Catching up

We're carless today. It's gone for its annual service & MOT. I'm left hoping the bill at the end of the day won't be too high. It will not be back till this evening which means a quiet day at home for us.  I don't think the Fox could walk as far as our village pub these days & I'm certainly reluctant to freeze on the Mean Machine, my electric scooter.

With this is mind, we ventured down to the Pub with PD yesterday. On the way back, the sky was gently blushed with pink. It was still too early, now the daylight hours are longer, to have become a full sunset.

Once home we saw Fran, our neighbour, on her way back from walking the dag. We asked how Dave was. What a tale! It's getting her down. He's been taken into Blackpool hospital. It seems there's been a change of specialist & the new man can't understand why Dave wasn't given an angiogram & other tests when he was in hospital before Christmas, let along last month's visit. So Dave is in for tests.

What gets to Fran is that the hospital he's had to go in is at Blackpool. That means she has a one-&-a-half hour drive there & a further one-and-a-half-hour drive back. She's only allowed to seem him for exactly one hour. They're very strict on visiting hours there. She feels she's spending half her life in the car. Some other visitors, who live even further afield, are staying B&B as it's cheaper than the cost of all the travelling. But what really gets to her is that Dave himself feels fine after his last couple of hospital visits, better than for years. They only seem to be doing about one test per week. He's already been in 3 weeks. Why, she wonders, couldn't he come home & just go in for the days of the tests & get the results before coming home, say one overnight stay per week. That would liberate the bed for someone else, save the NHS the cost of feeding him all that time, improve the morale of Dave & save her a lot of driving & give her time to get other things done. It does seem odd.

Meanwhile the world has become even icier. Yesterday we bought our weekend chicken. As our fridge is rather full at the moment, we decided we would put it the garage. It should be cold enough. I thought I'd have a look at it today & do what I could to prepare it for Saturday. It's going in Big Ears, the slow cooker, so I'll have to get it cooking by about 10 am. I brought the chicken over to find it's lightly frozen. It took a bit of manipulating it to get some flexibility to remove the string & cut off the wing tips so the bird will fit in the cooker. It's back in the garage now, but I think I will get the Fox to bring it over tonight so it's something more like room temperature for the morning. 

It certainly must be cold out there to have done that! Usually a frozen bird gently thaws in the garage during the winter months. Freezing a fresh bird in this way is ridiculous.