Grandma P's Ramblings Through Life

It has been a strange sort of Sunday!
With heavy rain and strong winds for much of the day we obviously didn't get up and go to find a car boot sale.
We have worked on preparing the next batch of 40 items for EBay. Everything is photographed, thanks to Bill and I have jotted down some of the main things that are needed for the descriptions.
Tomorrow I will start to describe and hopefully will have all 40 ready for when we get back from the Isle of Wight.
During the morning we watched The Great North Run - lucky Newcastle had clear blues skies for the event.
Thousands and thousands ran the half marathon.
There were so many sad stories and also stories of courage - all leading to money being raised for many charities.
One affected me quite deeply - especially after a spell last night of feeling sorry for myself.
A man was running today with his nurse. The nurse felt she should be there. This man is still being treated for cancer and the radiotherapy has burned his neck severely both inside and out. His gullet has been destroyed and he can no longer eat or drink. All his nutrients have to be fed through a tube sticking out from his stomach.
Imagine a world with no eating! Imagine no sociable meals with friends and family!
How dare I feel sorry for myself?
In fact I soon turned last night's moodiness around again. I had been looking back to this time last year and yearning for a life without a stoma and bags.
Then I recalled that this time last year I had an aggressive cancer and pain.
I am much better off now.

The reason for my introspection is because I have a problem, which may or may not be one to be concerned about. There is deep blue bruising around the stoma.
I am seeing the stoma care nurse on Tuesday. I have been putting this off because I really will feel anxious about having to change the bag in unfamiliar surroundings. But it will be at Crawley hospital - so if I fail then we are very close to home and the security of my own surroundings.
This led me to browse the internet for a while and I have found the Urostomy Penpals site.
It has been interesting to read of other's experiences and I have sent an EMail to somebody in the USA who asked about bruising.

There has been further aimless browsing whilst talking with Ashley, who had been playing around with Facebook.
I don't really understand how to get the best out of Facebook and although I signed up for it, I haven't used it.
With Ashley's help, I found some parts which were quite fun.
There is a group attached to the school that I taught at for quite a while and which J & A attended.
So, if you are reading this and have suddenly been asked to be my facebook friend, its because Ashley encouraged me!

So, it has been an aimless day - but things have been done.
And just like Mo - I have been attempting to enlarge the Roman Empire! And failing! Its that computer game again!
But I can beat the novices who play Scrabble!

Goodnight.

I am doing the blog fairly early in the day.
Nothing much has happened today and very little more will happen.

I feel run down; I wish I knew how to spell the word that Ekatarina used to describe how she felt today....... "ergh" sort of does it!
I don't feel too bad - but very tired and very "ergh".

Nevertheless I got up quite early, and Bill and I went to the car boot sale at Faygate.
It was cold - there was a hint of frost on the grass this morning.
It might be the last one there for this season. There were not very many stalls.
I bought a couple of Austrian maps for selling on EBay and also 2 books, including the Ladybird book on How to Crochet.
And there is now a jar of Eastern chutney in the cupboard, made by a regular cooking lady.

Since then it has been hard to do much.
Bill was busy though - and now he feels rather "ergh".
He finished off the heater service and then needed to vacuum out all the heater vents and so he went round the house with the cleaner.
This afternoon he has been preparing a lamp for the shop and some old Post office letter weighing scales.
He has just sold a lamp in the shop and decided that the one we have had for years could also go. We picked it up from the rubbish dumped in Bill's parents' next door neighbour's garden after they emigrated to Canada. That was in the early 1970's.
The scales he bought in from a lady at the shop. He has made them look really attractive.
He could photograph them and I can share these things with you tomorrow.

I have done vegetables and dinner. We have a goulash with potatoes, carrots and cabbage. I am sure there will be left overs. I don't have the energy to eat very much.
We will settle down in the warm and watch Saturday night TV.

The weather turned to rain here at about midday. It is going to get worse over the next 24 hours.
In North Wales Ecky says it has been raining very much and they even had "major hail storms".

I will finish with a few pictures for the family to enjoy of young Felix in Jenny's garden yesterday afternoon.

There are a few photos in my camera - but there they will stay until tomorrow.

The day has been good - and then suddenly I joined a succession of people who were hit by the bug.
I am presuming it is not a major bug - hopefully a 24 hour thing. That's what Jo reported after something similar last weekend.

This morning Bill and I went into town and we bought the curtains we want for the kitchen/dining room.
We still need to get a pole to hang them on.

This afternoon Bill stayed home and put some spare parts which had arrived into our heating system. It seems it was a complicated job.
I went over to Ifield to see Ruth and Jenny and of course Felix and Otto.
I fed Otto - a rare treat for me.
Ruth has an infection at the moment which is making feeding Otto herself not practical every time.
Then I played in the garden with Felix.
During the afternoon Jenny suddenly said she was beginning to feel an overwhelming feeling that a bug had arrived - maybe the same stomach thing that Felix has had.
Before I left Ruth was saying the same thing.

I was fine and then at about half past six I knew I suddenly felt it too.
I didn't eat much dinner and I shall go to bed very soon.

So, that's it for today.
Goodnight.

Today has been just one of those days.
The sun has shone a bit - though it has felt quite chilly. But I haven't felt able to settle to anything much. I feel tired, listless and crabby.
Shame - yesterday was good and I have nothing to feel crabby about.
It was just one of those days!

So it has been good to look back on a happy day in Wales with Pete and Jean.
We went to the seaside at Llanbedrog.


Beautiful!

I interrupt the trip to Wales because today has been good and full and interesting - and very satisfying.
The wind was very blustery but there has been lots of sunshine.

The first very satisfying part of the day were the results of Bill's recent blood test. There is nothing sinister about Bill's prostate problems - nothing more than commonly occurs to men as they get older. So, the nasty tests which might have been the next step can be forgotten. He just continues to take the tablets.

Our next mission was to go and look at "vinyl sisal" carpeting - you might think those words just do not go together.
The carpet shop was in the village of Nutfield - and sold beautiful floor coverings. The vinyl sisal was no exception.
The lady there was most friendly and helpful.
But the result was that we realised that this flooring option was way beyond our means - £45 a square metre, plus VAT!
And the friendly lady told us that any tiles already on the floor would have to be removed and the concrete base prepared.
I think we could have had new flooring for about £1500!!!!
So - mission accomplished.
We enjoyed a short stroll in the village - the photos will appear after my words.

We stopped for lunch in Horley - back to Wetherspoons for chilli con carne and rice for me and meat balls and spaghetti for Bill. We had money off vouchers for these meals. Bill even had enough tokens for a free coffee.
We did a bit of shopping in Lidls whilst in Horley.

On the way home Bill suggested we look at carpet tiles - a good idea, but he suggested Homebase! They had a poor selection and it is just one of those places where I really hate to be.
I then suggested we look in B & Q. I can't explain the difference between these 2 stores - but I feel comfortable in B & Q.
They had a good selection - and included exactly the carpet tiles I would like. Bill is sure he can lay the carpet tiles himself. He can take his time and I know it will feel more satisfying to him.
We then saw a rug. We have long had a rug at the kitchen end of the room; the present one was from a boot sale and I love it, but it is getting tatty. The rug we saw in the shop was perfect, couldn't be better.
I felt anxious - supposing this is the only one and they get no more.
In the end we had to order one - a good day to do it because it is 10% off for "old" people on Wednesdays.
We will go an order the carpet tiles next Wednesday.
I am so satisfied to have sorted out the flooring so quickly and easily.
And of course I have already seen the curtains we want in T J Hughes.
I can now picture the "new" kitchen rather better and I like what I see.

Now for some of the pictures we took in Nutfield.
It is situated along the sandstone ridge.
Nutfield stretches a short way along the busy A25, with some large lorries trundling through. That is a shame.
But there are some pretty little cottages on the main road - the grander Victorian mansions are dotted all around.

It was 9 days ago now that we climbed Bangor Mountain and enjoyed the view on a wonderful, sunny autumn morning.

Orme Road......home to Ashley, Liz and Ekatarina.
It is also home for many students these days. When the houses were first built they were for the workers in the slate mines.
I have just been exploring the interweb and found tales of a fisherman ghost in Orme Road! I wonder if he still is in residence.
There is a Welsh name of course - but I forget it.

The Welsh Monkland home is at the lower end of the road, just a short distance from the shore of the Menai Strait, with Anglesey beyond.

Last Saturday we walked from Church Island to walk underneath the Menai Bridge, which is the old road bridge which joins the mainland of Wales with Anglesey.
I read that the building of the bridge cut the journey time from London to Holyhead from 36 hours to 27 - that would be actual travelling time for there would have needed to be overnight stops on the way. We can do it now in 6 hours.

Information below is taken from Wikipedia. I doubt that the links work - but then anybody can read Wikipedia or other sites without my help.

Oh yes they do!


The strait is bridged in two places - the main A5 road is carried over the strait by Thomas Telford's elegant iron suspension bridge, the first of its kind, opened in January 1826, and adjacent to this is Robert Stephenson's 1850 Britannia Tubular Bridge. Originally this carried rail traffic in two wrought-iron rectangular box spans, but after a disastrous fire in 1970, which left only the limestone pillars remaining, it was rebuilt as a steel box girder bridge.


First we have 2 pictures of Britannia Bridge, taken from Church island.






Then we got closer to the Menai Bridge.

Last Saturday we walked across the causeway to Ynys Tysilio - St. Tysilio's Island. St. T was a 6th century Welsh saint who lived as hermit on the island.
The present church was built in the 1400s.