{"id":2987,"date":"2021-08-30T18:26:53","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T18:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2987"},"modified":"2021-08-30T21:51:17","modified_gmt":"2021-08-30T21:51:17","slug":"monday-30th-august-2021-day-532","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/30\/monday-30th-august-2021-day-532\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday, 30th August, 2021 [Day 532]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was a Bank Holiday – and true to form, it was a dull and uninspiring kind of day. In fact the temperature seemed to have drifted a degree or two cooler but, undeterred, Meg and I made our way to the\u00a0<\/span>paper shop to pick up our daily ration. Tomorrow, I am going to inform my newspaper supplier that I\u00a0have formally ended ny subscription to the Guardian<\/em>\u00a0and that I only have about 9 days of subscription left. On the other hand, I’m looking forward\u00a0the the extra \u00a350 a month of my\u00a0subscription which can be put to a much better use. Meg and I\u00a0occupied out normal bench and marvelled, yet again, at our 86-year old who regularly works 7-8\u00a0kilometres a day on his daily rounds. Although he has a little\u00a0rest when he sees us, he does \u00a0not tarry for long as he reckons his muscles might seize up unless he keeps\u00a0himself going. He has a special app\u00a0which ‘pretends’ that he is\u00a0navigating a world famous trail somewhere else in the world and, no doubt, this adds to his motivation. We popped into\u00a0Waitrose<\/em> and picked up one or two things of which\u00a0were were running short, including some green veg, so then we struck\u00a0off home and\u00a0finished off the beef\u00a0for yesterday.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

After lunch, we had a bit of a household drama with which to deal. \u00a0We noticed that our downstairs toilet seemed to be draining a little slowly – more critically, when it was first flushed it looked as though it was not far from overflowing. I was keeping a careful eye on it and if it was evidently<\/span> getting better, then<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>whatever<\/span>\u00a0blockage there was might cure itself. My son did a quick inspection of some of the\u00a0outside\u00a0manhole covers and discovered nothing amiss so we decided that the fault\u00a0must lie in the toilet unit itself. We consulted our ‘household’ file (\u00a0which is\u00a0several inches thick) to find the name of the firm we might have used some 5-10 years ago\u00a0when we thought we had a blockage and it turned out to be \u00a0blockage in a feeder drain (it could have been a nappy or something else in the system) We decided that it was a bad idea to call anybody on a Bank Holiday so we decided to tackle the\u00a0problem\u00a0ourselves insofar as we could. \u00a0I have a ‘mighty plunger’ which\u00a0I call into service on occasions like this but it seemed to have no effect on the problem. Much against my better advice and\u00a0<\/span><\/span>instincts, my son decided to tackle the problem\u00a0himself by inserting his arm as far through the system as he could<\/span>. <\/span>At first he located some\u00a0wedges of toilet paper and then, to our\u00a0mutual delight, discovered the obstruction. It turned out to be one of those\u00a0plastic toilet rim disinfectant units – and this happened to be a particularly\u00a0awkward size as it was one of those that\u00a0appeared to be five little\u00a0circular units in line with each other. Once we had located this and extricated this, the source of the problem was clearly\u00a0identified and cured. We were\u00a0left to imagine what a professional firm of drain unblockers might have charged had we actually needed to engage their services. Anyway, I told my son and daughter-in-law I would reward\u00a0thereby paying for a ‘home delivered’ meal the next time they decide to\u00a0have one. In the meanwhile,\u00a0although we still have a\u00a0replacement toilet rim unblocker in place, I have\u00a0attached it to a large and cumbersome weight such that this problem could never reoccur. I must say that in my years of being a\u00a0householder, I have never experienced a problem like this ever before and, of course, one always resolves that a similar\u00a0problem\u00a0will never reoccur in the future.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This afternoon, I decided that my little patch of\u00a0beetroot was never actually going to come to fruition. Although in my little beetroot patch, the seeds had germinated within a few days, the resulting plants were very weak<\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0spindly and were in danger of being overwhelmed by weeds. I am not sure whether the soil underneath trees) is basically a little sour and denuded or\u00a0whether the beetroot seed had deteriorated with age. So I decided to call it a day and basically dug over the whole patch – as it was only about two\u00a0yards by one\u00a0yard, this did not take long. The last time I was in Wilko<\/em> in Droitwich I had bought a box of lime so I used some handfuls of this to ‘sweeten’ the\u00a0soil before I try some new re-plantings. \u00a0<\/span>Tomorrow, we hope to be on a more even keel as we will have got the Bank Holiday over and done with – on my way back from Pilates, \u00a0I will see if Asda<\/em> are selling some begonias or other\u00a0colourful plants towards the end of the season and put them in the plot to brighten it up a bit during the autumn months.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was a Bank Holiday – and true to form, it was a dull and uninspiring kind of day. In fact the temperature seemed to have drifted a degree or two cooler but, undeterred, Meg and I made our way to the\u00a0paper shop to pick up our daily ration. Tomorrow, I am going to inform […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2987"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2992,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987\/revisions\/2992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}