Taster session and our new baby

Today I am starting a 3-day taster session of being at home alone, in preparation for Mr H. moving to Scotland next weekend.   Today he is driving up to his apartment in Dalrymple (Ayrshire) with his brother, to take up the large furniture; luckily he has a friend with a Transporter van so has borrowed that rather than having to hire one.   He'll be home on Sunday night so here I am alone!   Although today I will be barely alone as I have 3 friends visiting at various times including one who is taking me out this evening.

Some achievements of the last 12 hours, all things that until 27 June I'd taken for granted as easy, everyday tasks:

• Hanging up the washing! we have one of those ceiling airing racks on a pulley. It was hard one-legged and one-handed, but possible!
• Cooked tea for myself and Mr H. while he was out sorting out vans etc. Not difficult, but tiring.
• Earlier in the afternoon I dyed my hair (no, the red isn't natural! that would be brown and grey); I thought rinsing it off would be tricky but managed it in the shower without turning myself and all the surroundings 'Red Passion'
• I've asked a friend to take Django out for a walk tomorrow or Saturday!  OK it was easy for a one-off ask; I'm sure I'll get used to it...  Although he is an English Pointer and can run for miles, now he is 10 1/2 he does not need a long walk every day and we have plenty of garden for him to mooch around in, so every couple of days is fine.  Once I am better and fit again, he is going to get such long walks, it is the thing I miss the most.

Django asleep in the small sunny spot

Our new baby..
On Wednesday, Mr H. left at 5am to drive up to Wales to look at a Transporter van, and bought it; he will collect it next week.  Now that the market is flooded with these vehicles, we thought it would be easy to find a replacement for ours, but there is such a huge variation in configurations, options and modificiations that we discovered that they were either too basic or too expensive; or blinged excessively (they have become popular in the surfing culture). Hence the long drive to find a suitable one. Even so it has 20" alloys instead of the standard 16", which is a bit much for us, not to mention tyres at £200 each...!  so they will come off as soon as we can find a suitable replacement.

This one is manual gearbox, and has no rear seats at present but they can be added later if we want them.

Something our friends will notice is that it is the same colour as the previous one, purely coincidental.   We wondered if some people might think this odd and that we wouldn't want one the same colour, but in our minds it was our friend. It saved our lives and if anything it will be comforting and feel like a bit of normality has returned.

We will get back windows put in next year, otherwise I will have no idea how close I am to anything when parking!

Now, it is 8.30am so I supposed I'd better sort myself out some breakfast! ;-)