Lovely time

 We've had an absolutely lovely couple of days away, it's done us both good.  The days were sunny and warm enough to sit outside, the nights however - well, the early hours of the morning to be precise - were blimmin freezing.  I'd forgotten just how cold it can get in an old caravan that has no central heating and only single glazed windows.  We have an electric fire in the lounge and electric oil-filled radiators in the bedrooms, but it was still really cold - frosty and -1 deg outside early mornings (I know for some of my overseas readers that's quite mild!!).  Oh, and the electric fire has developed problems - it has 3 heat settings but now 2 of them don't work, only the lowest one does!  Good job we have plenty of blankets in the van.  Husband doesn't know how to fix the fire (or even if it can be fixed) so we'll probably buy another - that one was second hand anyway, it only cost us £30 and has lasted 2 years, so we can't complain.

One of our neighbours on the upper level was there, so caught up with them, there were quite a few owners on the lower level.  I also spent a couple of hours chatting in the lovely sunshine yesterday with the site owner and his partner and their lovely Labradoodle Molly, such a nice-natured friendly dog.  She's very old now, 14.5 yrs, partially sighted and half deaf and has heart problems, so probably won't be around much longer, her owners will be heartbroken when she goes.

We discovered a very small patch of damp in the corner of the ceiling in the back bedroom of the van.  I asked our caravan engineer friend for advice and we followed his suggestions, husband was up a stepladder (with me firmly holding the bottom part and keeping an eye on him) this morning cleaning off the roof and gutter and applying the recommended flashing sticky tape.  The damp patch inside actually doesn't feel damp, it appears dry (we assume it happened over the winter sometime).....in a few weeks when hopefully it will be completely dry, we'll paint over it, we have plenty of the paint we used to decorate left.  If our friend pops over in the meantime, he can test it for us with his professional damp meter.

Some of our plants in pots there don't look like they've survived the harsh winter, so I'll get some more.  We're intending to go back and stay for a longer time in a couple of weeks, our lovely van neighbours C & J will be going then also.  We don't really want to go for Easter weekend, we know it'll be busy there, several families with children are going and it'll be a bit noisy - it was busy and noisy Easter last year, I think, I'm pretty sure we were there at that time.

Got back home just before lunchtime today, after unpacking the car and putting things away (only took 20 mins or so) and having a quick lunch, we went shopping to stock up on frozen stuff, as we've been eating through the freezer food and have plenty of room in the big freezer now.  We went to Iceland Food Warehouse, it's pensioner discount day on Tuesdays, 10% off - every little helps!  I stocked up on fish, frozen veg and some pork steaks, chicken and a couple of small meat joints for husband.  We've been to the surgery and collected our prescriptions and sorted things out with the receptionist - the mysterious phone call husband had was made in error, as I guessed.  I didn't ask about the registering as an official carer thing, I'll wait until we find out the results of husband's memory assessment on Thursday.  He's not been grumpy or verbally aggressive since I had a word with him about it a couple of weeks ago, so I think it was just a case of him worrying, understandably.  His memory is still shot to pieces though, no change there.  I hope the tests get to the bottom of it, not knowing what is causing it is worrying in itself.  We'll soon know though and can then begin to deal with it.

That lovely bungalow we saw that ticks all our boxes, other than being over an hour away from all our friends here, still hasn't been let, so we're still sort of in the running for it.  There are several people with greater eligibility than us in front of us in the queue though, so it's unlikely we'd get it.  I'm still feeling ambivalent about it.....if only I could pick it up and move it nearer here!