Train Watching

After taking TG to school this morning we went swimming again. We moved our booked slot to an earlier one after our friend messaged to ask if we were going to swim, and if so to invite us back for coffee afterwards. My swimming stamina is building up and I did 36 lengths (900 metres) today. It was a lovely morning, as bright as yesterday but a bit warmer, so it was lovely to sit outside in our friends' garden drinking coffee and eating scones. D is a retired engineer and one of his lockdown projects last year was to build a garden pond and a miniature railway, so while we sat and chatted we watched the train chugging round and their high spirited young cat hunting flies with much dramatic pouncing. Their son and daughter-in-law had a blue plaque made for D commemorating the creation of the lockdown pond, with the slogan "Stay Home. Stay Safe. Dig a Pond" (imitating the three-part slogans the government here has used throughout the pandemic - the current one is "Hands. Face. Space").   

D's wife K is a keen artist and she painted a bridge over part of the pond and the tunnel below. The string is there to deter a heron which is after the goldfish in the pond! After we got home I spent a couple of hours out in the hammock in the garden, listening to an audiobook. Then our regular appliance repair man came over later in the afternoon to fix our dishwasher which had developed a fault earlier in the week and was flashing up an error code. He has been fixing things for of us for nearly 30 years, so he had a cup of tea and a long catch-up chat before tackling the dishwasher, which decided to work perfectly for him! He did a few tweaks and some filter clearing, which he hopes will stop it playing up again. 

This evening M led an online synagogue service for the first time. He had done lots of preparation and said it went very well, and he got very complimentary comments. He had asked me to make some challah (traditional bread) to bless at the end. I tried. Most unfortunately, when I put the ingredients into the bread machine I missed out the water. When I went to take the dough out, it was warm dry crumbs! Extremely pessimistically, I decided to try adding the water and running the 2 hour dough cycle again. Very much to my surprise when I baked the loaf it came out fine. All in all it has been a good day. Better weather and the easing of pandemic restrictions is making life seem so much brighter.