Two visitors

This was the first visitor of the day that I spotted, at 6.15 am, as I was filling the kettle to make a pot of tea. It seems I wasn’t the only one who was thirsty.

We had another visitor a few hours later; this time it was a friend from church, who had come for coffee. She’s been very understanding and supportive of Smithers since he had all his health problems, having been through very similar issues herself, so I was sorry to learn when I saw her on Saturday at choral evensong that she was going through another of her own bad patches.  

She and I sat and chatted while Smithers prepared coffee and served up cake, then he joined us and the two of them were able to compare notes on the most helpful advice they’d been given in the past, and what hadn’t particularly worked for them.

She told me she has been reading the copy of "Self-Help for Your Nerves" which I’d given her, and had found a lot of helpful stuff in there to think about and put into practice. I mentioned to her the ACE acronym which I’d recently learned about from a mutual friend (try to Achieve one thing, Connect with someone else and do something you Enjoy every day). She asked me to write that one down, and took it home with her when she left shortly afterwards.

After Smithers and I had come back from our walk this afternoon I took myself up to the spare bedroom to have a play on my digital keyboard so I could tick off the "Enjoy" part of the ACE acronym for today!  I am trying to master Offenbach’s "The Can Can" of all things but, even at 80% speed, I am finding it pretty fast. The piece has 116 notes and I played it 22 times, would you believe, by which time I’d managed to hit all 116 notes correctly, with timing 87% accurate. That’s a great improvement on the first time I played it, when my score was abysmal, and I was absolutely over the moon.