Plodding on in Hello.

It looks like I’m going back to work at the end of July. The distillery shop is reopening on July 10th, but there are enough salaried staff to deal with that. 31st July the tours are reopening, with special measures in place. The bistro too, with a limited menu and shorter hours. Prebooking for the tours is now essential (ie, no walk-ins), so the company can gauge exactly how many members of staff to bring in on any particular day. This Thursday we’re having a Zoom tasting of our new products (2 new whiskies), which I’m looking forward to. I should get my pack through the post in the next couple of days! It’s a hard job, but someone has to do it, I guess.
I’m looking forward to going back now. We’ve all been keeping in touch via Watsapp, with a general site group and a tour staff group. The tour staff group focuses mainly on whinging about how much we aren’t being consulted on what we think will work. Our head office is in the northeast, with the staff very rarely coming over. So it’s fine for them in their ivory tower, working out how well it will work in theory. But they don’t see how the practicalities of it simply don’t add up. Like the fact that we’re allowing just 6 customers and 2 members of staff in the shop at any one time. Sounds good, right? Except the tour tasting room is at the back of the shop, so there will be occasions when the tour of 8 will be coming back into the shop with 1 extra member of staff. Then are those customers expected to go back outside and join the queue to get back in to make their purchases? No one knows. We have a big function room that we usually hire out for events, but we’re not doing that right now. It’s directly opposite the shop, so we’ve suggested we use that for the end of tour tasting, but that’s been met with a flat refusal. So frustrating. I get that these areas are going to be deep cleaned at the end of every shift, but everything in the function room is wipe down anyway. Urgh. It’s going to be a baptism of fire, I think. We’re due to go back for a few days before we start proper, mainly to get training in the new ways and get given our new script. I don’t know why we’re getting a new script, the tour isn’t changing.
Belle has got a boyfriend. It’s so cute how they got together, it reminds me of how John and I ended up being a couple as well! She’s been friends with Kieran for a while now, he came to Solfest with us last year, so he saw me get drunk and fall asleep in his tent in the middle of the afternoon, poor love. He was at uni in Blackpool and Belle has been keeping in touch with him. About three weeks ago he asked her out and she said yes. He got back home on Sunday and he’d arranged to come to see her on the Monday at 10 am. Unlike Belle, she was up at half 8, did her college work, and sat at the kitchen window watching for him. (We live in an upstairs flat and the kitchen overlooks the street.) He lives in a village about 3 miles away and has been walking through every day to spend time with her. I’m giddy happy for her, it’s so lovely! When she announced it on Facebook, her friends were like “It’s about bloody time!” He’s really nice, I had a good crack with him on the doorstep the other day while Belle was getting something from the house. He’s proper cheered her up. :)
My weight loss has been going really well! I started using Rob’s fancy scales to track my weight loss in graph form about three weeks ago. At the end of April I weighed 13 stone 12lb, I wrote about it in my diary, which is how I know. I currently weight 12 stone 12.2lb, so very close to a stone loss. I’m very happy!
This week I haven’t been exercising though. I normally try to get at least 15,000 steps in a day and do either HIIT, yoga or both. But on Monday I got a cracking, debilitating migraine and it didn’t bugger off until Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were too hot and Saturday we went to buy some fish for our fish tank and do a big shop. Today, Sunday, it’s raining, windy and pretty cold. I’m hoping to get back onto it tomorrow.
I’ve developed a sudden interest in succulent plants. I think the appeal is that I already have quite a few, they’re easy to get babies off and there are loads in all the supermarkets right now in cute pots! John brought me a string of pearls plant that someone at work had given him. I’ve bought a shelf unit for the kitchen, to put my pans on and my increasing collection of wee plants! I’ve had my poor sempervivums for about a year now and they keep having babies and desperately need to be separated. I need to make myself some succulent soil and buy a load of cheap plant pots and get to work. My plan is to find weird and wonderful containers in charity shops and go from there. I’ve already got a baby aloe in an old Chinese preserved cabbage pot and it looks really nice. I’ve bought some lithops seeds and I’ve also got some coming for free from a cactus group I’m in on Facebook. Some people in the group confess to pocketing fallen leaves from shops, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be that brave!
I’d like to have a go at making some macrame hanging baskets and hang them from a piece of driftwood in the kitchen window. I’ve looked at some tutorials and they do look quite easy to make. So I’ve bought a kit, but I don’t really want to start on that until my plants are all ready to go.
I had to get my car repaired the other day. I swear it was fine before lockdown! But all of a sudden it started misfiring. I had to drive to Buxton and back for Rob to collect his stuff from halls, which wasn’t very much fun with a wonky car! As long as I got the revs up and kept it in a lower gear for longer, it did run fine. But at traffic lights it was scary, I checked my heart rate as I was waiting at lights on a motorway roundabout, and it was at 87! It was due its MOT anyway, so I asked them to fix the fault while they were at it. I hadn’t realised that it was an instant fail when the check engine light was on, so I wouldn’t have been able to drive it anyway! One coil pack, four spark plugs and one MOT later, and my purse being £250 lighter, my car is good for another year, thankfully. A couple of advisories on the brake pads, so that will probably be more cost next year!