Keeping busy

Last Friday, we had a great day with the grandchildren, A and her brother,J.

J is starting to walk a little ... only short distances at present. He tends
to get about more with a fast crawl. I showed how to kick a small ball,
carrying him with his feet slightly off the carpet, and swinging him a little
to gently kick the ball. I'm pleased to say that a short while later, he
started to dribble the ball by himself. (Well, I did refer to him as "J the
dribbler" in a recent post).

We had a long day with them (9 and a half hours), keeping them occupied /
entertained, and fed & watered, etc., so we both felt quite tired after
their mum had collected them at tea-time.

Saturday: I spent a good part of the day fitting new parts to our micro-
chip cat flap. The locking mechanism had seized up, so that the cat flap
was only working one-way .... our cats could get out of the house, but
couldn't get back in.

As it was still under guarantee, we were sent replacement parts by
Petporte. I spent 4-5 hours getting the defective bits out, and putting
the new bits inside ... about twice the time it takes to put together
flat-pack furniture sold by a well known Swedish/Dutch company. Ideally
PP should have provided full illustrations of what to do (with detailed
photographs) ... fortunately, I'd taken several close-up photos of the
entire internal mechanism, before I took it apart, which were a great
help to me in putting all back together again.

I spent the rest of the day, finishing off my marathon computer back-up,
and then installing Avira's Antivir, which appears to be working well.

I spent part of today training our cats to come back into the house
again, via the cat-flap, instead of through our patio door. I spent a lot
of time this evening encouraging Slayer to come back in ... she eventually
came in at about 8pm.

Mrs C made some delicious marmalade, which we sampled this evening on some
freshly made bread (with malted grains in it) ... yummy. There's nothing
quite like the taste of home-made marmalade ... the closest taste to it
is Frank Cooper's Oxford Marmalade, which is my favourite one otherwise.

This afternoon, we settled down in front of the TV to watch "Sunshine
Cleaning", which is mainly about the relationship of two sisters,
brilliantly acted by Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. Here's a link to the
IMDb website, if you'd like to know more.

A few things coming up this week ....

Sort out the wi-fi internet connectivity (for a talk I'm giving soon
for the charity I work for)
Find/replace my missing car handbook (missing since the car service
and MOT)
Find the code for our car radio (radio needs resetting after the car
battery was temporarily disconnected during the service)
Phone our boiler man, to ask him to fit a new pair of thermistors
Phone our roofer (to see to one of our drains, the downpipe and the
ridge tiles
Choose some photos for online printing (with Mrs C)
Give a talk on Flickr this Thursday (slide show finished last night)
Meeting up with friends tomorrow (jamming with electric guitars)
Committee meeting on Tuesday (for my charity)
Check out gas & electricity prices on online comparison sites (and make
a change in provider if necessary)
Review our cash ISAs, some of which are earning piddling amounts of interest.
Phone our holiday company (to ask about an admin matter)

By the way, we'll have the grandchildren with us all day on Friday.

There are a few more things on my list for this week, which I won't
bore you with (I'm unlikely to find time to do them anyway)