Today...

Today, I got up quite late for me, at 7.45am (I usually
get up around 6.30am after about 6 hours' sleep). The
sun got up rather late too ... very hazy to start with, but
later on we had brilliant cool sunshine with a little cloud.
Ideal to get out a walk.

And get out for a walk, I did. First of all, a 45 minute walk
to my NHS dentist ... the inner edge of one of my gold crowns
had sheared off when I was eating something crunchy the other
day, leaving a sharp rough edge and what felt like a large
hole at the side (a tiny hole in reality, but they feel huge,
don't they?). Anyway, Mandi said the tooth was basically OK,
she smoothed off the rough edges, gave my teeth their annual
check plus a scale and polish, and all for £16.20. A private
dentist would have charged £50 plus.

So another walk back, following which I made some fresh coffee,
and spent an hour or so, polishing up my next IT presentation,
"All about (digital) photos" ~ downloading them from your
camera and organising them (and your folders), plus looking
at Vista's Windows Photo Gallery (which I think is brilliant).

Mrs C made some gorgeous soup (onion, squash and sweet potato),
which we had for lunch with some home-made bread. Afterwards,
we both went for a brisk walk around the Arboretum ~ Mrs C left
me there while I took some photos, to do a little food shopping.

I carried on taking some photos of the beautiful beech trees
in the area ... the beech trees are just starting to lose their
leaves (in contrast to most other trees like the horse-chestnuts,
which are bald already).

Swept up some leaves at the front of the house, made us a pot of
tea, and started doing the veg for tea (a mountain of kale, in
addition to the carrots, sprouts and potato) which I cooked and
served up later with some vegetarian sausage and home-made
tomato sauce. We follow an Abel and Cole recipe for the kale ..
fry up a little onion and garlic in a wok with some sunflower
oil, add a mountain of finely chopped kale plus some added water,
stir-fry and steam the kale for abt 15 mins. Serve with a sprinkle
of lemon juice. Very nice.

Am now blogging while videoing the film: "Howard's End". Will watch
part 3 of the cop show: "The Commander", where the newborn son of
the detective sergeant is abducted (which is just part of the
ongoing saga). I'll record part 2 of "Picture Book" on BBC4, and
later: "Medium" (Mrs C likes this, I don't) and we'll watch tonight's
episode of "Little Dorrit" on "catch-up" tomorrow.

I'll spend a few minutes getting one of two photos onto this blog,
before doing the washing up.