This part deals with the arrival of Ellen a much harder adjustment in someways. I live in a small 3 bedroom house with only one lounge or living room 18ft x12ft so space is tight. Ellen's room is the largest of the bedrooms and needs to be. She has more stuff than an auction room.
She is up at 5 am most days for a 6am start so generally away to bed not long after 9.We have one meal together usually around 5 which is good, I enjoy cooking for two and she enjoys my meals. A couple of times a week it's no cooking day,on one I just pig out and she has a ready meal or a pizza. Yesterday of course was our day for a meal from the extensive menu of the local chippy,chicken nuggets and chips for her I went for the plain pie chips and gravy.We often buy each other little treats some sort of sweet or biscuity thing that is bad for us and sit guzzling away like kids.

One of the main problems was getting Ellen to understand that I have an illness. She thinks I am indestructible and still sail through life on the good ship all is well which I did for years. She just could not get it into her head how potentially dangerous my blood pressure had become or why I needed heart checks why me a man who had to ask Margaret where the doctors was when I was 39 because they moved 20 years before and I had no need to visit them since, why a man who never let anything phase him should get so worked up about things. In the end I went on to Google copied a print out of the symptoms and dangers and how to avoid them and made her read it. I think then it began to dawn on her that I am not as fireproof as I was and this venture was not going to be plain sailing for either of us.
We get along very well as we both do with Stephen,we became even closer after Margaret died.Ellen is still and always will be my little girl and I will not allow anybody or anything to make her unhappy.She knows she has a billet here as long as she wants it she also now knows the pressure I sometimes feel and of course she does so much want her own place and independence.It will take time to find a place in the right area to fit her budget so until then we muddle through as families always have. Plans and schemes I had in mind are on hold of course and I get by the best I can.
It is not all doom and gloom here we are not that sort of family,we share the news ( hers mostly gossip off facebook of course and news of old friends) tell each other our tales of daring do adventures and funny things going on. There is a lot of "Do you remember" sentences it is great fun. So if I seem to a little negative some days well that's just an aging old fart trying to come to grips with a new life,trying to be patient with her and the cats and not always getting it right.
I have the cats house trained,training Ellen is a much harder task she does try and she works very hard sometimes for 12 days without a break it's just she is so damned untidy,that bugs me.

quote on guests
For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.
Rebecca Harding Davis