Slacking? Only at blogging

I'm trying to get this post finished by midnight and then it will be my 3rd post today but apart from a few book reviews which are just copied from Goodreads, they will be my first posts since last Saturday so a catch up is well overdue.

Sunday I was out with my daughter for afternoon tea.  That was a belated birthday treat to me from her.  We went to the Conservatory in the Barbican Centre in central London.  The centre is the largest performing arts venue in Europe and s a listed building.  It opened in 1982 and the building and the surrounding estate are a bit like a concrete jungle, in the midst of which is the Conservatory.  It's full of amazing plants and it was quite easy to forget we were inside what felt like a concrete fortress.

It was great to be able to spend quality time with my daughter.  We see a lot of her and her wife as they live quite nearby but since she's been married I don't see much of her on her own.  

Monday was a quiet day but on Tuesday hubby and I went to collect our future daughter-in-laws wedding ring.  They came down to London to select their rings a few weeks ago but due to a mix up her ring wasn't ready when my son came down the following weekend.  Rather than make another trip down from Nottingham they asked us to collect it which we were glad to do.  Although at first it proved difficult to locate.  The poor assistant was getting quite flustered.  Not the sort of service you'd expect from Tiffany's.  Anyway it was eventually located and instead of just one small bottle of bubbly, which presumably they give with all purchases of wedding/engagement rings we came away with two.  So we had 3 of the very distinctive blue Tiffany bags which we promptly hid away rather than flaunt an expensive purchase as we made our way through the shopping mall at Canary Wharf!

We stopped and had a bite of lunch before heading home.  We might have stayed longer but there was a fire alert and we had to evacuate the centre.  I assume it was probably a false alarm but we headed home anyway.

Wednesday and Thursday evening this week I met with other family members to talk about food shopping for our forthcoming family get together in Kent.  We will be staying in a lovely converted Oast House again (around 40 of us) and I've taken on overseeing the organising of the food.  I'm trying not to get too worried about it - I have been given lots of pointers by my sister-in-law who has done it in the past, including a spreadsheet and copies of previous shopping orders and once we get there everyone mucks in with cooking and clearing up.  It's also good to utilise my organisational skills.

The other thing I've been focusing on this week is keeping up my steps level and doing the first week of the Couch to 5K app.  The app supposedly takes you from couch potato to being able to run 5k over 9 weeks.  You do the app 3 times a week with a day's rest in between each activity.  This first week has been fairly simple - after a warm up walk you alternate 60 seconds of running with 90 seconds of walking 8 times.  So far so good, I completed Week 1 this morning.

This is where I run - there is a good path right around the pond.

A few family members have set up a separate Whatsapp group and we are encouraging one another so that helps.  Plus hubby agreed to give it a go on the second day and he was even keen than me to get up and go on day 3 this morning.  I decided to get up and do it first thing in the morning before it gets too hot and then I can get on with everything else.  So far so good.  

But with that and the usual chores of running the house I haven't had a lot of time for blogging but today has definitely been a blogging day, including catching up with reading other people's blogs.

Tomorrow I'm getting my hair done and then going to feed my daughter's cat - they are away for the weekend in the south of France.  My son and his wife are also away, in Poland, for a friend's wedding.  

Right now I'm watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics.  Not sure if I'll last out the whole thing.  The time difference is not going to make it easy to watch events live.  Thankfully with catch up TV and all the TV channels we have these days I doubt we'll miss anything important!

Enjoy your weekend.