This weekend just gone was a reasonably free one; Saturday was taken up with swinging past the Old House to pick up post and make sure it hadn't fallen down ahead of the survey which was booked for today. I dare say we'll hear back about that soonish, but I would hope that the chances of there being anything (majorly) wrong are pretty close to zero. (We've also had confirmation from our solicitor that she has prepared the draft contract and sent it off to the other side; mind you, I think that may well have consisted of blowing the electronic cobwebs off the one that had been prepared last time...). After that we returned home to continue the long process of clearing off bits of garden and feeding them through the chipper -- this would be the New Chipper What Works, as opposed to the Old Chipper Which Didn't. (It's the more expensive of the two Bosch models that Homebase had available; it has a corkscrew mechanism rather than a spinning disk, and eats branches and trimmings like nobody's business. Shame the compost bin is now full...) We also have what looks like a Shambling Mound on the lawn, but it's actually a pile of pond-weed I evicted, much to the delight of the fish (singular), and the frogs (very plural indeed). On Sunday we had a friend of ours from Oxford round for lunch; we hadn't seen her in some years so there was a lot of catching up to do.
Mum is currently in hospital, having gone in on Friday with stomach pains that they thought might have been gallstones, and which have now been categorised as Definitely-Not-Gallstones-We-Think-It-Mi
drown_not_wave's graduation was Wednesday of this week; we cheered in the appropriate places, managed to get her to stand still for a photo or two, and then went out for a nice lunch at Loch Fyne down at Gunwharf Quay. After that, she, I and 
rotwang went bowling, which seemed like a good idea at the time but shortly reminded me of two reasons why I don't do it very often. Reason 1: I am truly crap at it (though I suddenly found something vaguely touching on the fringes of competence when I switched to a lighter ball). Reason 2: it leaves me in pain for a couple of days afterwards because my hips object to that swivelling motion as you bowl the ball.The weekend prior involved poker on the Friday,
waistcoatmark and sielis's barbecue on the Saturday, which was fun (and for once we didn't take more meat than we were ever going to eat), and Guilfest on the Sunday. That Sunday was stonkingly hot -- good thing we had plenty of factor 30 suncream with us, else I would have been decidedly crispy by the end of the day -- but at least it's much easier getting to Guildford from home than it was getting to Hyde Park. We arrived in plenty of time to check out the stalls and have a spot of brunch before the music started; the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain were first up and were completely and utterly ace. They were followed by the Zombies (not bad), Chas & Dave (acceptable), Marillion (might have been okay if they'd played anything that anyone not a raving Marillion fan would have recognised; as they didn't, they get classified as "terminally dull". wimble, I got a free CD/DVD/thing of theirs shoved into my hand and didn't feel like littering. If you want it, let me know), Lulu (rather less exciting than I'd hoped she would be, but not too bad), Daniel Bedingfield (dull, dull, dull -- but I got a lot further through my book), and Status Quo (well, this was part of rotwang's birthday present). Say what you like about Quo, they really know how to do a live show. 'Course, the fact that the festival had just played host to a successful attempt on the air guitar world record probably didn't hurt, either. (If you look at this picture and zoom in, you can see two Union Jack-patterned inflatable guitars being waved (about 1/3 of the way across from the left and just above the half-way line) -- those are ours.) 
