White Diet and Campervan

Not a whole lot of excitement around here yesterday. I spent most of the day on a bland "white food" diet, because of an at-home medical test I'm taking this morning to look for harmful bacteria in my stomach. I was restricted to eating things like white bread, rice and skinless boiled potatoes. The list didn't include pasta, but that's what I had for lunch yesterday -- I figured if I could eat white bread then surely pasta with no sauce couldn't be problematic, since it's all made of the same stuff. For dinner I had two poached eggs on a bowl of rice. Soooooooo exciting.

Now I'm fasting, except for water, but I did allow myself a cup of black coffee. My need for coffee outweighs my need for this medical test.

Anyway, it will all be over around noon. I really don't think it's going to find anything. I'm not sure I would even go through with it except that I already paid for it, so I may as well persevere. (I did it through a private doctor, not the NHS.)

Olga was feeling quite feisty yesterday and demanded two walks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I was lying on the couch reading when Dave, sitting in his recliner facing the back door, started laughing. He pointed and I turned around and saw this:

That's the "take me for a walk" look.

So we went to the cemetery, where the thistle seeds are blowing around in a very autumnal way (top).

On our morning walk, I found this:

 

It had been discarded beneath a tree with some other debris on the high street. This pillow SPOKE to me. My father collected Volkswagens, and he had a VW bus very similar to this that we rode around in all the time as kids. (I don't know what year his was -- the one on the pillow is allegedly a '63.) And my brother is a Volkswagen aficionado too, repairing old ones just like my father did.

So I picked it up and inspected it carefully, inside and all along the seams, and although the exterior was slightly grubby it seemed fine otherwise. I brought it home, took off the pillow cover and washed it and the poly-fiber pillow inside, and everything came out looking like new. Thank goodness for durable polyester! The weird black dots are part of the design, believe it or not -- here's another pillow by the same company with the same feature. At first I was worried because the spots didn't come out, and then I realized they're supposed to be there.

Anyway, as you can see, it matches my groovy green bean bag chair quite well -- at least in spirit!