Double Figures!

Had a little trip off the island on Monday. Mostly because I had a hospital appointment (more on that later), but also because our cupboards were looking a little bare (considering we hadn't done a proper shop since well before Christmas).

As my appointment wasn't until after lunch, we headed off early, did all the food shopping in one go beforehand and then spend some time before lunch indulging in some retail therapy. Impressively, I didn't actually buy very much (aside from a Kathy Reichs book that I'm planning on reading at some point in the future). I'd had big plans for a trip to HMV, so was more than slightly disappointed to discover it's closed down in the shopping centre, as have the two game shops I wanted to visit.

But the all-you-can-eat buffet is still there, so I wasn't too sad.

I had been a bit unsure of what to wear that day as well. As you can see, I needn't have worried:

Bad blurry photo is bad and blurry (it was either this or the one which shows that our dashboard is REALLY dusty)

It was actually 11 seconds before I took this photo, but we were moving at the time and all of those ones came out even blurrier!

And then there was the hospital appointment. I wasn't expecting things to move too quickly there, considering the fact that it's taken a year (one way and another) to get to the referral point (not entirely the NHS's fault, I hasten to add - I had a blood test taken in February last year during which they tested everything apart from the thing the doctor had asked them to test for, stuff happened and I couldn't get it rescheduled until October last year, when they repeated the process... exactly as before and once again tested everything apart from the main test the doctor had ordered. Got it right the third time, and the results came back all normal, which is why I then got the referral because despite what my blood says, things don't seem to be normal). Phew!

The doctor was fantastic, he quite literally wrote down everything I mentioned (right down to my aversion to tomatoes and my lanolin allergy). I'd say that most of the appointment was me telling him stuff and him writing them down.

Then came the cracker. He wants to operate on me! Under general anaesthetic! I think the look on my face probably told him what I thought to that. Apparently there is a non-surgical option but that's not as reliable, and also the surgical route means that if there's anything minor causing the problem, they might be able to fix it while they're in there; non-surgical could mean that they would still need to go in to a) find the problem and b) fix something if they find it.

The other shocker was that he wants me in next month, I'm just waiting for my referral so I can get the time booked off work. Earlier in the week I was kind of freaked by it, but I've spoken to a couple of people who've had the same thing done and I'm feeling a bit more at peace with it all now. I'm sure I'll flip-flop between the two feelings between now and next month.

The other big thing we did this week was bought a washing machine.

When we moved into our house we bought a fridge (with mini freezer) and were given a cooker, but the washing machine was something we decided we could live without.

And we did.

And it was easy in the summer, getting stuff done by hand. And then there's the local laundrette and my in-laws who let us borrow their machine as well. So we saved up our pennies and planned to get one in November... but then it was coming up to Christmas and the car needed its MOT, so we put it off, and we spent a lot of Christmas with my in-laws, so again, there wasn't as much point getting something we weren't going to use.

January began with a powercut and again, we post-poned the purching of the washing machine, just a little bit longer.

By February we'd got the money set aside and decided that we should hurry up and go for it before we spent it one something else. Which turned out to be a very good decision as one of our local electrical shops decided to have a sale, meaning that our £250 budget stretched much further than we'd planned it to. Plus delivery was free.

So my photo of the day for Thursday (which I should get posted tomorrow) is of our brand new shiny washing machine.

I think quite possibly the best thing about it is the spin feature. When you get used to having things washed by hand (thank you, Mr. Click) they have to be hung up in the bath to drip-dry before you can think about hanging them beside a heater (unless you don't mind puddles on the kitchen floor). Thursday night the laundry came out damp and by the morning it was virtually dry (and the kitchen floor wasn't even damp).

I'm just a little bit in love.