Food, Work and Furniture

I actually had to go into work this week!  It felt very brazen to be in the car as the sun was rising, and heading towards Melbourne. (Me, not the sun - the sun was already there!)

I've been working from home since I got back from the UK, maintaining the webpage and the new facebook page, plus doing other admin-y things.  But Wednesdays have always been problematic for staffing reception and it had got to the stage where reception was effectively down to one person.  Lindsey had been keeping me in reserve, Just In Case, but you can't run reception with only one person. So down I went. Actually, it was quite useful to touch base.  It was getting harder to maintain the social media when I didn't actually know what was going on!  I'll be doing Wednesdays for the foreseeable - and hoping that CV-19 stays away from us all.

The restaurants and cafes are closed for in-house dining in Australia. Some of them are simply closed, while others are offering take away food. It is sometimes tempting to order in take away food, but for me the whole point of going out to eat is the Going Out bit. Apart from buying pies from the local bakery and very occasionally bringing home fish and chips, we don't eat much take away food. But every now and then I do fancy a pub meal.  Sometimes, British Pub Grub.  So during the week, I made my own

Giant Yorkshire pudding, mash,
stew and veg. Yum!

Then Tabitha drew my attention to a British news article.  Apparently the Belgians are pleading with people to buy chips (to take away), the beef producers (I think in the UK) are pleading with people to buy the steaks that the restaurants and cafes aren't using because they are closed, and the French are pleading with people to buy more cheese. I am, as ever, happy to oblige (although I had potatoes, steak and cheese in the house already so didn't need to buy more)

Steak, chips, veg
with a mushroom and blue cheese sauce

And finally - furniture.

Last week, the lounge room looked like this:

I bought the chairs when we moved into Tani #1. We needed a lot of things quite quickly so I bought them from Kmart for not very much money. They are really camping or garden chairs, not lounge chairs.  Nevertheless, they did perfectly well. Until recently when I discovered that if I was watching television and Jim was sitting in his chair, every time he moved the chair rustled and squeaked so much that I couldn't hear the TV. I decided we needed some proper lounge furniture.

I had discovered some time ago that IKEA does online sales and deliveries.  I trundled around their website and bought lounge room furniture.  It arrived ready to be assembled (fortunately, it was more of a 25 piece jigsaw puzzle rather than the somewhat complicated 1500 piece actual jigsaw that Jim and I are currently doing). I assembled it and now the lounge room looks like this:

The blankets are separate, for winter cosiness

And now, of course, I find that we "need" another small occasional table, a rug and perhaps a standard lamp or two :-D