Crazy Paving

It has been a busy working week as I was back in the office again on Tuesday and Wednesday and we had a freelance job which took up most of Thursday and Friday. I am enjoying being back working-at-work alternate weeks instead of working from home, but this week I found the screen on the computer I was using awful to read - I have been spoiled using my retina display laptop at home - and spent most of Wednesday with a nasty headache as a result. Next time I am in I am going to try using the middle distance glasses that I have for music and see if that helps. My varifocals definitely weren't cutting it. I had expected having to wear a mask for much of the day would be hard, but so far I'm not finding it too bad. Fortunately we only have to wear them when we have members of the public in, not around the other people in our work "bubble". Our little team of four have all had at least one vaccine dose, and two of us are due our second within the next couple of weeks (the UK decided to leave a 12 week gap between doses, to ensure that people in the high risk groups were able to get at least some immunity as quickly as possible) so the risk should be minimal.

I am really enjoying trying out Hello Fresh meal kits. After using R's voucher to get a free box last week, I decided to experiment with using it for our weekday meals during May. So far, definitely so good! Each meal comes with everything you need in a paper bag, except for meat and dairy products which are packaged separately with cool packs. Each meal comes with a recipe sheet with detailed and easy to follow instructions, and all the ingredients are pre-measured for three portions.  For some reason the neatness of this gives me a ridiculous amount of satisfaction! I am a reasonably competent cook, but have been feeding a family for nearly 30 years and it is lovely to have something that adds a bit of novelty both to the meals I am making and to how I cook them. The picture above is yesterday's Thai-style beef with peppers, green beans and fluffy rice. Very tasty and enjoyed by all of us - even M who is less enthusiastic about spicy food than TG and myself. I'm trying to push the boundaries a bit to find new and interesting things that we are all happy to eat and so far, apart from one meal which was a bit too far out of M's comfort zone and a bit too rich for TG, everything has been a success. I'm keeping a careful watch on our spending to see how much, if at all, it affects our food budget for the month. So far I think for us it may be either neutral or only slightly more expensive, which is a pleasant surprise. 

Today M was working an early shift at 111, so TG and I had arranged to meet up with H to go shopping for plants at a garden centre in MK. We did consider postponing it as the weather forecast was grim - it has stayed cold all week, though mostly dry until today when it was miserably wet; fortunately it is supposed to get warmer and drier tomorrow. In the end we decided to ignore the weather and go anyway. The incentive to get TG out of the house early on a Saturday (she is on a teenage late rising schedule when she doesn't have school!) was a takeaway breakfast from Tim Horton's, which is quite near H's new house. They have a long-running offer of a breakfast sandwich or wrap, a hash brown and a hot drink for £1.99, which is ridiculously cheap. So cheap that last time TG and H went there was a 45 minute queue for the drive through. Today we decided it would be quicker to queue in person rather than do the drive through, but it still took a while. We got breakfasts to take for H and M2 as well as for ourselves, then after we had eaten we went to Dobbies garden centre. I bought the plant in the picture above to put outside our front door and some bedding plants to go into pots in the back garden; H bought a couple of plants in pots to put outside her front door (they fortunately survived falling over in the boot of her car on the way home!) and TG bought an orchid for her bedroom. Now I just have to find time over the next few days to transplant the little plants and hope that my black thumbs don't kill them!