End of the holidays

I had a fine weekend, hacking down more of the garden on Saturday (whoever thought ivy was a good idea...) while Mr A consulted our local landscape gardener friend and then cut some large branches off the ceanothus tree. The large shrub in the border that I mentioned before turns out to be a relative of the honeysuckle and will probably survive a nuclear holocaust, so it should be possible to transplant it across the garden, but if it dies I really don't care too much. I'll do the job soon if I can find the spade - probably in the garage somewhere but sure to be horribly rusty.

Another thing that happened at the weekend was that we borrowed an old Sky satellite box from some neighbours. The previous owners of our house had left a satellite dish behind, and the man who fiddled with our equipment last week said that if we plugged a Sky box in, we'd get some extra TV and digital radio channels for free. He was right! We now have a much wider choice of channels, yet there is still nothing much that I want to see. Mr A treated himself to an episode of 'The Sweeney' while I was away yesterday, which transported him back to when he was a young man learning to drive.

On Sunday I went down to see Lola II on the spur of the moment. She was painting pottery, which she's been doing for a while now, and her work is really beautiful. We had a great lunch at a local pub, and I took a photo of myself on Lola II's phone without her knowing, when she went to the loo. After she'd finished working we went back to her flat, where she showed me her new phone, the new lampshade and blind in 'my' room, and the newly painted kitchen. Lovely!

I made her tidy up her flat and do some sewing, and eventually I relented and helped her with the sewing (tie-backs for the curtains in 'my' room). That's my role in life, as a member of the Tidy Police. And the Secret Self-Photographers, and the Chocolate Elves, who hide a single chocolate in someone's possessions for discovery later on.

Term has started now, though - when the alarm went off at 6.30 this morning it took me quite a while to work out what was going on. I was finally woken properly when someone in my dream said "That's the alarm," but on reflection, I decided it was Mr A. When I asked him just now, he said that he thought it was actually me that said it.

Today was the first lecture in the module "Nutrition, Metabolism and Disease," which will include cardiovascular disease, disorders of metabolism, effects of exercise, obesity and diabetes. There has been a timetabling change - this module was going to be on Friday morning, but has been moved to Monday instead. This is bad, because that means I have to go into school every day instead of having Monday off. On the other hand, the module about GM organisms that I wanted to attend is on Friday mornings, so I might be able to do it after all. The downside is that the GM module is taught on the main university campus, half an hour further away. I have two weeks to make up my mind, so this week I'll go to both and see how I get on.