I received some sad news in my text messages as I had been informed of the death of the wife of one my contacts from dementia a short time ago. I had to think hard who the contact was and then realised that it was someone that we used to meet at a club organised by Age UK for dementia sufferers and their carers, but I have not seen him for probably the best part of two years. Naturally, I sent the contact my condolences, informed him about the fact of Meg’s passing of which he would have been unaware in all probability and then told him how I was making a new life for myself via ‘University of the Third Age’ activities. The day promises to be a quiet one as I am expecting a delivery later on today which entails me having to be in the house for most of the day until the delivery arrives – I was promised a time slot by text last night but it failed to arrive. If the weather improves somewhat, I may be able to get outside and get some weeding and lawn mowing done. According to the BBC weather app, the day today shows a light cloud over most of the country but there is a huge high pressure zone across France which is slowly to going to edge northwards which means that we may be due for a heatwave in a few days time. I wonder if there will be a run on ice cream and soft drinks as we head towards a Bank Holiday over the weekend and next Monday. I must confess not looking forward to any particular relish to Bank Holidays these days as it seems to impact on normal routine activities and one never knows whether the shops are going to be open, closed or restricted to Sunday opening hours. I know from bitter experience that things like routine medications have to be thought about so that one does not run out over a Bank Holiday weekend. However a spell of really fine weather means that I will have no excuse for not getting outside and getting some routine gardening activities undertaken. The foreign news seems to be universally depressing so I am giving myself a break for a couple of days although I am always tempted to see the latest speculation over the health of Donald Trump. Yesterday, on my trip out to a National Trust property, chatting to one of the other U3A members I was told that it might be possible for me to take along a companion to a National Trust property as a ‘carer’ and so I have in mind whether to enquire of my American friend whether I might make an application on her behalf to become an official carer for me. To be truthful, although Meg and I had a joint membership in the last year or so of Meg’s life, we did not utilise our membership for probably a couple of years as Meg’s health was declining although we did employ deploy our membership to gain access to National Trust gardens (but not houses) in the later stages of the COVID epidemic. But as the summer beckons, so does the prospect of many interesting places to visit in the vicinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yesterday was my Tai Chi morning and this went to plan except that I needed to have a lightening cup of tea because I needed to be back inside the house for 11.00am. Some days ago, I had read a selection of ‘Which<\/em>‘ Best Buys, reproduced by permission in ‘The Times’. They made particular mention of a particular 50″ smart Samsung TV that they reckoned had a picture and a sound quality well in excess of its selling price and given several ‘superior’ models a run for their money. Out of interest, I decided to see if John Lewis<\/em> were selling this model which they were and they also offered a five year warranty on it as well (a manufacturer’s warranty os typically only 12 months) I think that my existing Panasonic is as least a 12-15 years old and of course the technology has come on in leaps and bounds since then. So I reckoned that my existing TV did not owe me anything and offer like this might sell out very quickly s I made an impulse buy and bought it from John Lewis<\/em>. Today was the day when they came along to deliver and to install it. John Lewis<\/em> had offered me a general delivery \u00a0time of 11.00am to 5pm but yesterday, I received an email telling my time slot was now 4.00pm-6.00pm. Thinking I had an hour to get the back lawn cut, I was just on my out at 3.00pm when the John Lewis<\/em> van turned up one hour early. But the old hand and his young apprentice got things set up and running pretty quickly the new Samsung quickly found my internet connection. I managed to get my YouTube<\/em> account linked in (which is important to me given the amount of classical music videos and liberal American political podcasts that I play) so I am relieved to get things running smoothy. The delivery personnel who installed TVs regularly were full of praise for Samsung (and LG) TVs which they reckoned really led the field these days whereas the Toshiba was regarded as old and clunky and they hardly installed any these days. My previous TV is now in the box in which the new one was delivered and is being passed onto my domestic help where she will fortunately be in the position where her husband and boys can watch the football World Cup on one TV and my domestic help can utilise the other. I managed to get all of sticky labels with model numbers and serial numbers detached from the box and stuck inside my own record book which is very valuable to have these all safely secured. Now the TV was working to my satisfaction, I did go and get the back lawn cut about which I was pleased, needless to say. The garden remains somewhat overgrown but at least I am keeping the lawns tidy and the patio in good condition, although in the fullness of time it will require a professional re-grouting and steam cleaning. When this has been completed, \u00a0I will give it an annual ‘maintenance’ professional clean.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I received some sad news in my text messages as I had been informed of the death of the wife of one my contacts from dementia a short time ago. I had to think hard who the contact was and then realised that it was someone that we used to meet at a club organised […]<\/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-8280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8280","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=8280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8281,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8280\/revisions\/8281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}