Unfinished as yet and a little smaller than most.
I don't have any more space for trees, current total being 13, so I have had to take some to work where they are scattered around empty desks.
It's a phase, it'll pass, I expect...
]]>I had to make a batch of chutney the next day after I got my pan and as I didn’t really have much in the way of garden produce – it being winter and there being little apart from dead stalks in my garden – I used up some leftovers. A couple of almost-manky onions, some cooking apples I forgot I had and a whole bunch of dried fruit left over from the Christmas bake-out. The girlie had bought two big bags of dried cranberries and I never thought I would shift the second bag but, hey, it went in the chutney, problem sorted. It was very satisfactory chutney.
In so few ways am I cut out to be an ordained minister’s wife but I can maybe contribute some preserves!
We arrived at mother’s on Sunday evening, let ourselves in with the key and were immediately transfixed by a bleeping - an insistent and persistent bleeping. We probed around for a stray mobile or something, in vain. It was in fact a toy mouse that was hidden away in the under-stairs cupboard, one of those that makes a high pitched squeak when tossed or teased, which had got stuck in squeak mode and they couldn’t turn it off. After whacking it few times someone had the bright idea of wedging some card into it to interrupt the circuit. It worked
It’s the sort of thing that could drive one to the brink of insanity. We used to have a carbon monoxide monitor of a similarly mind-destroying disposition. Some accident had befallen it and it blipped. And blipped. And blipped. Some minutes between blips obviously just to crank up the irritation factor. It had to be put out in the utility room. We could still hear it. It went out to the shed and in the summer it made it’s presence felt out there in the garden. It went out to the garage. We could still hear it. I tried a hammer, it didn’t work. I don’t remember what happened to it in the end; I think it might have gone to the tip….where it is probably continuing its mission.
]]>And compared with some of the colds I have seen doing the rounds it wasn’t even a very impressive cold. I have seen this nasty cold thing in other people going on and on for weeks and weeks, reinventing itself and going back for a second , third and even fourth assault like a persistent little terrier attacking the postman’s leg. I haven’t, touch wood, been so severely afflicted, and it didn’t really make me feel ill - although I could have done without the worst of the symptoms hitting me on the day I was supposed to be narrating for the church pantomime. C’est typique.
But not by any stretch of the imagination have I been nearly as under the weather as my housemates. Hubby, of course, being a man would have to have it worse than the two women but to be fair he was quite bad and didn’t go sick from work at all – I bet his colleagues were really chuffed. As for the girlie, she is into her second month of bunged-uppedness while I am pretty okay. But for some strange reason my failure to attend a function seemed to suggest to people that I was very ill. In hushed tones people were approaching my mother to ask how ill I was. She was bemused and told them I had a cold. But then why wasn’t I there that night? I was in fact out at a post-Christmas Christmas Meal and not feeling remotely unwell.
Still it’s nice to know that people were concerned and caring.
]]>In the process of discussing with our heating engineer what we want to do the subject came up of moving house. How long do we plan to stay here? Hubby looks at me quizzically or perhaps hopefully. I said I didn’t think we were planning on moving at the moment. As he has just embarked on this process of training for ordination, and the training will probably start in the autumn at the same time as the wee girlie goes off to uni, I really don’t see that moving is going to be a sensible option for some time – this is aside from the fact that the housing market is currently pretty crap anyway. As he is being trained through his parish he will be obligated to the church for a while even when he has finished his training so we are looking at a minimum of another five years in situ. So why do we want to move house! All that upheaval and stress. We’ve just had a lovely new kitchen, new windows and re-decorated. I feel like pointing out that although the next few years will be quite new and exciting for the two of them it will just be more of the same old same old for me. That’s not to say that I haven’t considered a change!
I regularly take stock but I have found that it is sometimes easier in life to alter your attitude and re-learn to appreciate what is here and now rather than hunt for the greener grass on the other side of the fence. It isn’t any greener; it is only your perception of it that makes it appear so.
]]>Yes, do let’s concentrate on all those irritating little whatevers in life and put them in a list and go over them and dwell on how irritating they are so that we can stamp our little foots and grind our teeth and generally make ourselves more irritated. Quite frankly who needs it! Do we need to dwell on life’s little annoyances any more than usual? We are bombarded with grumpy old men and grumpy old women on TV talking about their pet peeves – I ask you, do we need to watch this on TV, the supermarkets are full of them grousing on about something or other. We are putting complaining and grumbling right up there among our favourite national pastimes and how better to salute this sport of sports than by giving ever more TV coverage!
Oh, sorry I was just reading something on a webpage somewhere that started a train of thought.
I have discovered iPlayer now, I’m slow to get on board with things but every now and then I try to catch up. It was essential to catch up with some of the Christmas goodies and iPlayer was only way! We had the mother-in-law to stay over Crimbo and unless the programmes had Poirot or Marple or Barnaby in they weren’t favoured viewing. I’m not sure why I missed Jonathan Creek though, perhaps I was out. However, I managed to catch up with it last night. I keep going over the whole tank of water-with-the-bodies scenario, it haunts me, but other than that there were quite a few queries I had about the plot. For example why did no one at any stage call the police? Spending a night in a strange place one’s friend is not only locked up in a strange attic room, but in the morning she has completely disappeared, does this not at any point the next day alarm one enough to perhaps call the police. After another day or so would one not start to feel even more anxious about her disappearance rather than forget her very existence in the story? When it finally emerges that this poor creature has been tipped into an ancient escape-proof water tank to drown amongst a bundle of long dead corpses does nobody think that it might now be time to call the police? This girl presumably has some friends and relatives that might notice she has not come home, been into work, facebooked or paid the bills in several days. HALLO-O-O? I mean clearly her part was only a cameo but surely…..
]]>Anyway my Saturday came around. Wild and wet and windy it was on Saturday and the last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed so I guess I probably wasn’t at my peak. The first thing I did at work was to shut myself in the porch, on the wrong side of the door entry system and the keys on the other side of the door. ‘Oh bother’ I said to myself, or words to that effect. I felt very silly obviously, standing in a small porch with a locked door either side of me, glass doors and windows onto the street so any passer-by would be able to see me stuck in my waterless goldfish bowl. Mortification, and all that. I didn’t expect to be in there long as I expected my colleague to arrive any moment, and I would have to explain, red-faced what I had done. If only. It would of course happen the week that she forgot she was working a Saturday and therefore didn’t arrive to aid me. I was in there for half an hour and, oh the ignominy of it all, it wasn’t her that let me out it was the combined efforts of the first patient and the duty doctor. I won’t live this one down for a while.
Lesson learned. Always carry a bag I can put over my head!
It all happened on the same day hubby got his news about his Deacon training. He has been approved and can go forward. Life throws these strange curves at you now and then. Only think what this means for my two babes - which has the greater street-cred annihilation factor, a morris-dancing mother or a dog-collared father?
]]>
Unfinished as yet and a little smaller than most.
I don't have any more space for trees, current total being 13, so I have had to take some to work where they are scattered around empty desks.
It's a phase, it'll pass, I expect...
]]>I have a collection of four bags hanging on the chair in my bedroom – there could be more but it isn’t a large chair.
• There is my swimming bag which I use on Fridays - contains the shampoo, deodorant, goggles and hair stuff.
• There is a Morris bag which I use on Thursdays – contains sticks and wavers
• There is a waterproof handbag for use on rainy days, of which there have been a few lately.
• There is a bag with my singing stuff in which I use whenever we do that – contains song lyrics, a maraca (singular), throat sweets and chewing gum.
Of course that’s only on the chair, in addition to those there are a few other bags.
• Another Morris bag which I use on Tuesdays – contains longer sticks and various handouts.
• A bag with all my committee meeting papers in – a nice Morgan bag actually.
• A bag of props for the Murder Mystery which we are going to be doing again soon so it isn’t worth taking the stuff out yet.
• There is a little handmade (by my sister) bag which I use for my lunch.
• Plus of course my handbag – don’t get me started on the contents of that or we’ll be here all day.
I’m always leaving the house with a bag of one sort or another!
]]>The Spanish seemed very happy for me to bring them rain, they needed it. It didn’t rain the whole time, I am exaggerating slightly, but I was certainly right to pop my emergency rain poncho into my luggage.
It was, however, warm there and it was a five day summer for us before coming back to the depths of abysmal dark cold November UK-style.
All was hectic before our brief Spanish sojourn, the kaleidoscope of our social lives whirled and crashed and collided with itself and each other and everything and thankfully things have cranked down a notch.
I am no longer trying to juggle several different types of performing scenarios all at once, we have a singing gig lined up in a week or so but that’s all for a while.
The Murder Mystery play what I wrote went off marvellously well – as far I was concerned – and we have been asked to do it again, and again. I may have to get a cushion for my head next time though; it wasn’t hugely comfortable being ‘The Body in the Wheelbarrow’. I made a good corpse apparently which was surprising as I am a terrible fidget as a rule. That day was a bit frantic as I recall as it involved working all morning at the flu clinic, performing in the afternoon in a musical capacity in a play written by a friend and then straight on to delivering a murder mystery evening for a church’s social event. Exhausting but very satisfying.
Since I got back form Spain I have done one gig (singing) with the band but apart from that I have had a few evenings in. The trouble is that I no longer have enough of a concentration span for television. I attempted to put the telly on this afternoon and watch House with a cup of tea. I think I only saw the first ten minutes.
Tonight it’s back to dancing. I haven’t been Morrising for about a month now because of the other stuff that has been going on and the jingle of bells calls to me. Last night I dreamt that one of the musicians from our Morris side tapped me on the shoulder and told me I should be getting to practice – yep I should be. I hope I haven’t forgotten it all.
]]>I could also be re-reading my murder mystery play that I’ve written but I’ve got play blindness now and I really need someone else to read it through. In typical fashion this all came about because - because I have this unerring ability to walk into things.
Sue came up to me one day, in the spring it might have been, or early summer, or something. She said ‘Could your group put on that Murder Mystery play you did at the church for our church, we thought it would be a good fund-raiser for October’ These may not have been her actual words but on the same lines basically. So I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure we could, I’ll ask the committee’. These were my actual words……well close enough. In the mean time I thought to myself we have done this same murder play half a dozen times now and everyone in the town must know who did it by now so I’ll just write another one, I’ve got six months. So all through the May, June and July part of the year I had it at the back of my mind that I really needed to start thinking about a plot for the Murder. I checked with the committee and they agreed we could go ahead with it and thought it was a good idea as we get a donation for our own coffers too and that is never unwelcome. All through August I kept thinking ‘I should get on and start writing this play’ – I advertised in our monthly newsletter and got a handful of people prepared to help out and perform it. By the end of August I was starting to get a bit anxious that I hadn’t so far even come up with a basic outline of a plot even though I had a cast all raring to go. In the first week of September inspiration finally arrived and I have finished writing it at last - with just enough time to go over it with my assembled group of volunteers. It is designed to be read from the script so a few rehearsals should be sufficient. It is now filling me with a sense of alarm and dread that this is to form the entire evening’s entertainment for a large group of people and what if they think it’s absolute s**t, not to mention the fact that one of my volunteers is a creative writing enthusiast and not averse to giving his honest opinion. How on earth did I get into this? And then I get a telephone call from a nice lady who has a scout group who has heard that the acting group I belong to might be able to put on a Murder Mystery for the scout group, a jolly idea for a fund-raiser……..I need to lie down in a darkened room!
Hey ho.
One of my plans for the year was to start a book club and I am composing in my head a text message to send to some of my lady friends. I think I’ll just go for it. First Monday in November and see what happens. And then if it comes off I might do a web-based spin-off. So far November is not too cluttered with other stuff. I wonder how complicated I can make this.
]]>We stayed in a adults/couples only hotel well out of the main tourist drags which was very pleasant and although I wouldn't normally be fussed about other children around it did make for blissful peace. The best beach by far was Halfmoon Bay, a perfect combination of turquoise waters, silver sands, splashy white horses and hardly anyone else sharing it.
Every picture tells a story so here are a few of mine.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jojopixie/sets/72157604091858139/
I would like to go to the Caribbean again but perhaps a different island, once you've been round it all there isn't a lot else to look at. However, it isn't the cheapest holiday in the world so we may not get to do it again. There's sun, sea, sand and the other stuff in other locations as well...
]]>That was way back in the winter time and before I went to the West Indies. I am trying to remember the kaleidoscope of things that have been going on since then but the colours and patterns are spinning so fast it giving me dinner-deja-vu. It was a very nice dinner actually, coronation chicken, one of my faves, but that doesn't mean I want to re-experience it.
At the start of March (when it was coming in like a lion in fact - the 1st) I got on an aeroplane and travelled across the Atlantic to the Land of Sea and Sun. Although I shall soon be half of 90 I have never travelled by aeroplane all by myself before so this was quite a milestone, another first. I was very nervous and very excited, both, and at the same time! And because it was a longer flight than I have been on before I also had another first in that I had to make use of the toilet facility. This is not such an exciting first time experience and as I fortunately didn't get into any difficulties there is not much of a story in that. More of borey, as my girlie likes to refer to many of my anecdotes. I personally can't see what is so boring about taking an interest in inspection covers but that is jumping up to present day far too quickly.
I was understandably then keyed up to quite a pitch when the aeroplane doors were opened and we filtered out into blazing sunshine and the tinkling strains of calypso drums. It was quite beautiful after a cold dull March morning in Merrie Englande. Hubby met me at the airport - he had been sailing around the Caribbean for a couple of weeks and appeared to have taken on a skin colour hitherto unknown, a kind of terracotta - I could have planted something in his head and put him on the patio.
The area around Antigua airport is wonderfully landscaped in rich tropical flora, an amazing array of fantastic strong colours and shapes and it lasts for about a mile or so - and then you hit the reality of the island....
Dusty, and extremely bumpy, roads rattled us around in a tin can of a taxi whose aircon mode of the day was open windows - presumably so that we could really take in the heady combination of dust and breeze, quite enough to make you sneeze.
I guess that first day captured the complete contrast that you find there. From the breathtaking beauty of the silver-sanded beaches against the azure blue skies to the ramshackle, falling-down huts that the islanders live in, surrounded by their chickens and goats, along litter-strewn roads.
I shall return but sleep calls, then work, and then a whole bunch of other stuff...
]]>I've been busy.
In honour of the return of the scribe a new look was needed. Somewhat plainer, the grass was beginning to bore me.
Well that's it for the moment, I don't want to rush into anything.
]]>Contents of gardening trug the other day:
2 pairs crunchy, soil-ingrained gardening gloves
A pink pouch of pink garden twine (supporting breast cancer charity)
A selection of seed packets, some open and spilling seed
Length of wire
1 fish finger
“Ah, I was looking for that” - I swear he is going doolally since he retired. I guess though that it is easy enough to lose track of your fish fingers, you think you have them all in the box but they are itching to get out and in amongst the gardening paraphernalia.
It was in this same weekend that I observed a swan attempting to break into a car’s petrol tank. Some fool had parked it right by this delinquent, over-sized duck’s pond - but it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to wrench off a petrol cap with just a beak so the car-owner was in luck. Not so lucky were the passing motorists subjected a large amount of crevice on show from the road planer, almost visible puckering (not to mention extremely unattractive under-garment).
Another snatch of the mildly odd. Seated on a settee in a small bungalow I am conducting a conversation with a guy in the adjoining porch-ette while also carrying on a desultory conversation with his wife in the room off the other side of the hall-ette. He is sculpting a head for a Medusa, life size and very fine, though he isn’t doing the snakes, another chap will do that. She is collecting together bits of pattern and fabric and pins to arrange for constructing my to-be-ready-for-Easter waistcoat (for Morrising in). It is a tranquil moment of surrealism after the mundane and commonplace arena of work.
Although work does have its moments. We have a new manager. After many years of being led by a formidable lady we now have……….a bloke. And he is a man not a poor excuse for one. Athletic build, gregarious, and doesn’t know how shopping works – he is a breath of fresh masculine air. I have to laugh - every day - when a constant succession of women seem to find themselves drawn to his office, to say hello, pass the time of day, or simply ask….whatever. These women who went out of their way to avoid going near the office in the days of his predecessor are suddenly drawn in there like moths to a flame. My roomie and I listen to the tinkling bells of feminine flirtation and snigger; we are biding our time – besides I prefer to have the opposite sex flocking to MY door rather than the reverse. I suppose that could be why my office is ….quiet.
]]>Not a million miles from the small island of Eigg, is another even more remote and far less well-known island, which cannot be named for security purposes and it is here that the Cannabis Ships skulk. A brand new wind farm on the island generates an incredible amount of power which is then supplied to the National Grid but not maybe not all of it….
A small family have been diverting some of the electricity to power three hulking, skulking ships, moored close to the secluded inlet on the north side of the island. Seen from the outside the ships appear desolate and enshrouded, a pungent smell emanating from them. These are the Cannabis Ships. Deck upon deck of marijuana plants….
Not really of course, this was just a conversation I was having with a guy who has way too much imagination! But is quite an idea and I was thinking of maybe a film of the tale on the lines of Whiskey Galore. A vast ship load of Cannabis lands on a remote island, etc. etc. There’s definitely a part in it for Robbie Coltrane I think and I think Ewan MacGregor would make a very convincing hero….
You just need a little imagination!
]]>48 Hours Ago: Drinking coffee after the meal at our Christmas Do and wondering why I sat at that table
36 Hours Ago: Drinking coffee and trying to plan my day of cooking for hubby’s Retirement Do
24 Hours Ago: Desperately wondering how to stay awake for another hour until I could legitimately go to bed
18 Hours Ago: Dreaming
12 Hours Ago: Stuffing tomatoes
6 Hours Ago: Taking photos at hubby’s Retirement Do
3 Hours Ago: Downloading photos onto computer of hubby’s Retirement Do
2 Hours Ago: Eating Chinese Meal back at home with family
1 Hour Ago: Chatting with the family about our various weeks
Now: Chilling and listening to tunes
1 Hour from now: Reading before bedtime
2 Hours from now: Spark out - hopefully
3 Hours from now: Dreaming – about something nice preferably
6 Hours from now: Still asleep – though it might be time for a little indigestion and insomnia by then
12 Hours from now: Sitting at my desk at work wondering where the weekend went
18 Hours from now: Making a nice cup of tea to keep me going until home time
24 Hours from now: At rehearsal – thinking if I get any colder then bits will start falling off
36 Hours from now: Going through my in-tray
48 Hours from now: Dancing
Well……..NO! Not all trips to Paris are romantic ones.
When I was nine years old my mother took me to Paris for five days – my father not being too keen on crossing water and my mother desperate for some kind of foreign travel experience. We were very much UK-holiday goers and it represented a wonderful and scary dip into the unknown, and largely unknowable. We went by hovercraft and train (my mother had - and still has - a horror of aeroplanes!) which made it seem a lot further away I suppose. It wasn’t a romantic trip although it was quite an adventure.
I have been to Paris several times since. I cannot honestly say that any of the other visits were of a romantic nature either – Paris doesn’t particularly speak to me of romance, well certainly not the soppy, sloppy, kissing-on-bridges type of romantic claptrap but I’m not that kind really. I have a far too short concentration span to sit gazing into someone’s eyes for more than a few seconds.
This trip was not a romantic getaway for hubby and me; it was a Paris taster for the girlie and a chance to catch up on some research for her Uni course which she starts in the autumn, History of Art. We left on Thursday morning on the Eurostar and returned last night on same. In the two days in between we covered a lot of ground – literally.
The girlie has a fear of undergrounds – any subterranean spaces really – so we had to walk – a lot! We did the Pompidou Centre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Eiffel Tower, a river boat trip, the Louvre, and Notre Dame. We beheld a lot of places in between as well. It was an incredible amount of culture to cram into a couple of days but so well worth it. The snow on the Eiffel Tower was a bit bizarre, as was the general reluctance to dispense with Christmas - Notre Dame still had a massive tree outside - but the art part was always impressive.
The Japanese tourists were an absolute hoot. They were all clustered round the Mona Lisa trying to snap each other posing by her with their cameras and phones. One guy couldn’t get near enough the real thing so he was taking a photo on his phone of the black and white photocopy of her picture near the door. They thronged round the statue of Venus, taking it in turns to stand proudly in front to have yet another picture taken. I told the girlie that they had to provide proof they had actually been in Paris.
One lady was just walking through the gallery screening the entire stroll onto her video camera and not actually looking at anything as she went. That seemed so very odd. But they had us in stitches more than a few times.
The last few hours of the trip however were a little less fast-paced. The girlie managed to fall down a few steps in the Louvre and sprain her ankle. She hobbled on valiantly but increasingly more painfully, until she simply could not carry on and we made a very slow and uncomfortable journey back to the hotel and thence to the station. Fortunately I did have a book to read as without it the last four and a half hours of enforced sitting around would have been a bit tedious – although I didn’t mind having a break from all the walking!
]]>No it’s not a party. The lady that does our window display for the upcoming play needed an empty champagne bottle and we only had full ones at home. Sooooooooooooo…. I said….well…its easy enough to empty one.
Hubby thought it very wasteful but I said that I can celebrate the fact that I got through my first presentation – of a series of three on confidentiality in the NHS – oh and btw, shhhh, I didn’t tell you that, it’s confidential.
I was so nervous. Partly because I had people attending whose opinion I have heard on the subject of bad presentations and bad presenters. I wonder why it is that when you want to if not impress than certainly not un-impress someone that you just fall apart at the seams doing something that really isn’t a tricky thing to do. But it was fine. Ok so I may not have been the best in the world but it got people talking over the topics and discussing it as a group – I couldn’t ask for more!
I am hoping that the effects of all this champagne on an empty stomach will soon wear off because I have to go out and take photos this evening and they don’t want to be blurry.
]]>While I was in Eastbourne I pottered round the shops for a bit and I tried on a whole load of stuff – only really for the pleasure of seeing me slipping into a size 10 as I didn’t really want to buy anything – then I ambled despondently home, slightly wretched at the lack of usefulness in my day.
I did however get my Santa finished. See below.
So having missed the exercise and the compelling smell of chlorine on the skin – I am to be found on Friday afternoons sniffing my forearms a lot – I was keen to get back to my Friday lunchtime treat of a few laps of the pool. I arrived to find the pool completely empty, unusually, and it was serenely blissful to do my lengths in the tranquillity of aloneness. Alone, that is, apart from my own personal life guard, a young man who worked his net alongside me. I don’t know if I looked like a feeble middle-aged woman that might get into difficulties easily or have a sudden heart attack in the pool and need fishing out but I prefer the illusion that my luscious mermaid form gliding through the water was drawing him like a moth to a flame.
Anyway it was quite the most perfect part of the day.
Other parts of it were less adequate of course like the moments of paranoia about people not replying to messages and mails. I don’t know why I get like that – I should get counselling for that maybe!
This evening we went to watch a local group performing The Gondoliers. It was like the curate’s egg, best with a pinch of salt – and a teaspoon. A moderned up version of the G&S classic which luckily had enough novelties in it to keep us awake during the duller tunes. There are always a few numbers in any musical which if it were on television could be usefully used as a kettle or loo stop – but in the theatre you are trapped in your seat and all you can comfortably do is rest your eyes for a few moments. During the interval my mother snared another dead animal story – the tale of a hamster decapitated by a fold-up bed – she is a magnet for these things.
I am looking forward now to a weekend of not very much – ah perfect.
]]>In spite of some sunny and unseasonably mild days it is becoming increasingly clear that Christmas is not far away and so tomorrow the girlie is dragging me out to do some Christmas shopping. I’m nervous at the thought of all that fake snow and be-tinselled nonsense although it’s still quite early for full saturation level – nervous but excited! It’ll be nice to enjoy my day off as a day off, as I haven’t done so for a few weeks, and much as I love work I need a change of scene…
]]>The unending saga of the non-cold continues – I have lost my voice. We completely missed out the stage when it sounds husky-sexy and it just isn’t working at all. I still feel absolutely fine, tip top and full of beans but I sound dreadful. And I am a talker so this is really cramping my style. I was supposed to be trailing round places chatting to peops today but had to knock that one on the head – such a pain. I am supposed to be playing a part in a murder mystery play tomorrow and it’s starting to look like it might not the best idea in the world.
Stuff happens.
The other day our next door neighbour – a bit of a fruit loop – had water gushing out and overflowing from the pipe at the front of the house; it went on for hours and was coming from her bathroom. Eventually I had to persuade to hubby to go round and check things out. He was somewhat reluctant as he had visions of her being dead in the bath – in his line of work that’s not a novelty. He was gone for ages. When he eventually reappeared he said that all was now well, a simple problem, the pipe at the back of the house was leaking so she had been running the bath to ease the problem and fell asleep and forgot about it. It’s frightening to think how much water that wasted – we could have bathed a small elephant and still have some left over for a water balloon. She’s a bit of a liability really, she fell asleep cooking salmon one day and it took days for the smell to dissipate – from OUR house.
And then we have the small problem of trying to talk the mater out of joining a transvestite special interest group……….
]]>We had an ‘in’ day today, partly because my night was disturbed by the lingering cough that developed from the non-cold, so it was an excellent chance to sort stuff.
It was starting to get a bit depressing with books piling up higgledy piggledy all over the house so I created some more shelf space. There was a shelf of soft toys left over from the girlie’s girlie bedroom days which was somewhat out of reach. A great place to shove all those books that we aren’t likely to be re-reading anytime soon. This includes some of the books I would much rather visitors to the house don’t see. Like ‘The House of Windsor’ – I married a royalist but I am definitely not one myself. I wouldn’t say I’m a round-head either of course – the clothes just don’t do it for me. And even though I don’t put it about a lot I like a drink or two and I’m not averse to having a good time.
Another title that got relegated is ‘Success with House Plants’ – my success with house plants is totally dependent on whether the plants are tough enough to endure my relaxed level of care. Although that said I have managed to keep a couple of African Violets going for several years now and they are at present sending up the most exquisite flower heads following a few parched, near-death months.
And the ‘Buses Annual’ isn’t likely to be perused too often as none of us is inclined to bus anorak.
Some books even made it out of the bookcases altogether, ‘Flower Arranging’ for example – OMG how out of date is that! I never really did it anyway – arrange flowers that is – I am too freestyle for that sort of nonsense. It’s like painting by numbers. ‘Picture it in Needlepoint’ is also in the out pile. I am not entirely sure how I came to purchase that one unless it was a book club buy. I have not managed in twenty years to find a window in my life to start needlepoint and it is not likely to change in the next twenty. In fact the book is needlepointless to me.
It has been very cathartic sorting out messy places today.
BTW I always liked the song Words by F R David and it haunted me for many years. It is nice to see that he is still singing and making music.
]]>It was inevitably going to be a day of mixed blessings, on our way out this morning we saw a tree with a whole herd of magpies in it. Sorry that should have been tidings of magpies. Thereafter for the rest of the day I kept seeing single, one-for-sorrow magpies. I don’t quite know what the significance of a huge tidings of magpies would be but it’s got to be interesting hasn’t it. And how long does it last anyway! Does the one-for-sorrow sorrow last until the next magpie, for the day, or for an indefinite period? Information is not too clear on this point.
The girlie was watching a snatchling of Sally Jesse Raphael this afternoon. There were ‘angry kids’ on it. One’s heart goes out to the parents of these children because it is clear to all and sundry that these unpleasant progeny should be terminated. They should be put down; they should be put out of our misery. A dog that is so violent that it mauls a child to death would be given a lethal injection so does not the same apply to a child that squeezes the life out of a pet with his bare hands. Ah no that is different - of course. It did seem a little ridiculous when SJR asked the angelic looking rabbit murderer why he would want to do that to a loved pet. Jeez he’s an eight year old boy – der! Let’s face it; the majority of eight year old boys have a fascination for taking things apart. My boy was eight at one time and he liked to take things apart – mostly with a screwdriver – but admittedly that didn’t run to animals.
]]>It’s just as well I have a few days off then. I don’t have much planned particularly which is probably the best way to be….
The weekend is my oyster so to speak and it starts here.
I have been spending a bit of time trying to get to grips with facebook. I only know a few random people on it and it takes me a while to pick up how things work so it’s taxing me at the moment. Trouble is I don’t have very long concentration span……….
]]>There is usually just enough mind-your-own-business growing around the cracks in the patio paving to completely cover my bulb pots. It looks quite pretty really for the two days that the mind-your-own-business retains its green hue. After that it looks a little sad but it does keep the bulbs nice and warm and it discourages the animals from taking them all out and trying to grow them elsewhere. They don’t always agree with my planting. It’s probably badgers; they have strong ideas about garden arrangements. It is absolutely no use erecting a fence without seeking permission from resident badgers as they will just take them down again.
I’m not having as bad a day, week or even couple of weeks as the courier who arrived at work today to pick up a parcel that was not there to collect. He was at the end of his tether with life’s little curves. His cousin had been murdered the week before, his father had been rushed into hospital the night before with kidney failure, and now there was no parcel to pick up. I personally felt that the parcel problem wasn’t on the same sort of scale as the other two events but maybe it was straw that broke the doodah. He collapsed in a heap of dejection and rang his colleague who said that ‘X’ had called this morning to make the arrangement. I said, ‘Well he can’t have, he’s in the Ukraine’. The wee fellow then said could he have a flu jab while he was there. As he left I wished him well for the rest of the day, what else can you do, but I think it wasn’t very likely to improve.
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