After a couple of busy weeks visiting friends, camping & exploring in Yorkshire and entertaining my lovely sister and her husband, this week has been pretty quiet. All we’ve done this week, it seems, is move from one venue to another attempting to collect some inoculations. Jabs, jabs, jabs!
I have to confess, we had a few glitches in our effort to get injected but, in the end, we’ve collected our quota and can look forward to surviving another winter. Monday morning we trotted off to our local pharmacy in Woodford Halse in anticipation of our Covid jabs. Oops! Sorry, you’re not eligible as you’re not 75. I queried why the online booking system had (a) contacted us to encourage us to make a booking and (b) accepted all our details and booked our appointments if we weren’t, in fact, eligible. The doctor providing the injections simply explained that it was, to use a technical term, a “cock-up!”
Penny was able to secure a flu jab (I had received mine the previous Saturday) but we were told we needed to get our Covid jabs privately, assuming we wanted one. So, home we trot to see what we could find.
When we got home, I checked the NHS eligibility criteria once again – I am entitled to an NHS jab. One has to be 75 by January so I just scrape in. Another year older and another year closer to the grave!
So, we book Penny an appointment in Northampton for Wednesday afternoon and one for me at the same pharmacy in Woodford for an NHS appointment in the morning. Mine goes splendidly smoothly – in, roll your sleeve up, jab, out. Hers went a little bit less smoothly – no vaccine at the pharmacy. Oops! They promised to phone us when the vaccine came in and we duly had a phone call on Friday morning – was Penny able to come in that afternoon? She was and she did. We’re now completely vaxxed up – take that RFK!
Not much else this week. We have started on some renovation work in Penny’s Workroom/Daisy’s Room. Penny wanted to remove one set of cupboards to give her a bit more space with just some hanging cupboards and her old, faithful & trusty map chest underneath. This is intended to coincide with some electrical work we need doing to tidy up the mangled spaghetti of electrical cables and devices which currently perch precariously on her conveniently positioned window sill.
The cupboards came out without too much difficulty only to expose some cracked and crumbling plaster – this corner has suffered from some water damage in the past. So, now we need to find a plasterer before we can get the electrician back in. With the availability of plasterers pretty stretched, we may be lucky to get this all finished off before the new year! Happy Christmas.
We’ve had, what for us constitutes some pretty decent autumn colour this year – a combination of the wet spring and a hot, dry summer so they say. I don’t think Northamptonshire is going to surpass New England for fall foliage but at least our fledgling Liquidambar styraciflua is showing us how bright & colourful it can be.
Nick and I are off the American football in London this afternoon to see the Rams and the Jaguars play at Wembley. I’ve been to the football once before and it’s always a good day out. Weather does not look great but we should be under cover. Go Rams!
And how about those Dodgers?
And, I think that’s it about it for this week!
Meanwhile, keep breathing, keep happy, keep smiling, keep exercising, be good, be careful, and keep safe. And be gentle to wasps and bees – we need all the pollinators we can get.
Lots of love to you all,
Greg