Slogging on

Elanor gave me a delicious bottle of Oz Cab Sauv for my birthday; it went very well with the rump steak last night, but may be why our sleep was a bit on and off…

Mind you, it was quality wine, there was no sign of a sore head this morning. Actually, wondering when or if Dunelm are going to get round to delivering the stuff we’ve ordered from them didn’t help in the wee small hours. We’ve decided that if they haven’t got the act together by Monday, we’ll have to cancel the online orders and on Monday or Tuesday get Graeme to drive his nice big car to the Derby store and we’ll buy it directly.

It’s so frustrating; the goods are both attractively designed and a reasonable price, but it looks as if their stock control and order fulfilment lets them down. When all the present stress is over I will a) take and publish some photos of the completed interior and b) do a systematic review of the suppliers we’ve used and the quality of their service.

Today, the Ocado order arrived bang on time (it’s using Ocado that’s spoiled us for all these less competent on-line stores, of course). We’d not long stored it away and settled to a cup of coffee when Elanor arrived. We all drove round to the lodge and put away the things that the two women bought yesterday.

After lunch and a quick zizz, Sheila and I had a meeting with Jules who manages the lettings and Kath who runs the cleaning team, during which we got through most of the minutiae of the handover procedures. We now have to generate some promotional text to go on the website; I’ll need to get my blurb generator running for that tomorrow.

Since getting back to the boat we’ve tried to order some patio furniture from Tesco.com, but the one we decided we liked, a set of two chairs and a small round table, only had one set in stock and of course we needed two…

I’ll try again over the weekend, I guess.

Since then, we’ve been quietly drinking tea and reading, trying to relax a bit after all the dashing about.