It has not been a very eventful day.
Dull as these might be to read about, actually I rather like days like this.
I trotted off up the eroding footpaths this morning in so much sunshine that halfway up I peeled off a couple of jumpers and left them hanging on a gate for my way back down. Even at the top I wasn’t cold, despite the ever-present breeze, and for the first time all of the snow had gone.
Roger Poopy was still an idiot. I am counting the minutes until the electrocution dog-collar arrives. He rushed off after some other dogs and would not come back. I stood on a rock and yelled for him, thinking longingly of the moment when I will just be able to attract his attention with the merest vengeful flick of a switch and savage twist of a dial, without bawling until I am hoarse or trying uselessly to grab him as he belts past me at high-speed.
It will have to be before the sheep go back on the fells. He has become too much of a nuisance now to be allowed loose near sheep.
When I got home I busied myself contentedly in the kitchen, making soap and some more candles. I was by myself, because Mark had gone to work, and Oliver had stayed up late last night, because of being free from bells and unsupervised by Matron. He turned out to be in absolutely no hurry to get up, firmly declining my suggestion that he might accompany me up the fell.
I summoned him for breakfast at half past eleven, and he staggered downstairs and told me that his friend George was coming over. I like George, but felt that his visit would be improved if Oliver was both conscious and dressed, and said so.
Oliver agreed reluctantly, and retired back to his room with a plate full of doughnuts and yoghurt for his breakfast. He is only a few months away from becoming a teenager, but all of the symptoms are there already. I discovered this morning that his feet are as big as mine. They are huge, like great big paddles on the end of his ridiculously thin legs.
Clearing up after the soap took ages, you have got to be thorough with this because splashes on the work surface will make your bread taste horrible for weeks.
I had just about finished and made myself a cup of tea when Mark came home unexpectedly. He only ever does this if I decide to do nothing for ten minutes, it is like a magical summoning charm.
He is In Charge at work now, because Ted has got fed up of earning a living and buzzed off on his yacht, where he plans to stay until the money runs out, which Mark thinks will be about three weeks. Mark had got some computing things to do, and plugged in a mass of wires and black boxes and squinted at them hard.
He was configuring something technical and giving it an IP address.
I do not know what an IP address is, despite having had it explained to me, carefully, several times. It is the sort of information that one can digest for the first fifteen seconds of a conversation, but then becomes rather like trying to eat grass, just too difficult to swallow very much of it.
I did the ironing whilst he concentrated.
In the end Ted rang him from his yacht, and they discussed incomprehensible things for a while, and then Mark put it all back in his rucksack and went back off to work, presumably to install it somewhere.
When I had finished doing domestic things I went to the gym, which made me cross because they had unexpectedly closed the swimming pool, for maintenance, they said. I expect some horrible child has pooed in it or something.
Have a picture of a stupid dog in the sunshine.
