… exciting to report today.
There I was, gazing out of the window at he rear of the hostel this afternoon and I noticed a couple of people at the door of the big derelict church at the back here. This seemed like the ideal opportunity to gatecrash yet another official visit – I’ve always wanted to set foot inside there.
And so I nipped off down there hot-foot, or chaud-pied as they say in Wallonie or warme-voet as they say around here, to blag my way into the church.
Instead, there I found these three women trying to work the lock of the door, without very much success at all. In the end, although they agreed that I could join the party, they couldn’t undo the door and in the end gave it up as a bad job and walked away.
So much for that.
I had another bad night again last night. Ages to drop off and waking up a few times during the night, and being definiteively awake by 06:30. So much for that. And I couldn’t eat my breakfast either – most of it ended up in the waste bin, along with all of my food from the fridge yesterday I imagine.
After a brief relax (that spread into a good couple of hours) I wandered off down to the Carrefour by the football ground to but the food that ended up being thrown away (and about which you’ll hear me moaning for the next six months, I imagine). I also treated myself to more ice-cream sorbet and seeing as the pineapple slices are now back to full price, I ended up with a big tin of peach halves instead, just to make a difference.
Lunch was next on the agenda, and then I set to work. I installed the 3-in-1 printer that I had brought with me from home, having first downloaded the drivers and the accessory files from the internet. And once I’d done all of that (which wasn’t simple either) I started off to scan all of my receipts.
That wasn’t a five-minute job either, and it’s really quite ironic. Many years ago I had one of the very first Hewlett-Packard flatbed scanners and the user interface was so easy to use. And not only that, it remembered all of the settings too. This is a modern Hewlett-Packard 3-in-1 printer, an HP deskjet 2180 that I liberated from Marianne and not only is it unbelievably complicated to use, it doesn’t memorise the settings in a batch process so each document has to have its settings set individually, which is the most ridiculous thing that I’ve ever encountered.
But if you think that that is complicated, you ain’t seen nuffink yet because although it’s definitely progress that I can now submit all of my claims on-line, it’s such a time-consuming process. It takes ages just to prepare one form of 5 claims, and I have about 50 or so to do. I’m going to be here for ever.
Tea was vegan burger, beans and oven chips followed by peach halves and vegan lemon sorbet. Now I’m going to have an early night ready for my marathon paperwork session tomorrow.
