Phew!

What a very odd and disjointed few weeks it has been! Mum is much the same, so I've come back home now as there isn't much more I can do at the moment. Her house is on the market so that will chug along in the capable hands of the local estate agent. Part of me hopes it will sell quickly, but another (more sentimental) part of me will find it enormously difficult to let go. It was so odd to see photos of the house on the Internet especially the one of my old bedroom! Still, I really don't want the responsibility of it next winter, as bombing up and down the A303 is tiring.

Meanwhile my own house and garden had slowly slipped away from me. It's all well and good people saying "the house work will wait", but actually a) it doesn't and b) I can't bear it when it's a mess!
I had brought a couple of chairs back from Mum's - a leather recliner for Mr D and an ercol rocking chair for me. Unfortunately, I had nowhere to put them so they stayed in the car for about 10 days - which in turn meant the conservatory had two car seats in it and I couldn't buy the compost I needed because the boot was full of chairs!! Eventually, I managed to rearrange my bedroom for the rocking chair and rearrange and declutter the lounge for the leather chair. Mr D took over 100 items to the charity shop!

I'm using the rocking chair as my knitting chair. You can probably make out that the 'scarf' is getting longer! 

I am ashamed to say that when I moved the furniture in the lounge, I had to get my paintbrush out because I hadn't bothered moving the bookcase when I originally painted the chimney breast!!
There are now more places to park your bottom in this house than is strictly necessary, but .........

Mr D would no doubt find it very comfortable if it wasn't always occupied by a teenager or a cat! 

Today I have focused on the garden which badly needed weeding. I was weeding the vegetable patch next to the chicken coop. It was the most fun I have ever had weeding! I had five little ladies to chat to and they were massively interested in what I was doing. The neighbours must have thought I'd lost the plot when I kept laughing, but the sight of five fluffy bottoms chasing after the worms I was throwing in to the run was so funny!
I just need to do a bit more pruning, some more planting and construct another raised bed for my pumpkin plants and I'm back in control of the garden!

On a completely separate note, we organised a financial advisor to come to the house last Friday. It was free with my husband's Union. I wanted her to talk about pensions because I seem to have trouble understanding them. No longer are they a mystery to me! She was excellent and we now have a timeline demonstrating exactly how much (dependent on governments and inflation etc!) we will each get and when (I have three separate pension pots and Mr D has two). She offered us very sound advice and left me very positive and clear about what we needed to do next to achieve our dream. At no point did she try to force any products on us either. Ninety minutes of very useful advice!

I'm hoping to have a quieter patch for a while and am aiming to gradually complete my outstanding jobs from the very long list because I know full well that there are some VERY busy times ahead!