The car was properly iced this morning, so I left it running in the drive to defrost. We have no passers by, being a dead end beyond the farmyard with no public footpath running past the property, so the chances of someone arriving in the garden just as I'm defrosting the car and driving it away are vanishingly low. When I got in I was disconcerted to see a red warning light shaped like a thermometer flashing on the dashboard. That never happened before. I tried the Skoda equivalent of switching it off and switching it on again, and the warning light disappeared. This little piece of extra fiddling about, plus the fact that while I'd allowed extra time for the roads being icy I hadn't allowed quite enough, made me almost but not quite late for work.
There were only two of us in, as the manager had the day off, and we didn't make much of an impact on the great jumble of plants that arrived from Italy last week. In fact, as a delivery of trees arrived mid-morning from Norfolk we ended the day with more plants on the grass at the back of the plant centre than when we started. I was still avoiding using my left hand for lifting, and my colleague had a bad cold, so we made a feeble pair unloading the Norfolk consignment, and as the delivery driver helped us he asked if we were short staffed. Yes, we were. I have no idea why someone booked the tree delivery for a day when there would only be two people in. Some of the Norfolk trees were bare root, their nether regions swaddled in black plastic sacks. My colleague made noises about maybe heeling some of them in later, which looking at the state of her cold I doubted was going to happen. I was certainly not going to volunteer to dig holes, and thought that if the manager had wanted them got into the ground he could have left instructions for the gardener. I did find some fleece, and cover the black plastic bags with that, in case tonight was another frosty one.
It was very quiet. The weekend was apparently quite busy, but people weren't coming to buy plants on a Monday morning in late November. My colleague said she was willing to stay late, as she likes being able to come in later, not being a morning person, so I left before she tilled up, but we won't have taken much. A couple of people came to collect plants on behalf of other people, but they were already paid for.
And that really was that. Back at home the boiler man came, could find no reason for the boiler to have cut out, and serviced it. It is running at 92% efficiency, which is one per cent down from last year. This is apparently normal. I don't know if it loses a percentage point every year. The Systems Administrator installed my new printer (the old one was very cheap, a false economy, and never worked very well and then didn't work at all) and spruced up my laptop with downloads and a sort-out. A programme called Turbo Chickens had got in somehow. I have no idea what that is. I didn't put it there. Further investigations on the net revealed that the new component in the upstairs loo had a flow restrictor that you are supposed to remove if you have low water pressure. We have, so the SA (who now wishes to be known as the Cistern Administrator) removed it, and the tank now refills in less than twenty minutes. It still makes a faint squawk when it's finished filling, like the dying exhalation of Monty Python's parrot, but the annoying low hum has stopped.
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