Busy weekend, power cuts and a mini exerciser

 Lovely day yesterday, we arrived at the van about 10 am, husband switched on the electricity and water then watered all the pots, whilst I unpacked and put away the bits we'd taken over there and made a coffee.  Friendly neighbours had watered some of our pots so they weren't too bad, other than the 2 pots of Cosmos which were keeling over, they seem to be suffering the most in the heat.  We then did all the deadheading, weeding and tidying up, which took about an hour.  Sat in the sun for a while with a cold drink, then had lunch.  Spent the afternoon catching up with fellow owners and reading in the sun, Betty alternating between lying in the garden and moving indoors to lie in front of the fan.  We left about 4 pm to come home.  One good thing about the current hot dry weather is that the grass doesn't need cutting!  What grass there is left is mostly dead - it will revive in due course, once we have some decent amounts of rain, nature is wonderful.

I made a list of things to stock up on for the next time we go, which will most likely be the middle of next week, we'll nip to the town for Wilko and B&M tomorrow as soon as they open, they're quieter on a Sunday morning before most people have got up.  I've got a few more meals to cook and freeze, so then I'll have a good stock of meals to take to the caravan.  We're planning on staying at the van for a fortnight or perhaps longer, as the weather is forecast to be very good (not so good for the parched gardens, though).  We'll pop home every few days to water the veg and pick up some more meals from the freezer - our van fridge only has a fairly small icebox so we can't fit loads in it.  It's such a boon having the microwave in the van now, I can't think why it didn't occur to me to have one earlier.

We had a couple of minor power cuts yesterday evening, the power was only off for a minute or 2, although apparently nearby villages had outages for a few hours.  We have outages frequently here, probably 1 or 2 in the course of 10 days, they don't generally last long though.  It's a constant amazement to me that we have these frequent power cuts when we live only about 2 miles as the crow flies from a massive nuclear power station - we're so close that we can see all the cranes for the building work that's going on for the new Hinkley Point C from our bedroom windows, and hear the end of shift sirens....at least I think they're for shift changes, not alarms! 😳  So we constantly have to reset all our clocks, landline, etc....well, I say all, there are some I don't bother resetting, only the ones that annoyingly flash.

As my 2nd hand treadmill packed up (and we've come to the conclusion that it's probably not economical to have it repaired), I bought one of those mini pedal exercisers, like a miniature bike but just for your feet.  I get very restless legs in bed at night and figured that whilst I'm sitting relaxing in the evenings (or even when taking a break during the day) I could be using this, so at least I'm getting some exercise still, and burning some calories.  Hopefully, it will help with the restless legs.