What Constitutes a Good Day?

I went to the gym today.  Apart from the fact that I managed a PB on the rowing machine there was nothing unusual in going to the gym.  However whilst I was on the walker looking out of a gym window (which overlooks the Napier Civic Theatre and its adjacent council car park) I watched the traffic warden check all the cars.  When she got to mine she looked and then marked a tyre.  That's not unusual but the fact that mine was the only tyre marked did make me wonder why and I decided that when I next saw a traffic warden I'd ask.   Here in the sticks there is not the animosity towards traffic wardens you find in some places.  They are, after all, here to make sure that we can all park as well as make sure we pay for the service.  

Digression: The only penalty ticket that I have ever had for parking was in the early 1980s.  I went to a meeting and parked on the road outside the meeting place as I always did.  When I came out I had a parking ticket and noticed that over the previous few days double yellow lines had been painted.  What?  When I got back to the office I asked one of my staff when the traffic order authorising that had been agreed.  A few hours later when I returned to my office there was a traffic order in the middle of my blotting pad (remember those?).  It was open.  It was open at the signature page.  The signature on the order was, you guessed it, mine.  I paid up!

Anyway when I returned to the car today after the gym I had a penalty notice on the windscreen.  What?!  Oh dear.  The ticket from the pay-and-display machine had gone from the dashboard.  That's one of the problems of an open-topped car tickets can blow away or get stolen.  But I wasn't a boy scout for nothing.  Actually I was never a boy scout but it's a handy sort of phrase.  I'm an Edwards and we are always prepared (as well as always being on time for appointments).  So I had photographed the ticket.  As it happens the ticket was in the footwell of the car so I could produce it.

So I popped into the Council Offices, smiled and and explained to the lady at the information desk that I had committed the offence in that I had not displayed the ticket but that I had paid and the ticket had blown onto the floor of the car.  "That's no problem" said the lady "I shall make the penalty notice disappear for you."  And so she did. 

This evening Wendy and Martin and friends from Napier who have stayed with me on Lewis came for dinner.  

You know what?  Life doesn't come much better than today.  Or am I just easily pleased?

Frantic Friday

When I write emails I occasionally use completely nonsensical or random headings: a habit that gets some people trying to work out what went on in my head at that moment.  The answer of course is usually 'very little'.   Sometimes, like the above heading, the reason is obvious although completely untruthful.  Today I have a whole day with no need to go out so that I can catch up with some things and prepare tonight's family dinner which is a special one: The Family's Son One, Jamie, leaves on Sunday for his gap year.  His first stop will be Scotland to see family and then to work in Switzerland for the ski season before going to China to stay with his aunt who teaches there and take a Chinese language course.  Chinese is considered an important language to learn in this part of the world.

Actually this week has been so busy I've not blogged (yesterday's Thankful Thursday was done a while ago) and I've only played one croquet match.  It was an exciting one though.  It was a handicap match with me giving the other played 7 free turns (called bisques).  At the 3 hour time limit I was in turn with three hoops needed to win. I broke down after two hoops leaving the game level pegging (I wonder if that's where the term came from because pegs are used to mark hoops made in croquet).  That means that you play on until someone makes a hoop.  I eventually had an opportunity to fire at the hoop with a shot from a few metres away which, if I had missed, would have given my opponent an almost certain win.  My ball hit the hoop quite hard, rattled around and just trickled through ending up where you see it in the photo.  Results don't come much narrower than that.

Yesterday I went to a fitness studio (a gym by any other name) where they tailor a course for you and then monitor you right through the session (a sort of poor person's personal trainer).  The purpose is to strengthen my leg muscles so that they are fitter when I get my knee replaced and also to do some cardiac work.  I haven't been to a gym since the cardiac sessions after heart attack 12 years ago.  I was fully expecting to ache all over this morning but I don't.  That presumably means that either I'm fitter than I thought or that the initial workout was not challenging or both.  Next session could well be a different matter!