I got up and put the last of the garden gnomes through the dishwasher. Before I re-paint them they all needed a clean and going at them with a wire brush seemed a tad harsh. I thought the pressure washer might do the trick, but yesterday I struck on the (frankly genius) idea of sticking them through the dishwasher. Gnomes and dishy have all survived the ordeal. I put the gnomes outside to dry out and remembered the gnomes we had when I was a lad.
My dad used to make his own garden gnomes (from moulds) and paint them, and they were so good that they all got stolen. I wonder if the gnome painting skill is hereditary?
Over brekkie I peered into the Internet to see that I’ve been upgraded to the all-new Facebook. Several people have been grumbling about it, and I wasn’t pleased to see that the change is not optional. But after five minutes it strikes me that the only difference is that the whole thing seems to have a larger font size.
I also saw there was a new geocache not that far from work. To find it you need to solve a puzzle which looks to be ridiculously complicated. Why do people set these things? If you don’t want people to find your geocache (which clearly the hider of this one does not) why hide it at all?
With not a lot else going on I looked at the monthly accounts. Not too shabby. I could be a whole lot worse off. I would like to be a whole lot better off, but that is just greed.
Amazingly the credit card people still haven’t billed me for the hospital car parking last Christmas, the Smargard I bought from Munzee, some Lego from Bricklink and two e-books I bought from Amazon. Each on its own wasn’t much, but together that’s thirty quid’s worth of stuff I would seem to have got for free.
As I counted pennies there was quite a lot of noise from not-so-nice-next-door. Only a couple of days ago she told me she is too poor to afford to repair the broken fence, and today she had all the rear windows of her house replaced.
The people doing the work are going to give me a quote to have my rear gutters and facias done.
We got the dogs leaded up and went for our first proper walk since we came home from holiday. Down to Orlestone Woods. We had a good walk… we walked round the woods, the dogs didn’t run off, we only met one other person and had no “episodes”… a good walk.
Once home I popped up to the corner shop. They’ve taken to baking fresh croissants and pastries every day and they go well with a cuppa. Today I came home with pain au chocolat which were rather tasty.
We then set off to Hastings for the main business of the day. I have (had) two brothers-in-law called “Michael”. One died a couple of weeks ago.
I first met Big Mike in 1982. I can’t pretend I warmed to him. There is a lot I could say about him. I wrote quite a bit, and deleted it. It would be wrong of me to list his various crimes and failings; we are all human. I will just say that despite having been on many family camping trips with his brother over the years, I’ve probably only seen him twice in the last twenty years (one family wedding, his father’s funeral) and had I walked past him in the street I doubt we would have recognised each other.
Today was his funeral.
It went well… so I am told. The rest of the family have posted on Facebook saying what a lovely service it was. But I must admit that where everyone else (not that there were many there) was in tears, I was quietly seething. Like so many before him, he was christened a Catholic, he hadn’t been anywhere near the church for decades, and once dead the Catholic priest crawled out of some hole to claim his soul. The service started with my sister in law giving a rather good eulogy, and then this priest came on and blathered platitudes. To try to ingratiate himself he kept dropping names of family and friends… it was a shame he didn’t mention the deceased’s brother or sister.
(Exactly the same happened when my grandmother died – no one even knew she was Catholic until the priest showed up)
After the service the close family went up to father-in-law’s grave where we had a little “us time”. I can’t claim that we have the closest of families, but it was good to spend a few minutes together.
Pausing only briefly to cadge a cuppa off of my mum we came home. As we drove my phone rang. My brother had spotted us passing through Rye.
I’ve made a start on painting those gnomes…
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