NickP's World

Gemma, Ian and Ryan arrived tonight for Christmas.  They made fairly good time arriving around midnight.

It’s really nice to see them all again as it seems like ages since we moved to separate houses (in separate cities).

Today I had my second round of Dental Implant surgery, for another 3 implants (taking the total to five now).  The surgery took almost 3 hours and was done under local and all went very well.  That’s is the worst of it all over with now, the remaining work will be pretty painless.

Now just waiting for the pain from this surgery to kick-in and then disappear after a couple of days …….

Julie arrived this morning for a visit and is staying for couple of weeks… Welcome back to Kent, Julie.

Our very good friend Rachael has come up from Portsmouth to visit us and to help with the packing.  Christmas was the last time we saw her so this really is a treat.

After commuting back to Manchester every weekend and staying in “digs” (in Kent) for the week while I am working in London it’s now more than time to move back to Kent.  It’s been a long 18 months … only seeing Ann and the rest of the family at weekends.  Both Ann and I are really looking forward to getting life back to normal and being together again.

So, we’ve now found a place to rent in Rochester and are moving this coming weekend  We (well mostly Ann so far) are busy packing up ready for the move.

Oh yes, and I can kiss goodbye to my 50Mb broadband I’ve enjoyed in Manchester as I can’t get it where we are moving to (so probably time to check out infinity broadband).

Just started working back at GS again  So it’s going to be a weekly commute to/from Manchester for the foreseeable future

Well this is a bonus … living in Manchester means that we can now pay a visit to Hay-on-Wye over a single day!  Ann, Wendy, Jim and myself left Manchester at 9am this morning and arrived in Hay-on-Wye around abut 12:30 after taking a leisurely drive off the motorways.

The little bit of a downer on the day came when we realized that the £1 book shop had been taken over by new management and that it was now a “£1, £2 or £3 book shop”

Still, I did manage to find 3 of the books that were on my, admittedly, short list of wanted books and altogether I got 14 books so that should keep me going for a few weeks   Ann really surprised me this time as she almost bought as many books as I did!  And Jim even managed to spend £4 on 3 books (thereby blowing his book budget for the next couple of years at least).

All in all it was a very pleasant day out for us all.

The day is finally here … the house is sold and we’re off to “sunny” Manchester to live.  So after 32 years I am finally “returning home” (who’d of thunk it?).

We expected that it would take the four removal men about 90 minutes to load up the house contents as it was all boxed up and stacked in the room nearest to the front door (except for the beds and sofas), but no, it actually took almost 5 hours!

As of today I am once again seeking work, having finished at Canterbury.  The budgets all spent and they now have to fend for themselves.

Today, we had the absolutely awful task of saying our final goodbye to Daisy, our pet dog. We had had her for 16 years and 3 months and, I am sure you can imagine, this has left a very large whole in our lives. She will be sorely missed by all of the family and many of our friends.

Daisy was the runt of the only litter from Siouxsie (our previous dog, that died while in labour). We were given very poor odd’s by the vet for Dasiy surviving the first 24 hours but she was a real little fighter and proved us all very wrong.

Here are a just a few of my favourite photos of daisy: