How's this for service!

The parcel we've been expecting from Sara arrived yesterday lunchtime (Tuesday). It was collected from her Thursday afternoon - we're very impressed. We used Ecopost - about £36 for parcels up to 25kg. That's the best service we've had yet to Spain and we'll definitely use them again. I had a big shock though - it was so heavy! All I was expecting was some mail delivered to our old address, the webcam we ordered in the UK, a book and a dvd (Da Vinci Code). Instead it felt as if it was full of bricks - this is what was inside as well:
















Lots of birthday pressies! I love lots of small surprise parcels, much prefer it to one big present! Once we'd set up the webcam Sara 'allowed' me to open two of the packages. One contained a lovely mug and coaster with some beautiful words on them, the other two bars of my fave chocolate, Bourneville. And that was really spooky - before I was married my favourite Sunday late morning 'brunch' was a packet of rich tea biscuits, a block of Bourneville and several glasses of milk! OK, I know it was probably a weird thing and extremely unhealthy but I was young and thin and didn't pay a lot of attention to food in those days - it was there and I ate it! The spooky thing was that I bought a packet of rich tea biscuits in the supermarket yesterday!

There are still 9 little parcels left to open, some more from her and her family and some from Mark and his little girl. My birthday's on Friday, so after we're home from the market I'll set up the webcam and she and the girls can watch me opening the parcels. And I'll have a nice cuppa in that new mug with biscuits and chocolate on the side!

Today our new gardener has been and we've finally got the palm trees cut back. He must have taken 60 or more fans off them - there's a huge pile I'll have to drag out to the roadside on Sunday night for Monday's garden refuse collection. He also managed to dig up the remains of the massive cactus I've been trying to kill - evil thing! He was here nearly five hours and didn't manage to get anything else done, but we hope he'll be back next week when his work will be less arduous and we can decide what new plants we want to put in.

We managed to get some of our pictures up today but aren't particularly happy with the arrangement. In our previous house they all had their places but it was so much bigger than this one, and concentrated virtually in one room they don't 'fit' at all. Some will be suitable for elsewhere but a few are going to be hard to place to best effect. Back to the drawing board.

Tomorrow the plumber is coming with the quotes for aircon and the laundry-to-bedroom conversion - hope we're not in for a shock with that! Best of all, he's going to fit the reverse osmosis water filter! YAY - no more lugging water from the supermarket! What a difference it will make, not to my bill because it's relatively cheap, but to the effort it takes to carry it all!

Having difficulty staying awake tonight - think the cyber crop weekend has caught up with me, that and the fact that I acquired 7 or 8 mozzie bites during the weekend (think they must be living in the laundry room!) and they're dreadfully itchy at night, and have been keeping me awake. Finally tracked down my tube of Cristalmina and it's certainly helped today, so crossing my fingers it will do the same tonight.

Desperate to do some scrapping, my head is buzzing with ideas for layouts but somehow other things keep getting in the way. Maybe I'll manage something tomorrow......

Till then.......