Bits and pieces

Just a few odd notices for today:

We are 4 here at 'The Avenue' again! Janine and Gwilym came home from France on Tuesday. A flurry of activity in the garden was started: I had been cutting the lawn in their absence, but not being 'green fingered', Lyn and I were a bit reluctant to do much weeding as we feared we might remove plants and not weeds! Now that we know the drill a bit better, we can do more garden maintenance. Gwilym and I also removed the remains of a tree which had blown over a 2 weeks ago and took the remains to the recycling dump.
The weather, which has not really been bad at all, is predicted to be particularly sunny and mild over the next few days, so Lyn and I are planning to go on an organised 16KM walk tomorrow, in the Ciltern Hills. Sean has been invited by his boss to go to an Arsenal-Bolton football league game tomorrow, so that should be quite exciting. We plan to have lunch with him on Sunday.
On Monday, Gwilym and I are off to Holland to take 'Onbekommerd' to the winter storage. The long-term weather predictions are very good, so we hope for nice calm and sunny weather. On Thursday, we need to be in Lelystad for the engine service, on Friday we move to Amsterdam. On Saturday Gwilym flies back to London and my friend Hans will join me to take the boat to Alkmaar on Sunday (2 October by then). On 4 October she will come out of the water and I will have a few days to do some maintenance (our friend Ed, the previous owne,  has kindly offered to give advice and put me up at his house). Then on the next Saturday (the 8th), I also get back to London.
So those are the plans for the next few weeks, but I'll try to report here as we go along.
In Cape Town, my ex collegues from SANS still have their 6-weekly 'money table lunch', but without me of course. One of them remarked that he liked the blog but berated me for not mentioning the 'money table'. I asked for a picture of last Tuesday's lunch, but nothing has materialised so far....
So, sorry, no pictures today. Maybe I'll add some later. But there is a new picture in the previous entry, courtesy of John Eloff.