Day 887 & Day 888

Today we have two days for the price of one...

Day 887...Tuesday

As Simon was back at work we resumed our shorter early morning walk and did our usual route of 1.9 miles in 37 minutes. My legs definitely felt it for some reason this morning and I was not loving the fact that this route is a tad on the hilly side.

My morning was spent catching up on a few jobs around the house, some cleaning, ironing and bits. I even managed to squeeze in a little jigsaw time before lunch.

After lunch I headed out to meet up with a friend for coffee at a local garden centre which has a lovely cafe called PipTree. It was very busy but we were able to grab a table outside and despite the very grey clouds it was lovely and warm and stayed dry. As a treat we both indulged in a cream tea which is one of my favourite guilty pleasures...although I'm not sure my stomach agrees with me one hundred percent. The effect of adopting a low carb/keto way of eating can sometimes mean that those indulgences don't always still as well digestively speaking as they perhaps once did. A combination of sugars and especially grains can sometimes make for a bit of a grumbly stomach. But we had a lovely couple of hours catching up and putting the world to rights.

Back home and it was time to have a play with our new purchase...a soda stream! Having gotten fed up of not being able to buy sparkling water we have indulged in a soda stream, not something I ever thought we would own but now we do. We won't be adding all the various syrups that are available as we don't drink any sodas of any variety, it will simply be for sparkling water with perhaps some fresh fruit added for a little extra flavour.

Then Simon gave me a quick lesson in 3D printer clean-up! Basically this is taking the printed part and snipping off any support structure and base layers...one of those weirdly addictive jobs!

I even managed another half hour with my jigsaw before I headed down the gym. Tonight it was all about kettle bell and body weight exercises targeting glutes and abs!

Day 888...Wednesday

Up and out again for another early morning walk with very grey skies but still warm and thankfully a breeze which meant it didn't feel as muggy as yesterdays walk had. But it was 1.9 miles in 37 minutes completed before 9am.

The majority of my morning was taken up with some gardening, or as I like to call it 'cleaning the outdoors' as that's what it feels like. It was a couple of hours of sweeping up leaves, cutting back plants, cleaning out grates and weeding. Not my favourite job but one that needed doing and one that I wanted to get done in case it decided to rain later on. I need to get some weedkiller sprayed around as well but that will have to wait until we have a dry weather forecast.

On a positive this morning both my brother and I have finally received an interim payment from the solicitors in respect of my dads estate. It has taken them since the beginning of the month to get this processed, their systems are so archaic. In fact my brother challenged them on why it was taking so long as he, like me, has worked in banking and, like me, knows how smoothly transactions can and should be processed. He was told because 'that's the way it's always been done' - unbelievable! They seem to be working about three decades out of whack with the rest of the world. And whilst neither myself or my brother were in need of the payment, and it wasn't a large payment either, we just felt that it belonged to us and should be with us rather than lining the accounts of the solicitors!

After lunch my task was to sort out the butchers order which had arrived late morning. I had 4.5 kg of bacon, 100 sausages, 5kg of chicken and 5kg of steak mince to split into meal sized portions and freeze.

It was late afternoon before I finally stopped and took a few minutes out to enjoy a coffee and move some jigsaw pieces about. Before I knew it Simon had finished work for the day and it was time to head down our gym in the rain. It's on days like this that having the gym in the garage only a short distance from the house is really appreciated. Tonight it was an arms workout for me.

And there we have a couple of days, see you all tomorrow.
xx