Pancake queue

I'd got a call from next-door neighbour Susan on Saturday asking me to call in about a favour she wanted done. I dropped in on Sunday night for a chat and picked up the threads today. Susan visits a respite home every Friday and has built up strong friendships with both staff and patients alike. One of the staff is due to retire next Friday, Susan and the others had made a collection and had got a card which some of them had already signed. Now Susan wanted me to personalise the card with an appropriate message over and above the ready-printed greeting.

She'd thought of me because I used have a reputation for a fine hand when it came to what's usually considered 'calligraphy'. I explained to her that I hardly ever do handwriting these days and rely on the computer for just about everything, so I'd told here that I'd work on two possibilities: feeding the card into my inkjet printer to overprint the message, or printing something onto tracing paper and inserting that into the card. Yesterday's hospital business meant I hadn't made a start, so I got down to business today. I first needed to find a card similar to Susan's to run a printer test, and I also wanted to source tracing paper as a fall-back option. Visits to two shopping centres sorted out those two things.

This is the Pavilions Centre in Swords, which is quite a bit more up-market than the Omni Centre in Santry which had been my first port of call. I got a card in Santry and the tracing paper in Swords. While traipsing around the Pavilions I came across this queue for pancakes. I guess I should have joined it, but part of me always thinks bought pancakes can never be as good as the real thing, and I had vague intentions of making my own when I got back home.

As it happened, I didn't have any pancakes, as it took ages to work up something for Susan, run my printer test (unsuccessful) and struggle with feeding tracing paper through the printer's manual-feed tray. Eventually I had something to show Susan, though I was far from satisfied with it and was determined to improve on it tomorrow. Susan liked what she saw, we had the usual grand old chat, and I promised to have the finished article for her tomorrow afternoon. A somewhat productive day, but also a frustrating one.