My life recently is contained neatly in just five categories: LTRP, Badminton, Garden, Buddhism, and Work. I don't think there's much else gone on in the past week except eating and sleeping. Note that Music and Running do not feature - Music starts again in September, but Running may never make a further appearance. Holidays, Camping and Travel are imminent though - I'm looking forward to several trips coming up soon.
LTRP
I met the kitchen man Ylf again, hopefully for the last time. I have selected and specified everything I can think of - plinths (I do love that word), units, doors, handles, worktops, 'upstand' (where the worktop extends a little way up the wall), 1 hob, 2 ovens, 2 sinks, 2 taps, 2 draining board arrangements, 1 dishwasher. I'm keeping my current fridge/freezer and washing machine. Ylf has provided a floor plan, a final quotation, and some computer-generated pictures of how it might look.
Meanwhile I have approved Ulf's chosen LVT (Luxury Vinyl Tile) supplier and he has partly broken down his quotation for me. We will have to talk more because (a) his quote for the flooring was supposed to be cheaper than the alternative Karndean but it isn't, (b) Ylf not Ulf needs to be responsible for the whole kitchen installation because Ulf doesn't have a fitter for my preferred worktop, and (c) I still don't have an overall comprehensive picture of what Ulf will be doing and how much it will cost. However, at this stage I can probably construct this for him, which is what I may do to save time.
As you can imagine, every other aspect of the LTRP is on hold until the kitchen project is done, except for trying to sell various unwanted white goods and the terracotta wine rack with capacity for thirty bottles that has never held more than about five. I'm not even thinking about what could be done next, although when the stairs are replaced (part of Ulf's quote) perhaps it will be time to consider the upstairs hall... so maybe I am thinking about what could be done next.
Badminton
Always evolving, my Monday club now only has three female members. I'm there for the full two hours every week without fail, and another lady regularly comes but for only one hour because she has childcare issues. The third lady turns up once in a while and swears that this time she will keep coming every week, then we don't see her again for months. So I spend a lot of time playing with the boys, which is fine, but it would be nice to have more women.
I tried to arrange a summer barbeque for the club. When will I learn? They all encourage me by saying what a good idea it is and won't it be fun, so I set a date and time and place and construct a welcoming and enthusiastic email, and just three people respond to say they can come, one of whom is bringing a child. So we abandon the BBQ and I book an Indian restaurant which turns out to be unsuitable for the mother/child combo and has to be un-booked, and we go to Pizza Express. At the last minute we did get three more, so there were eight of us in the end. It lashed down with rain throughout, so a good thing we didn't stick with the BBQ idea. And I so rarely get to eat pizza.
Garden
Nasty, thorny, back-breaking, stupid garden. I don't even spend much time sitting in it, not even back when the weather was good. Day 1: I hacked it back by at least a third and left all the debris on the lawn and paving. Day 2: I filled ten bags with non-thorny stuff (wisteria, forsythia, sage, spotted leaf plant whose name escapes me, other one with the scented white flowers), left the rest where it was. Day 3: took ten bags to the tip, returned and filled them again with the remaining thorny stuff (rose, berberis, pyracantha, holly, hawthorn) and more non-thorny stuff, took another ten bags to the tip. Another couple of bags still waiting, and the lawn needs mowing.
When the indoor LTRP is done I'm coming for you, garden. You'd better watch out.
During Day 3 a head popped up over the wall from my neighbour's garden. It is a gardener, who reports that he visits twice a year to hack back my neighbour's plants in much the same way as I hack back my own, except she has a much smaller space with much less in the way of thorns. I invited him to come and attack her overhanging shrubs from my side of the wall, which he did, and I now have his contact details. If this flirtation proceeds to full engagement then he may join the ranks of my named tradesmen, and I may never again have forearms that look as though I have been fighting with cats.
Buddhism
My Thursday badminton club doesn't play over the summer, and the Buddhist Centre in Birmingham has a Thursday night event. So at the beginning of the summer I thought I'd go there on Thursdays, except that I kept finding lots of good reasons not to. My local Tuesday Buddhist group doesn't happen in August either, but eventually I made it to Birmingham last Thursday. Conveniently, they were holding a Bake Off activity so there was a lot of cake, followed by a talk about how baking might complement Buddhist practice which didn't do much for me. But I enjoyed the cake a lot, and met some more new people who were also very pleasant and welcoming. I might even go again on another Thursday.
Work
There is a Health and Well-Being event scheduled for mid-September and aimed at staff at my hospital site, and the Dietitian who used to work in Public Health and 'cardiac prevention' has moved on to Weight Management. So I've been called upon to create the Healthy Eating stand, together with the two part-time ward Dietitians. (Almost immediately, and for reasons that are not connected with the Health and Well-Being event, one of them resigned.) I have made a few phone calls to a couple of organisations and with luck I'll receive a poster or two and some leaflets about fat, fibre, salt etc. in time for the event. It will not be an impressive display, and hopefully someone more competent will be appointed soon so I won't have to do it again.
I've also agreed to do an ante-natal clinic which is my least favourite clinic in the world, and I'm covering another clinic to help out the team because our Team Leader has gone, and I nearly covered another two clinics because of staff unavailability but I wasn't needed in the end. Look at me, volunteering for extra stuff. Maybe I am starting to work a bit harder than before. And my very least favourite patient of all time has decided that I can help him if he sees me on a regular basis, which is sufficient punishment for all my previous sins.
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