Fish and laundry

Keith woke up this morning and said he needed fish and chips. It wasn’t exactly early, because of President’s day no alarms had been set, but it didn’t sound like breakfast to me. We waited until noon and off he went to Treorci (the Welsh spelling) Fish Bar. He came back smiling from ear to ear, “I think we have 5 pounds each of food to eat.” We opened one package and decided the second would wait until tomorrow. It was a tasty lunch. And it will be a tasty lunch again tomorrow.

After lunch, we tackled the laundry. The washer in our house recommends 3kg of laundry per load – about 6 pounds. Mmmm. Okay. It takes 2 hours for a load to wash. (The first time I ran our new dishwasher a couple years ago it said it was going to run 2:09. I said oh no, it’s broken.) The dryer in our house does not exist. Dryers don’t seem to be a thing in the UK. My experience is limited, but neither of the actual homes of friends I have been in had dryers, and 3 of 4 apartment I’ve been in didn’t. The one that did was a washer/dryer COMBO (not a matching set, like USA, a single machine that supposedly did both wash and dry) which we never figured out how to work. Since there is no dryer, one must just hang up the wet laundry. That seems fine, except that it is very damp here. After you take a shower in the morning, the floor of the shower is wet. The next morning when you come back, the floor is wet. I did not hold out much hope for the clothes drying quickly. It’s only been 8 hours and things ARE DRYING! I can tell. I am quite excited to see what morning brings.

The wind died down and the sun peeked out. We climbed the hill of a street next to us. In my imagination, I was going to climb up this mountain-type hill that rises behind our house some day. I had no delusions that I wasn’t going to have to stop and rest a LOT (my main delusion was that I was even going to try), but I thought I should definitely give it a go. Yeah. I stopped a couple blocks up the street to have a couple deep breaths and let go of that bit of imagination. The sun was really in the wrong direction to get a decent picture, but I’ll add one or two, just so you can get an idea of what hills I am talking about.

Rehearsal tonight was work on test pieces. Test pieces are competition music written to be hard, not necessarily to be fun to listen to. Strangely, Keith and I both liked both. Several of the other band members mentioned they did NOT like the first one. Tee hee.