Thursday 23 October 2025: Like New Street Station

Honestly, it was like New Street Station in our house yesterday. The saying is actually ‘like Piccadilly Circus’, but my dad always used to say New Street Station, as that’s a busy railway station in Birmingham, and it kinda stuck. Even the poet says it.

We were up with the larks because the poet had an early start on site for work and we didn’t know what time the gas engineer was coming to check the boiler. So I got up with him, and it was a good job I did because I prompted him to check when our new fencing was going to be delivered, and it turned out it was going to arrive yesterday. I asked him what time. Between 8am and 6pm…

He went on his merry way and I did my social media and some other research on my phone. I also received an email saying part of an order I was expecting tomorrow was on its way and would be delivered yesterday.

The fence delivery bloke arrived at 9:30am. I’d already started work for the day, so I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed enough to receive what looks like 3 roles of fencing wire and 3 packs of 5 wooden fence posts. 

Once at my desk, the first thing I wanted to check was to see if Pixabay was working. Armed with all sorts of solutions I’d spent an hour researching over my dirty cuppa, I booted up the desktop, navigated to the website, and…it worked. Straight away. So it must have been to do with the outage on Monday. I thought it was the Mac as it was happening on several different browsers on 2 different ISPs but not on the phone, which worked fine. But it must have been the cloud thingy. And after I’d bragged that I didn’t even notice any cloud outage too…

At 10:45am the doorbell went. Thinking it was the gas engineer, I opened the door with a big grin on my face, only to discover it was 2 Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

I don’t have anything against JWs, or any religion. But I’m not keen on it being rammed down my throat unsolicited, nor some thinking it’s perfectly fine to invade my privacy. BUT…I kept that cheerful smiled pinned to my face, asked them how they were (they appreciated that at least), and told them I work from home so couldn’t really spare them any time but if they had a leaflet they could leave…They did, and they went. Result.

Back at my desk, I started today’s blog post. Then I have no idea what else I did beyond faffing. Every time I settled down to start something, the door went or the phone rang or an email came in that needed my attention.

At just before 1pm, the roofing contractors arrived. And within minutes, the gas engineer was here too. The gas man was here for a matter of minutes. The roofing contractors were here for just under an hour. As they were leaving, the delivery driver was arriving, and not 1 but 2 parcels were delivered. 

Phew!

At last, I had the rest of the day (or what was left of it) to do some work. But I kept getting distracted and gave it up in the end as a bad job, determined to do more today.

The dog didn’t arrive yesterday in the end. His taxi service couldn’t bring him until this morning. So by the time this goes live, he may be on his way, or even here. Regardless, we were and are ready for him, with a nice new bed and some nice new balls. He loves to play fetch with a ball. If we’d known, we could have saved our shopping expedition for yesterday evening instead of the poet rushing home from work on Tuesday. But, hey. 

I have no idea what I’ll be working on, but it will probably be Book 12 for the great novella challenge. I am mid-editing for the editing client, but I already interrupted that with this week so I could get on with other things without feeling bad about it. I’ll get back on with the editing next week.

The rest of the delivery I booked for Friday is coming today.

EDIT: I hadn’t scheduled this for some reason, so here I am now, posting it live again…