Day 64 - A new washing machine!

We have not had a working washing machine for about two weeks now, so I was very excited today to have a new machine installed! In fact, I was probably a bit too excited, as I put on five washes and now we don’t have enough space to hang all the clothes to dry! It’s not a great time to have an essential appliance break down. However, our landlord has been very good about it. Her and her husband came over, wearing face masks and gloves, and installed the new machine. We had very little contact with them, except to unlock the front door for them. Then we made sure not to be in the same room as them at any stage.

I started today, like every Friday, with my 8am Pete class. For the first time, I did this class outside. Pete commented on how nice the weather looked here. For once it seems like we’d more sun this morning than Dublin had. It always seems to be the other way around! I took advantage of the nice weather to read my book outside for a while. Then I collected our Tesco shopping and, while me and Peter washed and disinfected the items before putting then away, we wondered if we were going to have to continue washing our shopping for years to come!

In the afternoon, I went for a run to my usual field. Someone has moved a large slab at the entrance of the field, to make the stepping stones over the stream a little easier to navigate, which is nice! I’ve noticed lots of little things that people have done in the past few weeks to improve our surroundings. There are also a lot more weeds on the roads and paths, but I think this is a good thing, especially for the bees and insects. In addition, lots of the weeds have pretty flowers at the moment, which are nice to look at!

While out running, I missed Leo Varadkar’s speech about phase 1 of the easing of restrictions, which begins on Monday. It’s probably just as well, given the meltdown I had two weeks ago after his last speech! I only end up getting my hopes up, and it probably has less of an impact on me to hear the latest updates, gradually, from other news sources, rather than from Leo himself. As expected, not much is going to change on Monday. Garden shops and hardware shops will open. We can meet up to four people in an outdoor space if we wish, and we are advised to wear a face covering when on public transport or in enclosed spaces like shops. We’ve all been so good for the past nine weeks - all of this seems like not very much reward.

Fiona also missed Leo’s speech this afternoon, and I joked that our radius had gone back down to 2km. She got a bit upset hearing this - I shouldn’t joke about these things! I would have gone mad if someone had done the same to me. Sorry Fiona! She was also disappointed that Ikea will not now open on Monday, when it had originally been earmarked as somewhere that would open. I totally see where she’s coming from. We’re all looking forward to when we can do things like holiday in Rosslare again, so we really want to see the early phases moving in the right direction! For some reason, hardware shops can open, but not homeware shops.

This evening, we ordered dinner from Pompeii pizza, which me, Peter and Damo had been looking forward to for almost the whole week! Initially, the restaurant was too busy and we couldn’t put an order in, but thankfully they reopened a short while later and we soon had our food. I loved Peters excitement at about 6pm when he exclaimed “is our Pompeii pizza delivery tonight?!” It doesn’t take much to get us excited these days!Baca lagi