Reflections and Nightmares- Irene A Waters (writer and memoirist)

I missed you and I missed coffee last weekend. I was still busily working on my exegesis to give to my supervisor and my life stopped in order to meet my deadline of Monday and yeah! I did it. I handed it in Monday at 4-15pm. Not quite finished but all the written work done. I have three graphs to complete and being a bit of a dinosaur I am trying to do something that is simply not possible to do, by me at any rate. I will have to come up with an alternative and do it in the next few days. To all extents and purposes though it is now done.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you that I am now worried that my work is far too long. Why didn’t I know that beforehand but how can you write a memoir of 30,000 words. Mine is around 84,000. The thesis for a masters is supposed to be between 40 -60,000. In total mine is more than double that. I’ll see what my supervisor says when it comes back. I have to get it to the examiners by the beginning of April at the latest so I haven’t got much leeway now. Lots of form filling and organising to get everything in the correct order for submission. But right now I am having a rest and enjoying what remains of my sister and brother -in -laws trip to Australia.

The other thing I would tell you if we were having coffee is that Bundy, our old dog is not well. We had an x-ray on Tuesday and the news was not good. His lungs show chronic obstructive airways problems and the right side of his heart is enlarged. We went because we had not been able to get on top of his eyes and he had developed a cough whilst at rest. He had always had a cough and we thought it was a collapsing oesphagus, common in cocker spaniels. Apart from this cough at rest he had no other symptoms and we are hoping that cortisone will help his lungs and give his heart less work to do. However, the worrying thing is that his trachea has deviated from the midline at a place where there is a lymph node. This could be just that the node is working overtime or it could be sinister. The treatment if it is a lymphoma is steroids so we are not going to subject him to further tests but wait and hope like crazy that he gets better. Roger is going to be inconsolable if something happens as they shadow each other.

On a brighter note we took BILL and SILS bat watching. First to where they sleep.

© irene waters 2016

© irene waters 2016

© irene waters 2016

© irene waters 2016

© irene waters 2016

On Friday we went to the marina to listen to some music and had a bit of surprise. These are not the bats from the trees we looked at but from elsewhere. We had never seen so many in our entire lives.

For those of you who wish to participate this week is your last opportunity to respond to the Times Past prompt which will finish on the 29th February. For more details https://irenewaters19.com/2016/02/02/times-past-prompt-2-womens-work/

Just a great week. Hope you had  a wonderful week as well.

Hope to see you all as I return to some normality although that won’t happen fully probably until September. Thanks for sharing coffee and thanks to Diana for hosting our coffee mornings. Have a good week.