Replacement Therapy and a fondness of absence

In fact it's not the absence I'm fond of so much as the person who is absent.* It's true what they say. He's away and my heart is growing fonder by the minute. In fact by the time he comes back I may almost have got as far as missing him :)
Barney is away on a trip of epic proportions (not in time, in it's greatness). He's going on a train pulled by the famous steam engine "Sir Nigel Gresley" (I hope I've got this right - if not I'll tell you when he gets back). he'll be leaving London tomorrow morning at 7.25 (and I've set my alarm to remind me to send him a text at 7.15 which will astonish him a lot - I've even saved the message so all I'll have to do is press the button and roll over to dream of him chuffing away toward Edinburgh) and he won't be back till Monday morning.

Not that I'm a playful mouse :) Oh no. Not much :) Though he is a bit of a big pussy cat in his nicer moments.

Anyway. We've been replacing things. The oven for one. It was sort of obvious that glue and screws wasn't going to do the trick when the outer glass half of the door swung down when I opened it the other day and dangled teasingly from the handle above the stone tiles on the kitchen floor. I was saying to a friend only recently, and half in jest, that we never clean the oven, just replace the whole thing when the layers of old grease and burnt stuff inside is about an inch thick :) Oddly enough, it's about there now.
So we have a new oven. Just like that!

The other replacement is an older story. About two months after we got married, we went on holiday to Morocco and spent an afternoon trying to surf in the rather small waves. It was a very cold Summer that year - even in Morocco (in fact I seem to recall that back here they were having a heat wave so maybe it was only cold in Morocco). Relatively speaking of course. It wasn't actually cold but the water was cool enough that my fingers shrank a bit and my wedding ring (a beautiful, deep coloured, 9 carat gold ring with a delicate chased pattern of leaves) slipped off and vanished into the sea. Several people spent half an hour peering into the water and diving under the surface and generally doing the sort of things people do when stuff disappears into the sea but to no avail.
Mythologically speaking and if we had been Greeks, this might mean I was then married to the Sea God, Poseidon and therefore guilty of bigamy but since we weren't in Greece I was just devastated. And Barney was pretty fed up too.

My Mother had recently remarried and had a new wedding ring made so she gave me the ring which my Father had given her. A nice plain gold band, which I've worn ever since.
So, speaking of replacements, a few weeks ago, Barney suddenly announced that he wanted to buy me a new wedding ring. Just because he could, I think and because it had niggled at him over the years that the first one was lost.
And after a little searching in local jewellery shops, I found one. We never bought an engagement ring because we were a bit hippy go lucky in those days and didn't consider ourselves bound in an engagement so the new ring is sort of a bit of both. It's a plain band with a rather nice little diamond with a pretty and simple round setting - not a rock by any means but I think it qualifies as a quite large and beautiful pebble.
Currently being enlarged** - I know this might seem like tempting fate but the jeweller assures me that my Mum's ring was two sizes too small. If I'd worn it much longer we might have had trouble getting it off :)

So I'm feeling a bit naked around the left hand and also rather fond :) And having a pleasant feeling of anticipation.***

Isn't that nice ?

We do need to replace the washing machine sometime soon but pfooff! Who cares about leaky washing machines :)

*Though I do quite enjoy his absences as long as they're fairly brief.
**Next Tuesday. Can I wait that long!
***Also wondering, since Youngest was a tiny bit miffed that nobody noticed her engagement ring (which most certainly does qualify as a rock) whether any of the children will notice it :) How dreadfully vulgar of me!