Life these days - Sedentary

We have truly cut down on traveling these days. We feel more settled at home, it's like the next stage of life? Rushing to the airport, waiting to board the plane, landing in a foreign land, taking out the map, navigating around... these don't seem as appealing to us as before.

Last Saturday I woke up to see K mowing the lawn in our garden which was a pleasant surprise. As I mentioned, it is the growing season and the grass is growing really well. Little white daisies are sprouting all over the lawn - see the white dots on the ground.

Hard at work

We are still looking for a new front door and we had someone come over to measure and give us a quote. Hmm we are still undecided. In fact K felt safer to visit their showroom in Crayford, about a 30min drive away into Kent. Since we had no real plans other than grocery shopping, we thought we'd visit the showroom. We saw the sample doors in the shop yes, but the sales guy was out that afternoon except for a girl mending the shop who admitted sheepishly she is not able to help us with our technical questions about doors. Ended up K and her got into this animated Game of Thrones conversation which was quite funny. Really random. We went to look at doors but ended up chatting with a stranger about the latest GoT season.

Grabbed a bouquet of flowers from M&S going for - you won't believe it - GBP 1.50!! It was to be taken off the shelves and still looking so good. Why of course I'll take it, thank you very much

We drove by Hall Place in Dartford which looks like a really nice stately home with an English garden and we made a mental note to visit it someday.

That evening we were invited to Liling's place for dinner. There we met up with Doris and Thean, as well as got to know another friend Phoebe from Hong Kong. We chatted so much that night that we eventually stood up from her dining table at midnight! We sat down at 7pm so that is a full solid 5h of non stop chatter (shocking now that I think about it). And that was because our parking in her development was expiring at midnight. Gosh - yes let me recall what did we chat about?

We started off by streaming random Youtube videos on her Apple TV, suggesting the playlist for the night and them girls swooning over the lead singer in Maroon 5 and discussing how the MTV for Sugar was made (were the wedding couples really kept in the dark? Google it!). Then we started playing cheesy and ear-wormish songs (songs that just won't stop ringing in your ears after listening to them). We then chatted about our work, especially Liling's bank is doing massive redundancies at the moment so she was describing to us how her colleagues were asked to leave in the latest cut just last week, the biggest round so far, 200 people over 2 floors. Their next round is rumoured to be June, which isn't too far away. So sad, I hope she will be safe! Like what I mentioned before, redundancies these days in banks have little logic. She was saying they fired away experienced people who knew their stuff. I guess it boils down to their salaries, regardless of how much knowledge they had in their job. Whoever that is left has to feel really lucky and pick up the pieces. It's the same everywhere.

We then moved on to the big topic these days, amongst all our friends - Brexit (Britain exiting the EU). I never really envisioned talking about big topics such as this with my friends but yes this is a real decision we have to make come 23rd June (all commonwealth citizens can vote so most of us are awaiting for our postal votes to arrive). At the moment, the polls are showing a close fight. It seems like the local common people want Britain to get out of the EU whereas big corporations and bosses want Britain to remain in the EU (for obvious reasons). And people from EU cannot vote so we think it would really be a very close fight. K loves to bring this topic up with friends these days to gauge their views. It's a difficult one really, because if I were a local, I probably am tempted to want Brexit to happen, but I worry that people wanting out are not well informed of the consequences. The government is trying to reach many households - even Youtube ads here are about this referendum. Anyway, t's a little over a month away for this important decision. I attended a lunch time talk last week about the Eurozone economy and indeed, as what we have already seen with the slowdown in the market, this EU referendum is probably the single only thing now that is making investors extremely cautious. One thing for sure, if Brexit happens, the GBP will fall further than what it is now (which is already low btw).

Sunday the sun was out and was a beautiful day. I suggested driving to Hall Place (the place we passed by yesterday).