Phil January

Following a Christmas and New Year at home, it gave me a chance to take Georgina to Melton to see her Grandparents.  She actually spent Christmas and New year in Italy, visiting one of her step sisters.  It wasn’t long before she was off back to London but we were giving her our bed settee from the caravan for her apartment so I stripped it down and drove her to London.  Being in South London near the shard, the only way is right through the middle from the start of the M1.  It takes an hour to get to the end of the motorway and then another two hours to travel the 10 miles through London.
No sooner had she gone back and we started our year with a holiday; it doesn’t get better than that.  I found a cheepie to Lanzarote which was all inclusive.

It turned out to be not the best of holidays as the food soon became a little samey and the quality of the produce wasn’t always the highest quality.  They did have pork loin and fillet steak carved by a chef now and then so it wasn’t all bad.  We always managed to find enough to put weight on so it couldn’t have been as bad as Claire made out and we only ate out one lunch time.

 The worst and most frustrating thing for me was that we paid for wi-fi and it was worse than unless unless you were nocturnal.  I guess that they had enough bandwidth for a large family so when several hundred people went online at the same time you couldn’t even get your emails.

 Still, because I couldn’t put as many blog entries as I normally do it means that you have more now for my end of month entry that you haven't seen before.

 To be honest, because we were all inclusive we didn’t go out or do anything to talk about anyway.  We had the type of holiday that most people would think as normal.  This gave me a chance to restart on my book again and for Claire to test out her new Kindle paper white.

 As our wi-fi didn’t work, we ended up putting most the blogs on at The Waterfront so I thought I had better show you a picture of it.

 At the end of the week, we had our longest walk right to the south end of Costa Teguise which took about 2 hours and there wasn’t much to see when you got there.  At least it was good exercise and the weather was nice and it also gave me a chance to catch up on some of my podcasts.

While we were there, Claire’s Kindle ran out of charge and she hadn’t taken her charger so we spent quite some time scouring the hotel collections so she could nick some paperbacks.  I found a book in a shop by JD Robb.  It should have been called Deskarati.  Talking of the Robb’s, Dan flew out to Australia to join Kylie and Tom flew out to Korea to join Youngja.  Good luck guys!

The other big thing that happened this month was that Sue went into hospital for her heart operation.  Quite a worrying time for everyone concerned.  Following her previous operation to remove a tumor from her ovaries they discovered that this tumor had damaged her heart valves.  Apparently your ovaries normally produce a protein called serotonin and a normal level is around 20mg per ml.  As cancer cells grow out of control and so overproduce whatever they normally make in the effected cells, Sue’s were producing over 1000mg per ml and so this massive overdose had buggered her heart valves.  Not the left hand heart valves that normally need replacing but her right hand ones that rarely require changing. 

 This meant that rather than having a more routine operation she had to undergo a much more complicated difficult operation that took 7 hours to complete.  Therefore she had to go to Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital for this operation.  This wasn’t such a bad thing as its a really nice hospital where Claire and I had roast Lamb for lunch  mmmmm yummy.  And all followed by home made apple crumble and custard.  I also hear that the surgeons are pretty good too.

Although Sue was very weak when she first came around from the operation, her recovery was remarkable.  She was out of intensive care in no time and was only in the normal wards for three more nights and they let her come home.  Well done Sue; lets all hope that Sue finally sees the end of her terrible trauma's that have been going on for years now and she can, at long last, start to rebuild her life.  This might be a lucky one for you Sue.  Lucky 2013.

 

Last weekend, I managed to get down to stop with Steve in Loughborough.  Its about a year already since I went last time.  I should have gone the previous week but the snow made it a bit risky.  I started by driving to Melton to do a few jobs for my Mum and Dad and then drove over to see Steve around 4pm but he was still out for a drink with Melv so I joined them there.  It was great to see Melv again anyway and it saved us going all that way in the evening and gave us more chance for a pub crawl around my old haunts around Loughborough.  We popped in to Lynroys to see some other old friends Roy and Linda.  We have done this before but Roy has never been there.  This time he was and he had had his knee replaced two weeks ago and therefore was taking it easy.  This was great because he could sit with us and have a drink.  We ended up staying there all night until the shut at midnight.  It was great as they had a Rod Stewart tribute guy on called “Rud Stewart”.  I thought he was better than Rod is these days; what a brilliant night. 

Boy, we suffered in the morning.  Steve has done a great job doing his house up and is almost finished now.  It hasn’t been a quick job but its been done well.  Somehow I didn't take many pictures at Roy’s or Steve’s which is a shame.  I did manage to get a picture of the bathroom where I seemed to spend so much of my time in the morning.  You would have thought that after all these years of Claire doing the blog that I would have got the hang of taking pictures every time something happened.
Anyway, next month we have nothing planned at all, but early March we have a cheap cruise which I will tell you about later.  Have a happy February!