Our House-Guests Move Out

Brian and Talia (not sure her name is spelt right.) have now moved out. They managed to find new accommodation in Wolverton and last night they were packing up their belongings into their cars and drove away. We hardly saw them, they made virtually no noise. Both dogs took a while to get used to having them around, particularly Alfie who gets himself really worked up when anything that isn't part of his routine is changed. He goes bonkers when we go for a walk and runs up to everyone he meets, human or dog and seems to have no fear, but whenever it's someone new who comes into the house he gets really silly. He yaps and barks and sometimes hides. Brian bought Carol a lovely bunch of flowers as a 'thank you' which was nice. Talia has a job in a school on Beaconsfield. I'm not exactly sure what her job was, whether she was a teacher or a teaching assistant there, but it seemed to be quite a long way to drive, there and back each day. She used to leave around 6.00-6.30 each morning and get back by around 4.30, at about the time I was going out to fetch Carol home from Milton Keynes Academy. Supposedly takes around an hour, but I imagine it might take considerably longer with traffic conditions not exactly free-flowing. I used to drive regularly between Bedford and Thorpe Park and that could take around 1 to 2 hours, but considering that was a little over 30 years ago and before the M25 and really good roads were opened. It could get really blocked up on some stretches of of the journey with bottlenecks holding you up for 20 minutes or so. 

House Guests

Carol came home from work and told me that we would be having house guests. Brian is a new member of staff at Milton Keynes Academy and he and his girlfriend, (another teacher, although she doesn't teach at the Academy, but at a school in Beaconsfield apparently.) have been having problems with their landlord (seems infectious, this business of landlords, as you will recall from earlier posts on here.) and as we have a vacant room, it seemed that we could come to their aid on a temporary basis, for around a month or so until they can find more permanent accommodation.  As we were given so much help when we had all the problems with our former landlord it seemed only right that we should do the same for other people in a similar sort of situation. So they arrived at around 6.15 yesterday evening, just as we were having our meal. We had to put the dogs in the kitchen when they came in and Alfie was excited when they met him, Poppy being her usual friendly self. They spent the rest of their evening ferrying their belongings from their former accommodation. We had to move our bicycles from their parking space in the entrance hall to the kitchen to make way for more of their belongings. All went smoothly and they hardly made a sound when they came back when we had gone to bed. Alfie is still not sure about them. I think it's to do with having his routine altered but by this morning he was far more settled. 

I managed to get the rest of the grass cut early this morning. I did most of it yesterday afternoon before I went to meet Carol from work. One of the plastic blades on the mower broke, and I had to replace it before I began mowing, so thankfully that job is out of the way before the Bank Holiday and Half-Term holiday as I don't really want to mow the grass next week.