Quiet, cold week

I was thinking that everything that had happened this week had been happening in a quiet, cold sort of way.   But I just walked out with the dog, whose paw is now a great deal better, and realised that it’s not the quiet cold week – it’s me.  Without my daily walk I’m dull, or at any rate a lot more dull than I am with my daily walk. 

It was cold yesterday and this morning; not as cold as England but a nasty biting wind cutting through things.     

 

Mike Brewer, Dino, Sue Murby, Richard Murby

 

Wednesday, though, was fine enough to sit out on the terrace and we had a visit from the Murbys whose elderly short legged dog, Dino, is coming to stay with us for a week in May.  He sat happily chewed a hide bone that Dolly has been ignoring for the past four months until she put a stop to this outrage by claiming it back.  Sue Murby is much better than flowers than we are so we walked her round the field to point things out.   In this picture, everyone appears to be asleep over coffee.  They were actually awake and just chose to all look the other way when I got the camera out.

 

Annita Wright, Paula Taylor-Moore, some pears and some asparagus

 

Thursday was Christian’s cooking class involving making sauces loaded with cream and butter.  We do get to eat the stuff that we cook and there were small slices of steak, asparagus and also chocolate loaded pears.   I will never make a proper chef.  Christian showed us how to carefully peel the pears, leaving a bit on round the stalk at the top, and then how to core them by poking them up from the bottom which is a fiddly business.  The thing is, if you peel them completely without leaving a bit on at the top, then  slice them in half and scoop the cores out, they taste just as good and it’s much easier.  So I will never make a proper chef.

 

Yesterday I was helping shift stuff around in the charity shop.  Everything had to be cleared away from the walls and into the middle of the room or into the back room prior to a clean coat of paint being applied.     Very speedy painters, Alan and Mary Rogers, slapped yellow on the walls in the afternoon and the shop is now ready for summer stock.   Perhaps it’s only when you start shifting stuff in a charity shop that you realise what an amazing load of tat is at loose in the world, though we do have some good stuff as well.