DVT DAY 204

Monday, up, breakfast, pond, shed. The pond was an unintentional diversion as I noticed the pump was not working and ended up culling the pond weed and racking off the floating debris. When I got to the shed it was hours of trying to devise a session record form but for some reason the header and footer functions would not behave themselves. So hours of frustration for very little. A quick lunch of noodles and it was back to the recalcitrant laptop. During a moment of relaxation I discovered that my new hot wire saw will not cleanly cut wax, which is a bit of a blow and scuppers what thought was a good idea. It was about this time that I noticed the shed had started to rot to the extent that new holes were appearing. I headed for Wickes to get wood filer and hardener. No wood hardener, but some wood filler. I head for the nearest B&Q and find they have no wood hardener but I do get to have a call with a friend who I had not talked to for a while. I find that B&Q have got a fungal treatment so I get some and adapt my intended shed intervention. Home and I find the garden guy has trimmed all our hedges and is heading off home. I get into the shed and move stuff around so that I can spray the back wall with the fungus killer. While it starts to dry I get a piece of shed boarding from the garage and stow it ready for tomorrow. My master plan is to patch the back wall with lengths of shed board and seal it. If that goes well then I shall wood fill the holes from the inside and when that is dried get to work with a new layer of wood preserver and paint. The shed closed for the night I retreat to the WiFi in the house and redo the work I had done during the day. I finally get it done and send it with an e-mail to some managers I am meeting on Wednesday. Time for dinner and the second half of a rugby match before setting down to write the blog.

This feels like a day of chore which I will not get back. Tomorrow the chore of shed mending will continue wedged in around a one to one with my programme manager. Hopefully my retreat shed will be weather proof and warmer by the time I’ve finished and ready for a long winter of COVID discontent. Ah death were is thy sting? This time last year I was in my second course of chemo and my hair had fallen out. Now look at my flowing locks!

DVT DAYS 200, 201 ,202 & 203

For four days I have suffered WiFi deprivation. Norfolk equals no WiFi and that means no blog for four days. To add insult to injury the weather was exceedingly wet and very windy. So our outing and abouting was somewhat curtailed as we huddled down in our wooden den amidst the fishing lakes at Woodlakes Park. Apart from one drenched heron and several very bedraggled fishermen pushing barrow loads of fishing kit we saw very little signs of life. At one point in the height of the blow the electricity failed and we had to ring a near bye restaurant to make sure it wasn’t just our little hut that had gone dark. They confirmed that it was across the area and then tried to sell us take away.

Our happy little hut look like this:

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Due to the dire weather we spent much time reading so I was able to finish my book on media philosophy. A stimulating read and helpful for the preparation I am doing for a conference debate in November. I came out of the read knowing that I am an analogue being living in a digitally dominated world.

Finally the weather eased enough for us to head out for a trip to Kings Lynn. Kings Lynn has of course its own bit of history but it is surrounded by commercial sites and shopping estates. The cobbled streets were almost empty on a Saturday and the wind whipped along the narrow streets and alleys. We took in the historic bits quite quickly and then sheltered in Baguettes to Go with hot chocolate and sausage rolls.

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As it starts to rain we head back to the hut and an evening of reading and fuzzy TV. So we get to Sunday and pack up and drive off waving farewell to the hut. The one thing about the Norfolk hut was the mattress, which was hard and supportive. It made me remember our intention to replace our current jelly like one, which apart from being very large is bloody uncomfortable. By strange twist of fate its the A47 all the way, how boring is that. So home and the usual routine kicks in, pack stuff away, wash stuff, tidy stuff, clamber on the bike and sweat stuff before cooking curry and watching football. At least the heating works. Another six months of COVID should just about see me shoot myself. Thankfully there is a letter from a friend waiting to be read over a cup of coffee and work beckons, which will give me stuff to do. I shall plan my week in my home shed and get Christmas under way. I also intend to go to the gym and up the fight against the flab, I’m fed up with my phone telling me I am obese.

DVT DAY 199

Today was Wednesday Alpaca day. As a treat my partner, my youngest daughter and I went to walk alpacas at a local farm. So today’s blog is unashamedly Alpaca packed.

Everything was of course COVID aware and we were reminded by the guide who started our alpaca induction with a brief chat. Of note were, don’t pull your alpaca, they often take ten minutes to go to the toilet, they do not kick but will spit at each other so don’t get caught in the cross fire. So after a brief chat in the pouring rain we were allowed to choose our alpaca.

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We walked with our alpacas across the fields, stopping to say hello to the pigs. At one point the alpacas sped up as they knew they were going to get fed. We had all bought packs of tasty alfalfa pellets to feed our new friends and they knew when they would get them. At the first rustle of paper they immediately stuck their noses in the pocket and tried to get the treats. It does not take an alpaca long to eat a bag of treats.

After the feeding we walked our friends back to the starting point and returned them to the farm staff, but of course we took the occasional selfie for the scrapbook.

As a finale the alpacas get more food and the one with my daughter had ideas about getting more than his fair share.

At the end of our time we wash our hands and make our way back to the car and then home.

Home and coffee. We go to the garden centre for compost and pick up some pies to take to Norfolk with us tomorrow. We get home again to find my eldest daughter had been busy laying the flooring we ordered for the weights area of the garage. So now the area is looking more usable and the squat rack now sits firm on the floor.

I plant a few of the plants we bought the other day and then retreat in doors fro tea and an evening of Hero’s until its time to blog.

DVT DAY 198

Its Tuesday,which means its all fairy day as we go back to Trentham Gardens to seek the fairies we missed before, so todays blog is all fairies, and no apologies.

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Arriving home to a bag of new clothes pegs its time to help my eldest daughter to assemble her new squat rack, which if I am lucky might get to use. So the gym in the garage is coming together. I expect I might move the exercise bike into it in the winter months.

Time for tea and to fill my drugs wallet for the week before settling down for the Great British Bake Off whilst writing the blog. Tomorrow is walking alpacas!

DVT DAY 182

Monday and I get up to the smell of bacon and coffee, a good way to wake up. I have breakfast with all my family there and take the opportunity to tease my eldest daughter as she is the only one working today. I find I have a present from my partner with an accompanying note. The present is a surprise and echoes my dandelion clock image of my life line. I am touched by the thought and the note, not for sharing.

We decide that over the next couple of days to do stuff, starting with a trip to Beacon Hill for coffee and fresh air. Before going I order some interlocking flooring tiles for the training area of the garage so the weights do not damage the floor. Pretty blue ones of course. I drive us to the entrance of the park and we set off for the cafe. We find the cafe closed! Sitting at a picnic bench we consult the internet that tells us this cafe is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. We are bemused at its closure, it seems to make no sense looking at the numbers of families that are sitting around the area. We abandon the park, saying farewell to the bear as we go.

I drive us to Bradgate Gate our local deer park that has been going for 800 years. We head for the cafe and settle on coffee and tuna sandwiches. The sun is shining and it is warm, just the excuse needed to have a Magnum ice cream. I sit and watch the small yellow birds seeking the seeds from the pine cones on the tree that we are sitting next to.

We laze for a while and then head off towards the garden centre closer to home to restock and begin to prepare for next spring. We wander around and gather up plants and bulbs making plans on the hoof for the coming seasons. We end up with a trolley full of foliage and head home.

I hang my washing out and notice that our clothes peg stock seems to have disappeared so resort to Amazon to put this right. We all sit around with a col drink and I order the tickets for Trentham Gardens tomorrow. We are going to go on the fairy hunt.

I change into my cycling gear and head for the shed for an hour of effort. It feels gratifying that I get through the hour. On the way back to the house I notice a large dahlia has come into bloom.

In for dinner with the family and I resist the cheesecake and go for plain strawberries, my major goal is to get my weight down, Oh to be just overweight rather than obese as my phone sees it.

My evening is spent running off the bill for the re-piping and sending a reply to the ombudsman with whom we are still at loggerheads with. It means another review by the ombudsman for a final and legally binding ruling. So that particular chapter is in the lap of the gods now. I am almost past caring now as the reality of the experience of being ill in Jamaica is way outside the comprehension of any “objective” agency. I finally get in the shower and get refreshed before settling down to write the blog.

DT DAY 196

Sunday and I’ve spent it sorting out the garage and all the storage space. So now the garage is retuned to a training space with several boxes of “stuff” to go to charity, recycle or the dump. In the course of the day I realised that my Imelda Marcus gene is worse than I thought, as the day wore on I found other pairs.

All day I have sneezed and constantly dabbed my nose as it ran profusely due to the dust. It finally abated when I sat to watch the football in the evening with the fire one. I had some moments of panic when I could not log onto my blog, for some time it would not let me in. In the end I gave up and went for a shower and a long chat with my youngest daughter who arrived to stay for a couple of days. She had bought loads of retro clothes from the Coventry clothes market. Some really good jackets and coats, all bought by weight.

Finally I get into my website and write the blog. Tomorrow sees my partner and I start a weeks leave, so I expect we will garden and prepare for our three day break in Norfolk later in the week. For now I will settle for a good nights sleep.

DVT DAY 195

I’m knackered! From morning till night I have been moving all the stuff back that we moved to enable the re-piping. So much stuff and some surprises. One of them was the discovery of a child’s teas set given to us by my parents and told not to let the girls play with them. We obviously took the advice they gave as I found them in a tin tucked away. They are German porcelain by EM Bavaria who were well know for making child’s tea sets. This set is 100o, beyond that I do not know, although they are apparently common. No hidden fortune here I’m afraid.

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I also discovered that I have the Imelda Marcos shoe gene. It kind of creeps up on you is my excuse, a combination of hoarding and liking shoes to go with clothes. I found I had at least three collections which when put together seemed excessive. See below:

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What can I say. I seem to like shoes. Most of the ones in the last picture are bound for the shoe recycle or charity shop. Not the colourful ones.

We kept going through the evening and I went off to the garage to begin to clear some space for the longer term rearrangements. First job was to re hook the tool board and get it filled.

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Its been a full days graft, my back aches so its time for football and the blog before getting some sleep and start over in the morning. Of course being Sunday its weigh in day, lets hope I earn a Mars bar ice cream.

DVT DAYS 193 & 194

Its very simple: two solid days of cleaning and decorating the storage space in which we deposit all the things we cannot bear to throw out. It had not been touched until we had to move everything out to enable the plumbers to do the re -pipe that took care of the first three days of the week. So I bit the bullet and decided to clean the area and paint it out, and of course that led to deciding to insulate the new central heating pipes. Of course if your doing all that then then I thought I might as well sort out the flooring. This I thought was a good idea until I moved the wardrobes and found mould on the end wall. Fearing damp I set about demoulding it and putting on a coat of antimould paint before emulsioning it. So Thursday saw me cleaning and painting. A tricky timing task as I had to host my Open Forum at 1pm. Of course there was the run to the local Wickes to buy the materials fitted in as well. I will not bore anyone with the details of the work but by the evening I was knackered and retreated to a hot bath. It was glorious, I love the joy of having hot water to top up the bath at will. I lay in it for hours and read all of Marshal McLuhan’s The medium is the Massage. I recommend it as a good bath time read.

So Friday arrives and my first thought, almost, was whether the paint had dried on my mouldy wall. It had, so I set to finish the painting of the walls and ceiling. In a moment of inspiration I decide to put a new flooring down and I fixed on a form of decking tile that I had used before. Its durable and I had no intention of ever redoing this area of the house again. So I go to Wickes again, buy the pipe lagging and then found the decking tiles I wanted. I then stood by them and calculated how many I needed to cover the storage area. I cracked it and picked up the required number of packs, and retuned home. I set about putting the first tiles down. To my surprise the space was exactly four by ten tiles, a miracle, no cutting required. The fly in the ointment was that I had miscalculated and was a pack of four short. Such a pain, but I headed back to Wickes and got the final pack of decking tiles. I then spent a tortuous few hours laying tiles and moving two large wardrobes around in a very confined space. It was tiring to say the least but eventually with a little help from my floor laying kit I got it done. With that done I lagged the new bright shiny pipes. Using my new hot wire saw was fun and made cutting the pipe lagging easy, so this part of the work went smoothly. The final outcome looks nothing but at least I know its all sound and will not need doing again for years.

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I cleared away what I could and collapsed in front of the TV, ate tea and then watched rugby. So now I’m catching up with the blog and wondering when I will get time to read my new books on McLuhan.

I am keen to get the house straight again before my youngest daughter comes to visit Sunday for a couple of days. I’m hoping for snow so we can luxuriate in the warmth of our new heating system.

DVT DAYS 191 & 192

Tuesday and its chaos in the household as the re-pipe crew invade us and continue to drill, solder and amaze with their 3D vision. My partner and daughter go to work and I retreat to the shed to write letters and keep myself busy. On the way to and from the shed I snap a red admiral.

One thing I do is frame a picture sent to me in a letter from a friend in Scotland. I hang it in the shed with her other pictures that she has sent me.

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The odd snack now and then and to keep going until my partner returns home and finds the radiators hot. The miracle has happened our heating system works, never before have all the radiators been hot in every room. The crew need to return to drain the system of the cleaning agent they have flushed through it. I am feeling sore and crap from yesterdays injection so take myself to have a bath and read. I wake up naked on the bed with a book laying on my chest, I take the hint and go to bed.

I wake on Wednesday alone, everyone else is up and either working or going to work, the re-pipe crew have just arrived. So I scrabble to dress and retreat immediately to the shed. I take a call from a friend and settle into writing more letters. At least the re-pipe means I am catching up with my correspondence. To my surprise the crew have finished by mid morning. They show me the set up and leave.

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The system is hot from the test and I cannot resist going round the house feeling the radiators. The crew said they had left the system on the program, which was news to me so I googled the program panel and found a video demonstrating the use of the programmer. Its really clever and has loads of options so at some point I need to re-programme the system to meet our household needs as economically as possible. But with time pressing I change into my training gear and hop aboard the exercise bike for 40 minutes. I have very little time before I have to log onto to todays Open Forum. No one turned up except the host and the person doing the technology. We chatted for a while and reflected on the possible reasons for the zero turn out and how the world works. In the middle of the discussion the guy who does some work in our garden turned up meaning that I had to end the season and tell my guy what needed doing in the garden. While he toiled in the garden I tested out the shower that had been acting up for a while. I hoped the work done on the system had corrected the fault and to my surprise it had. It started inauspiciously with a lot of spluttering and upping and downing of the temperature and then it got going. A real pleasure to take a comfortable shower fro a change, it remains to be seen if it will continue to work as well. My partner returned saying that her mother had committed to have a stair lift in stalled. So the visit to the mobility shop had paid off.

I put the lounge back to some sort of order so that we could spend the evening in relative comfort after which I started to write the blog while tea was cooked and continued till it was time to watch more Heroes. Tomorrow the car goes to be serviced and MOT’d and hopefully the nasty rattle at start up will be sorted. My injection is still sore despite exercise and a hot shower, its taking longer this month to ease, it maybe something or nothing I will wait and see.

DV DAY 190

Its re pipe day, the first f three, however before I can enjoy the fun I have to go to the GP for my 28 day injection. Right side this month for the pigeons egg that gets injected into me. It feels sore as the nurse pumps it in and as the day progresses it gets sorer, I feel crapper and I get a thumping head ache. But hey this is re pipe day 1. Four crew members turn up in four vans dead on 8:30 and begin. Luckily we had moved our cars and my partner and daughter went of to work leaving me to retreat to the shed. I am a great believer in letting people get on with their work especially when its something I know bugger all about. I remember how annoying it was in my workman days to have people stand around while I sweated my bollocks off. There is something degrading about being watched working, unless of course you invite people to do so, like when training new therapists.

So I retreated to my shed to check emails and to write letters, where I was joined by an intrusive rose and an inquisitive caterpillar. A strange feeling of being immersed in nature.

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Having written my letters I headed for the post office trying not to hear the noise of drilling and banging. I caught a glimpse of a disembowelled boiler. I hurried on. to my local post box. Mission complete I walked to our village cafe and order a take away bacon and egg baguette, returning home to eat lunch in the shed and quench my thirst with a bottle of water. My head is really aching now but I start to play with my jewelry making kit. Not a success but I had a chance to practice skills and find out about the medium of wax. By the time the crew started to pack up I was napping on the swing seat. At this point I went to see what had been done during the day. It was impressive but there is still loads more to do. Below are some pictures of progress to date.

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We wave the crew farewell and return our cars to the drive ready to start all over again tomorrow. An easy evening meal of pizza as I write the blog for the day. I’m hoping for an early night.