Getting busier

14th & 15th December

We’ve had a mixed couple of days, though much more good than bad. Yesterday, we did one of our trips down to Poynton and both topped up the food stocks and looked for some of the final presents we need for the forthcoming Saturnalia.

This bit wasn’t entirely successful in that we didn’t actually find any of the presents we were looking for, but overall it was still a successful trip. Taking the bus back meant that we arrived just before lunch, so that everything was packed away before we settled down to soup and sandwiches.

Graeme and Cathy have asked for iTunes vouchers, and we thought it might be possible to pick those up at the checkout in Morrison’s. There was indeed a pack of vouchers there but unfortunately the checkout operator wasn’t sure how to ring them up and had to call the supervisor.

There then followed a surreal ten minutes whilst the supervisor firstly tried to check out the pack of vouchers, didn’t manage to do so and disappeared off with them to get advice. She failed to return, leaving us standing there with the checkout queue lengthening behind us and the operator occasionally wittering gently to himself.

In the end we paid the bill for our groceries and left without the vouchers. Although irritated, we weren’t too worried as we knew we could buy them online through the iTunes store and even print them out on our own printer.

That is, we thought we could, but there was a problem with the connection to the store and it kept rejecting my credit card. I’ve had an e-mail exchange with a nice guy somewhere in the world (from the tone of his e-mails I suspect California), and the glitch was sorted by lunchtime today. Looking at the discussion forums, this seems to be not uncommon with iTunes v9 so if it happens to you just get straight on to Apple support.

Yesterday afternoon passed quietly after all this excitement. I spent a bit of time dealing with the iTunes complaint, e-mailing a complaint to Morrison’s, for which I’ve had an apology, and buying the DAB radio for Sanity Again.

My health has been a bit of a theme today. The good news is that my shoulder is loads better, and I’m hopeful that my next physio appointment will be my last. However, a large mole that I’ve had on my cheekbone for donkeys’ years was really itching yesterday and when I got up this morning it had started bleeding.

I think that I’d probably scratched the itch in the night and caused the bleeding, but with all these scary leaflets around concerning the dangers of skin cancer, especially for folk like us who spend a lot of time outdoors, neither Sheila nor I felt very happy about it. Moles that suddenly change their behaviour are one of the things that could be bad news.

So I used the internet to check on the nearest GP surgery and walked down there. I’ve got an appointment to see a GP tomorrow morning, which isn’t bad for a walk in to a strange surgery. Needless to say, the mole has promptly settled down.

We popped in to the boatyard today, just to check for post, and found that the chairs for Sanity Again had arrived a day early. Susan promptly made us a cup of coffee whilst we checked that all the packages were there, which they were.

During this, the couple who are buying Braidbar number 123 turned up to sign their contract, so it was pleasant to have a chance to meet them and have a chat about common interests (partly toilets).

We’re looking forward to a quiet evening and then a busy few days. Tomorrow is my GP appointment and a visit to the Post Office to despatch Christmas parcels, then on Thursday it’s into Marple for shopping and physio. Friday we’ll be back at Poynton to check out progress on Sanity Again (lots of it this week) and then on Monday we are towing the shell for number 121.