Thursday 11th February - Bound to happen sooner or later...

 So yesterday, what with one thing and another, it was suddenly five-to-eleven and I had a zoom piano lesson to teach starting at eleven...

I had time for trousers and socks etc, but left the top half of me as nightdress and fleece cardigan. That gave me 30 seconds to run a hair brush through my hair. 

I remember remarking when I bought them that my new (back then) winter nightdresses were pretty enough for day wear, if only they had been made for that purpose. Yesterday they had a test drive! Luckily Wednesday morning's zoom lessons are a certain amount of piano lesson, and a much larger amount of chatting with a friend, so we were both able to have a giggle.

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Yesterday was also the day our new printer arrived. It is a mid-range model, so not as clever as the one we had before, but slightly cleverer than completely dumb. We are discovering its particular idiosyncratic likes and dislikes as we go along. So far we can print things from the PC, but not from the laptops (we each have one) or telephones or tablets. Early days, early days...

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We have a number of Really Large Projects which have been fermenting slowly over the past year. Years. Several Years. Decades? The Bedroom Floor is going to be a major effort. What you can see are the remains of the cheap bedroom carpet that was already down when we moved in about 38 years ago. It has not aged well. Every few months I trim a little more off, so that I don't catch my toes in the frayed edge.  

The other holes in the carpet, by the door, across the foot of the bed, and along the other side of the bed, are covered by a selection of rugs which makes hoovering a nightmare. Oh, how I wish we could just cut it all away and have floorboards - but these are 1950s floorboards, cheap, splintery, knotty, warped, gappy - unsuitable.

We have a plan to use the remnants left from when we put down a beautiful wood floor all through the ground floor, up the stairs and on the landing. There won't be enough to do the whole floor, but the cunning plan is to just go round the furniture...

There is some precedent for this. Inspired by vague memories of a sitcom called 'No, Honestly' in which Pauline Collins papered the living room, carefully pasting the paper around the pictures while they were still hanging on the wall, 

I painted our bedroom (while Himself was away - 'no, please leave the painting, I'll do it when I get back,'). I couldn't bear another moment of living with the wallpaper. Of course the furniture was too heavy to move so I just painted around it. This was about thirty years ago.

Well, all went well until about twenty years ago when we rearranged the furniture...

You can see why that awful, depressing wallpaper HAD to disappear! But now I see it every time I enter the room, but at least it is in a dark corner, and not visible once I am in bed.

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I have finally got round to making some sauerkraut, the first this year. I use the recipe on the BBC Good Food website, but I'm more generous with the caraway seed and peppercorns. The ramekin and clingfilm is there to act as a weight to encourage the cabbage to stay submerged. Now it needs to ferment in a cool dark place for a couple of days. There is a valve in the lid so I'm not anticipating any explosions. I've used 500kg  of cabbage to get half a large jar - best to have plenty of headroom as the sauerkraut has a tendency to make a bid for freedom in the early stages.

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Yesterday I was thinking the cress would soon be ready to eat. 

 

Today it was all lying down in despair. Maybe it heard me. I have given it plenty of water and am hoping for the best.