Sloping off

After a week that had alternated between busy and down right frustrating, I had decided that Friday was going to be a sea of serenity.

I started relatively early and cleared a few items from my inbox. As half past nine approached I wandered outside to see whether there was any chance of watching the eclipse. None of us had any glasses so the plan was to watch a reflection in a bowl of water. As we scanned the sky all we saw was cloud and it didn't look like we were going to see anything at all.

The minutes ticked by and suddenly we could see a small, bright crescent through a veil of thinning clouds. We were able to watch safely for a good few minutes with the cloud cover acting as a filter for the sun's glare.

With the celestial viewing over, I wandered back in to the house and settled to complete my weekly report. With eleven o'clock approaching I was just about done. I headed out to the car for a trip to B&Q where I picked up a replacement fence post and a couple of bags of post-fix. These will be needed to finish off the fence where it meets the new wall by the front door.

Back at home I munched my way through lunch and then tinkered with the Enfield's rear mudguard for a while. Having fitted a rubbing strip yesterday, I trial fitted the mudguard to the bike. This fit is reasonable now, not perfect, but reasonable. I will have to drill the mudguard to fix it to the frame tab but at least the two make physical contact now.

Feeling ever so slightly guilty I wandered back to my laptop and noticed that a colleague was keen to have a chat about how I present my solution and costs to our pricer. He may have been keen but he wanted to talk late in the afternoon. This was going to interfere with my laid back Friday so I pinged him and we agreed to chat sooner.

The result of our discussion is that I may well have landed on the service improvement project that I need to develop this year … a solution pack that can be used to price and hand off solutions to the sales teams.

If I am honest my working day ended there. TP and I took a wander around the Three Miler with the dogs before returning to console Hayden. He has completed the brickwork to either side of the flight of steps but the coping stones have been delayed. They may not arrive for a week or more and it is fair to say that he is not impressed as it is going to delay the job.

I then grabbed a quick coffee and rounded up 30%. We headed over to Redditch Shot-blasting to collect the freshly powder coated garden gate and then headed over to Littleton to view tomorrow's auction lots … it is fair to say that we are highly likely to be back tomorrow for a bacon sandwich, bad coffee and intentional hand waving.