Help! I've been subsumed by an alien

I don't know what it is but I don't recognise myself at the moment. I came back from my trip to Yorkshire fairly knackered and convinced that I would need a week at home seeing no-one and saying as little as possible to recover, and that at the end of two weeks I might feel just about up to contacting a few friends and arranging to have coffee with them, one at a time. 

In the event I bounced back far more quickly than  normal. I always know when I have turned the corner and am starting to regain some sort of coping balance when the list of things for the day changes from 'things I have managed to do' to 'things I am going to do'. There has to be a list every day, it's my Linus blanket, but the first one reassures me that I am achieving things while the second one goads me on with tasks to be undertaken. I might say that I very very rarely get to the end of a Type 2 list, but the good thing about living in Orkney is that anything not achieved one day can just be the starting point for the next one. 

Anyway, as a result of all this feeling like I can take on the world (well a small corner of it) we have been out three days in a row. This is almost unheard of in normal times let alone when I've just come back from time away. 

Thursday evening we went to a lecture in the Town Hall  about medieval trade between Northern Germany, Shetland, The Faroes and Iceland. Seems the Hanse didn't bother much with Orkney for reasons so far unexplained. The room was warm and the lecturer was not the most lively of presenters, but I heard most of it. Of course I was on a hiding to nothing as far as seeing her slides was concerned, but it seems to me that there are very few talks/lectures that actually need slides and this one didn't. There were a few shots of an official website which the OH said was appallingly badly designed, which I'm quite prepared to believe, but luckily I didn't have to look at it.

Friday was a lighter event altogether, as we went to an exhibition opening at the local Gallery in St Margaret's Hope. We try to get to all the exhibitions that they have, can't always quite make it. They're usually good, there's the occasional one that we don't like, but no-one can like everything and anyway, that wasn't the case this time. In fact I would quite happily have brought home several of the canvases, were it not for the attached prices. They were acrylics, semi abstract, the colours were beautiful and generally they were a joy to look at. And then we had a bit of a chat with a few people we know, half a glass of white wine and a few crisps then home again. 

Today we went out for lunch which is a it of an event. We had quite a few things to do in town, including picking up the wallpaper for the latest room rejig, so I suggested that we have lunch out for a change.  I almost changed my mind when  we got to our chosen venue, as it was busy and noisy, but the OH insisted gently that we stay and I'm glad we did as I enjoyed the food and not long after we had sat down most of the people who had been making all the noise melted away,which made for a quieter calmer atmosphere. And we got everything done that we wanted to, despite being rather late getting started, so that was a big tick for today.

Tomorrow were dong a bit of furniture clearing and shifting, which doesn't sound like much fun but falls into the category of 'must be done' and as a reward for that we're planning  to go out again to Geri's ice cream parlour. For some reason I didn't blog about our trip a couple of weeks ago when she opened, but anyway planning to go back tomorrow. I also couldn't quite believe it when I heard the following sentence fall from my mouth 'If its a nice day, after we've been to Geri's we could go for a bit of a walk'

All this activity and sociability and volunteering for exercise is so uncharacteristic for me, and should proof still be wanting that I have been taken over by some sort of alien version of myself I have recently picked up three part completed knitting projects and stayed with them, monogamously, until they were complete. I don't know that that isn't the most worrying part of all.