buttons and keys and then holding my breath in the hope that it is all going to work. To my relief it does and I end up with a laptop that is empty and functioning well. Rather than stopping there and thinking that I have won I am greedy to make it even better, so I down load cloning software and try to clone the old disc drive onto a swish new SSD drive. I play and try different ways into the system and suddenly the disc I was looking for pops up on the screen. I try to clone it but with no joy and so I try again and this time leave it to run without me watching it. Its mid evening and I retreat to London Kills and sit with a laptop on my legs writing the blog. The laptop will either work or not but I will not be playing any longer tonight, that will be a tomorrow job.
