Today was one of those ‘one things leads to another’ type days and it was a long time before I actually got myself up and breakfasted. I knew that the U3A (University of the Third Age) were organising an sort of industrial archaeology trip to view the historic listed buildings in Port Sunlight (Wirral) and I am always keen to sign up quickly for these kinds of ventures because they are to places where you might not go as an individual but it makes so much more sense to go as a group, not least because there are always many fellow travellers with whom to chat but also because the expense alone in petrol costs is more than your share of the cost price of the excursion. So as I was signing up for the next trip in July, the organisers had, very sensibly, asked each one of the intending trip members to have with them their ICE (In Case of Emergency) contact cards. I realised that I did not have one prepared for myself but now that I am on my own, as it were, I realised thatI had better organise one for myself. I got onto a website which turned out to be American and the card turned out to be red one on the PDF which when printed out on a black and white printer turned out to be near illegible. I fiddled around without success trying to change the colour of the card in the PDF but eventually gave it up as bad job. I then located a (British) Red Cross template but this required moving text boxes around, choosing appropriate fonts and the like. Eventually I succeeded though and now comes the job of laminating. I do not have a laminator at home but I do have a series of self laminating labels that you stick together to form a composite whole. So I printed off the PDF and had to carefully cut the front and the back of it to the right size so that it would fit the size of the laminating sheets. In all of this, I was eventually successful but it took me so much longer than I thought it would and at least I have the relevant details stored in a saved ICE pdf file so the manufacture of more cards ought to be quite an easy job. Whilst I was at it, I made three of those cards, one for my credit card wallet (into which it just fits), one into my normal money wallet and another to put in the breast pocket of whatever jacket I happen to be wearing at the time. This was a useful job to get done but I had to look up details such as the phone number of the GP surgery, check the spelling of my routine medications and things like that. As it is a half term week this week and the Methodist Centre is closed, fortunately I had the time to engage in such activities but I am finding these days that even simple activities are always taking me longer than I would have anticipated. Although we are in the middle of a heatwave, we have the very unwelcome news that our energy bills are due to rise 100’s of pounds in July (as a consequence of the Iran war) Energy bills to rise to more than two-year high and average annual energy bills are set to rise by hundreds of pounds from July for a typical dual fuel household. Energy regulator Ofgem has announced a 13% rise in the price cap to £1,862 a year for a typical household, up from the previous cap of £1,641. That means bills will cost £18 more a month for an average household on a supplier’s standard default tariff. So now is the time to try to get a better fixed price deal of that is possible. Actually, I have managed to get a deal fixed at an OK price for the next 12 month which comes into effect tomorrow so I should be able to avoid the price rises scheduled for July.
After a slow morning, I did a normal shopping at Aldi but was dismayed when got home to discover that my normal front door key was missing from my back pocket (but I always carry an emergency spare in a wallet attached to my belt by a chain!) When I thought about it, I thought that the ‘key’ that I use to access a supermarket trolley had got entangled with a skein of thread and I wonder whether in getting it entangled and put away I dropped my house key without noticing. So I popped the shopping (unpacked) in through the front door and immediately raced back to the spot where I had been parked to see if I could find a dropped key but no such luck. But as a desperate last measure, I popped into Aldi and grabbed hold of one of the assistants to enquire whether a key had been handed in. She and a male colleague disappeared into their office and came out bearing my ‘lost’ key – you can’t imagine the relief that I felt! I am going to devise a little change of procedure to ensure that this can never happen again. Then I unpacked the shopping and made myself a salad type lunch which was easy enough to throw together. I was anxious to get rid of some particularly fast growing thistles that had grown unbated down one side of the house and as tomorrow is the day when the bins have to be pulled to the kerbside to be emptied first thing in the morning, any weeding is best done the day before. So although the weather was quite warm, I made myself undertake this task as the thistles had been an eyesore for quite some time. Now I need to tackle other sections of the narrow gravel sections by the side of or communal roadway (I am never quite sure of the correct building term for this feature of a house or driveway). It is very hard to know what is going in the USA: Iran negotiations at the moment with both sides jockeying for position in the ‘spin’ states. Iranian state TV has shared details from what it says is a draft ‘memorandum of understanding’ with the US – but Washington has branded the report a ‘complete fabrication’ whilst also maintaining that the talks between the two sides are ‘proceeding nicely’. I suspect that these shenanigans will go on for a few days yet after which a deal may – or may not, emerge.