Monday 13 Mar 2023: Snow!

It carried on snowing through Thursday night and was really deep by Friday morning, so I actually spent a lot of time looking at and photrographing the snow too. The dog wanted to go and run through it all but he kept on getting stuck, so the poet went out and cleared a path for him… Needless to say, the dog didn’t stick to the paths! The cat went out to have a look at it a few times but didn’t rate it so she kept coming back in. It was so thick Friday morning we didn’t think we’d be able to take the cat to the vet, but a delivery driver said that the roads outside the village and even some of the roads around the village were clear, so we bided our time.

When I wasn’t admiring the snow, Friday was mostly catching up on editing. It was also about doing my weekly computer scan and backup. By early afternoon the sun had come out and was melting all of the snow. And at 3:45pm the cat went to the vet (and got the all clear). Aside from taking the cat to the vet, other jobs we finally did last week were registering with the local doctor and updating the dog’s microchip information. Losing the cat for a week was a massive reminder for us to do that. (And the cat was finally chipped on her first visit to the vet last week.)

We didn’t do the shopping on Friday night because I’m still reading up about the blood sugar diet and the fast 800 diet. (Both by the same author.) We don’t have high blood sugar, so I don’t think we need to look at that, but the science is interesting and as both diets are based on the Mediterranean diet, we’re going to give that part a go. First of all, however, we had to clear the cupboards of all the high-carb high-sugar stuff… And I don’t mean chuck it out.

So I settled down and created a meal plan for this week based on what we have in the cupboards, fridge and freezer, so we can use them all up. Saturday’s shopping list was a lot shorter than usual, but there were a few other extras that we threw in, such as the new gig bag the poet bought me to take to gigs because none of my handbags (which I don’t use very often) is big enough for everything: my phone, his phone, my glasses case, his glasses case, car keys, his asthma medication, a hairbrush, pocket hankies, and everything else that usually goes in a handbag. Apart from makeup. I don’t carry makeup because I very rarely use it, and the poet certainly doesn’t use it.

The snow was just lingering in the edges in and around our village on Saturday morning, but it was all but gone everywhere else. We’re a lot higher than the surrounding villages and towns, so we had more snow. (Yay! Finally cracked it!) We did the shopping, came home, had something to eat, collected the dog, and went to visit the mother-in-law.

On Sunday we cleared a massive job that we’ve literally been humping around with us for about six years: we purged the household filing. I sat on the hall floor (it’s a big, wide hall) surrounded by suspension files and their contents plus piles in subject order and one massive pile of rubbish. The poet cleared a drawer in his desk area and proceeded to check the existing files, adding anything we didn’t need to the rubbish pile while I shredded. The shredder ground to a halt twice due to over-heating, so some of the paper went straight into the incinerator. The filing used to be in a wide drawer in an old desk we had in the dining room. Now it’s been reduced to around two-thirds so it fits in a narrower drawer.

We still have lots of other big jobs to do, such as dental and optician appointments and finding a hairdresser (for me, the poet shaves his head now). The change of address form is waiting to be posted to the driving license people but I still have my pensions and the trust account I manage with my sister to update my address on. I tried to find the trust account details at the weekend (hence the file-purge) but failed and when I rang them up they said I had to write them a letter with as many details as I could remember. Fortunately, my sister came to the rescue this morning with the details. (She’s been out of the country and didn’t have access to it before now.)

The poet’s been mastering a couple of songs for his son’s band and he’s writing a new song too, so when we weren’t clearing rubbish he was working on those.

Today I have more editing to do. I have one book to proofread and consolidate proofreader’s amendments with the author’s and my amendements, and I have another to finish hard-copy editing so I can do the screen edit. In between I’ll be looking into this post, 6 Habits of $100K Freelancers, from my blog buddy Lori at Words on the Page.

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