Hi everyone.
There was no plan today other than Helen helping Di with a bit of business. In preparation for buying a property, Di has to get a local "identity". This involves presenting yourself with a lot of ID to some administrator and jumping through all sorts of hoops. Last time she tried it, she took along Christo, a solicitor from the family. It took a lot of brown-nosing and a half a day of hanging about in govt offices, and in the end, nothing happened. When Di told Helen, Helen said she'd handle it. You can imagine there was a lot of scoffing, but to everyone's utter amazement, half an hour after Helen went into the office, the emerged with 3 copies of a local birth certificate and all the ID application completed and processed. Di spent the whole afternoon elated and aghast at what she'd managed to achieve. We all agree that Helen should set up a bureau for doing this sort of thing. She has great personal contacts and is a fixer par excellence.
Aunty Mary had been parked at Aunty Lito's house for the morning and when the business was over, she was picked up and brought over. We had a lovely lunch under the pergola...a chicken curry with rice. While the business of selecting tiles for the terrace at Aunty Mary's house was being undertaken, Stella and I stayed at home. Apparently, this selection process involved visting various houses and a church where the tiles had been laid. While Helen, Di, Ian and Aunty Mary were fighting it out with the traffic, Stella and I were cleaning the silt out of the pool, scrubbing it with a brush and constantly unclogging the filter which was filling up with the seeds and leaves that had blown in. In another life Ian had installed pools and was well aware of all the intricacies and idiocyncracies of the creepy crawly. By the time they returned, we'd improved it 100% and well deserved the swim.
Once the guests had left Helen and I got to work with jobs. She dealt with inside cleaning and I wrestled the sucker-blower out of the shed and gave the terrace a going over. It's still hot even though its nearly 6pm now, but we've both had a shower and are ready to wind down and put our feet up. I'm feeling guilty about not having done the year 11 correction yet, so that may be on the agenda tonight.
Well, must go now. Keep you posted. Love, Lily
