Sunday 2nd April - of flowers and fudge and other things

This week I saw the first flowering of Lady's-Smock, also called Cuckooflower;

I've deliberately snitched a blurry picture from the web, because that's how I see it - in drifts of pink in sunny patches along the lanes as I zip along from one place to the next. Every year I struggle to remember its name... although it didn't take me quite as long to get there this time.

I've been seeing primroses for a while now, and today I saw great drifts of cowslips along the grass dividing the hither and thither sections of a dual carriage way. "Primroses," I said to myself. "No! The first cowslips!". Other travellers must have been able to notice them for days already, as they were well in flower.

Celandines, daisies, dandelions, wood anenomes... this past week's weather of alternating rain showers and sunny afternoons has done its work on the Sussex countryside.

I've been forgetting to bring in my seedlings overnight, but they have survived, so yesterday I shoved them into planters in my growing vegetable plot.

How about that shadow for showing for the strength of the sun at midday today? The green sack has 9 pak choi seedlings, I've added another four lettuce plants to the black planter next to it, filling the space not used by my broad bean plants. 

 The brown planter has two more broad bean plants and a tangle of radishes, and the remaining black planer just has four sad and spindly brussel sprout plants. I've been using loo roll and kitchen towel inners and various cardboard cartons as pots to start my seedlings in, so that I can just put them into the planters without disturbing them too much. The earth was surprisingly warm - I'm glad the cats haven't discovered that they are excellent sun traps.

The next load of seedlings are on a window ledge. This morning, the spinach seedlings arrived - the beetroot and spring onions are taking a little longer.

What of the fudge? We went to Arundel for a belated Mother's day out, taking No 1 Daughter with us, meeting up with No 1 Son (that's how come I saw all those cowslips).

Well, hey, what do you know! Roly's fudge is back - it disappeared for a while which was a great loss as far as we are concerned. We went on a little walkabout round well-known haunts. Every restaurant that looks at all appealing was fully booked, but in the end we found an outside table at "Belinda's"

 

which to begin with seemed a "not-so-good" idea - it was still a bit chilly. As time went on, tea arrived (large teapot accompanied by large pot of hot water, trademark willow-pattern blue-and-white chine) and battered cod and chips and salad arrived, and the sun arrived.

Then we walked further on to create space for more; Spark's Yard is a favourite.

http://www.sparksyard.com/

It wasn't gift wrapped like the picture... inside it is full of everything you never knew people wanted to buy. Once you see it, of course, it all becomes "wantable". We escaped with merely a silicone washing up thingy which we thought would be good for grooming one of our cats. It's a sort of brushy kind of thing - ours is blue and rectangular and only one, unlike these examples which appear to be like flowers and come in threes. I suppose I could always have dug around in my handbag and photographed the actual thing.

Why would that be more effort that hunting around on the web for a picture?

Roly's fudge.

I was coming to that. I was very restrained - I sampled the strawberries- and-cream and the clotted-cream - twice, to make sure. I didn't need to taste the salted caramel. I abhor salted caramel. Then I bought one small piece of each of the maple-pecan, butterscotch, and coffee-walnut flavours. I left the shop at that point, leaving the rest of the samples in peace, and the others to choose what they wanted, and BB to pay. It's a very small shop and I was just in the way.

Time to go home - Mother's Day complete.

Wednesday 13th January - Surprise

This came from Holland for me yesterday -

What a lovely surprise! How lovely! Thank you very much. I know exactly what to put on the dish - the last of my Christmas chocolates. Did I mention that one of my New Year's Resolutions is to eat chocolate at least once a week? I've done that for several years now and always kept it.

I've counted the chocolates, I mean MY chocolates. There are 16. And I will be counting them again when I get back from work this afternoon. Just saying. In case anyone has any ideas.

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 - Advent 22

I've just finished today's tea - "Full-on Breakfast Blend". It may be the evening rather than breakfast-time, but it has been a fairly full-on day.

First on the list was a replacement headlamp bulb, fitted at Halfords. It's quite a tradition in this household of having things break in the few days before Christmas. I know that the usual cliché is for the Christmas Tree lights to fail, but that has only happened once to us. Other years it has tended to be more dramatic. Like the fridge freezer going into melt-down on Christmas Eve. (There is no pun in that sentence, by the way). Or the cooker going off, and I mean OFF, with a bang on Christmas Day, just as we are getting the turkey out to rest, and winding the oven up to High for the roast potatoes. So a replacement headlamp bulb - that doesn't count as a Christmas Crisis at all.

What was worrying me slightly (nay, considerably) was that I still hadn't bought presents for various members of the family. By the end of today, I've only got one left to buy. I wonder what I will get for them? At the moment I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA, which is more than a little bit scary. (I could turn this into a competition, with prizes, but, sadly, "answers on a postcard" will arrive too late).

Anyway, thanks to yesterday's enthusiastic shopping, I've plenty of wrapping paper to wrap the missing presents once I have bought them. Whatever they are.

One lovely surprise came this evening. For me! We came home to find a delivery card pushed through the letter box:

"behind the big woods in your garden" - no, we don't own a few acres of woodland or a small forest. But we do have a dismantled shed, leaning up against the fence, waiting to be mantled.

The "pack" turned out to be a Fresh Flower Card - carnations and Christmassy bits and pieces arranged in a little block of oasis, and a dinky little pipette for me to water them with. I'm properly happy - thank you, thank you, BestBeloved.

Thursday November 26th - My Bestest Thing

I wanted this from the minute, no, the very second, that I saw it. Do you remember those multi-colour selector biros that used to appear in Father Christmas stockings? This is a Very Superior multicolour coloured pencil selector, with a properly engineered clutch mechanism like Good Mechanical Pencils (not the cheapy plastic ones that come free with Killer Suduko booklets).

And the packaging. Oh my word, the packaging. No-one can do packaging like the Japanese 





I've already used it to "improve" one of my birthday cards.

 



So that's two secrets that are out now. It's my birthday.

And I am a stationery nerd.

Friday 12th June - National Kindness Day

This has been quite a hefty week of teaching. It's probably the first week since the beginning of May when I have taught every lesson in my timetable (apart from one piano lesson on Friday evening). Thinking about it, I have taught extra lessons this week because of the various music exams looming on the near horizon.

Friday was full-on, with extra lessons in the morning and then a hectic afternoon getting three classes of year 6 children to play "Frere Jacques" on boomwhackers,

At the end of the day I was standing in the classroom trying to summon the energy for the next task - replacing the ten tables I had stacked to the side at the beginning of the afternoon, and setting 30 chairs back in their places.

A pupil from another class appeared with this:

It's a Thank You card, with a lovely long letter inside thanking me for teaching her to play the recorder. Today is National Kindness Day, and the children in her class were asked to choose someone who had helped them, and make them a thank-you card. She chose me!What a lovely present; made all the difference.

Saturday 10th January - Flowers

These arrived for me today from my brother and sister-in-law. What a lovely surprise. I'm looking forward to watching the buds appear and the little papery-white flowers emerge.

For my birthday and Christmas, I ran out of things to say when people asked me what I would like. It didn't seem sensible to answer "a Bosendorfer Concert-size Grand Piano and a house big enough to put it in", so I said what I would really like would be flowers.

And I was much, much 'righter' than I realised.

My birthday flowers from my parents give me endless pleasure; they arrived like this one cold Autumnal evening. A camellia on the left, and Christmas Rose (hellebore?) on the right. The huge white blooms are giant plastic roses that my father stuck into the pots "to make them look more interesting"!

I have since removed the roses to the back garden where they are looking surprised, stuck into a patio tub full of weeds.

Just before Christmas I re-potted the birthday plants into slightly larger pots. The camellia is covered in huge buds, and I have already had two bright red flowers come and go. The Christmas Rose was totally pot-bound. It responded to its new home with great enthusiasm, and now looks like this.

 

For Christmas my father suddenly appeared with a pink cyclamen and a pot of stubby green hyacinth shoots. The cyclamen is now just beginning to fade, but the hyacinths are looking grand. This must be the first year that I have had hyacinths that stand up more-or-less straight.

In the garden, as well as the plastic roses, the Christmas Day snowdrops (so-called because they tend to arrive just in time for Christmas Day) are looking 'blooming'. I've even found a couple of flowers on the little rosemary shrub. 

A few flowers just makes all the difference to a dull and manky grey, dreary day.

My next job is to deal with a bucket of sprouting bulbs found lurking in my parent's garage. They are moving soon, so he didn't want them. I might evict the weeds from underneath the roses and put them in there. I wonder what kind of bulbs they are...

Thanks, everyone.

Tues 26th Wed 27th Thurs 28th November - Birthdaydaydayday

It's been my birthday - in fact it's been my birthday since the first present arrived, neatly positioned beside the planter on the front doorstep, at the end of last week. (Note to self - write thankyou note). I didn't open it until the real birthday.

Unlike the presents I receive from my Favourite Daughter on Sunday afternoon - it seemed a shame not to open them while she was there, so I did.   Open them early, that it.   fab - a book from my wish list, (Note to self - update relevant page on blog) and other goodies. We also had cake.

Cards and flowers arrived on Monday

and more presents (books and chocolates and flowers and other treasures) and cards on Tuesday from Best B and Number One Son and friends, (note to self - update the pages on my blog again).

Yet more presents from my parents and my Uncle and Aunt over from the Netherlands when we took a Chinese meal round to share with them on Wednesday. (chocolates, baklava, an amazing oil lamp, and, oh wow, a battery operated bubble-blowing gun. (I saw these at Niagara Falls and was very, very taken by them! The children had them, and the bubbles floated past, lit up by the floodlights trained on the falls. I don't have any pictures of the bubbles, but it's an excuse to post memories of the Canada trip from this Summer...)

It's Thursday, and it's STILL my birthday! A card from someone at work, and tonight there was cake, and a candle, and cream!

 

So, a lot going on these last few days, and not much time for posting.

 

 

Saturday 23rd November - Thanks, Norton

A small flag appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of my laptop screen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Norton has tuned your PC"

         Thanks, that's great.

















Could you do the piano, the guitar, the ukulele and the cello for me as well?

 

pictures all from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_tuning





Saturday 16th November - The full moon through the trees

This evening, as the light faded and day became night, I watched the huge, pale moon, lightly veiled in wisps of clouds, bobbing and weaving between the bare branches of the trees.

We were in the car, driving home. Depending on the lie of the road, the moon sometimes appeared high above the trees, shining through the inky sky, sometimes low, barely above the hedgerow. Sometimes to the left, sometimes dead ahead.

It brought back sharp memories of this time last year. Most evenings, at about 7pm, as soon as I had finished teaching, we would leap into the car and rush the twenty miles to the hospital in order to snatch an hour with my mother. Then we would return to a ridiculously late meal, usually around 9pm, before falling into bed, to sleep before the alarm went at 6 am the next day. This was our routine until she was able to go back home in February this year.

A year ago, my mother wasn't able to eat or drink normally. All fluids and food had to be thickened to a kind of paste and fed to her using a spoon. She was very confused, in a lot of pain, confined to bed, unable to even sit up, and pretty much completely helpless.

What a contrast, between then and now. Today we spent a pleasant morning in the brisk Autumn sunshine pushing my mother around the town, looking at the market stalls and searching for a winter hat (we found a lovely soft cowl which does double duty as hat and scarf). Then we went to a local restaurant for lunch, before going back to the residential home where my mother is staying for a week's respite.


The same moon, the same inky-blue sky, the same bare-branched trees. A new year.

Sunday 8th September - Canada Part 1

We've been on holiday!

Staying with friends in Canada! Again! 

If I were to blog about EVERYTHING that we saw and did, then there would be a zillion blog posts. So here are just some highlights. This post is all about Niagara.

 

The top of the Canadian Horseshoe falls at Niagara. You can stand really, really close to the edge.

and then the water just plunges over

 

 

 

The Canadian Falls from further downstream. You can just see the rainbow.

The American Falls are a little downstream from the Canadian Falls 

Then all that water goes thrashing through a narrow gorge

In a wild bedlam smashing thunder of chaos

Until it meets a sudden check, and turns right, causing a giant whirlpool.

If you are brave, or mad, or crazy, you can take a ride over the whirlpool in an antique open cable car. We didn't.

O wow! It is a totally all-encompassing experience. The noise, the sights, the - the - the -

no words really. 

Thursday 4th July - Getting ready for Winter Sports

In my work as a peripatetic music teacher, I have had some pretty testing experiences as I drive around the county from one school to another.



http://www.avis.co.uk/blog/driving-winter/

I've been cross-country ski-ing in my car. I was the one in the lead, creating the tracks through virgin snow along the route of the old A3 in West Sussex.


I've been skating in my car: http://boingboing.net/2011/01/19/cars-sliding-down-ic.html
fortunately I had the road to myself. Unfortunately it was up a little hill. Fortunately I had very, very good tyres. Unfortunately there was a line of parked cars. Fortunately I made it to the top without hitting any.


Then I went home and recovered.

I've been swimming with my car. Several times. I've been luckier than whoever this poor motorist was - my car never actually drowned but my word, it was scary, scary, scary. 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/2005-06-07_Car_died_in_puddle.jpg



Now I can inform you that there will never be any seriously bad winter weather in West Sussex ever again. That's because I have just been given a folding snow shovel and a pair of snow socks for my front tyres.

 

. 
In July. Now that's what I call thinking ahead.




Wednesday 15th May - A Very Good Day

8:00 Set off for a school for the first music lesson of the day. Time to chat with co-teacher before

8:45 teaching  ukuleles. Lively lesson. Taught song "O you can't put your muck in our dustbin" to the general approval of 40 children aged 7 and 8 years old.

9:30 lesson over, time for a cup of tea and to review the lesson with co-teacher.

10:00 off to local hospital for routine blood test. Arrive at
10:25 - nice clear run. Found a parking space! Amazing! Had enough money for just 1 hour. Hope that's going to be enough time, cross fingers and find 20 in queue for blood tests. Oh dear. Get a letter written, and a couple of music lesson reviews written up (rather a backlog to catch up on). Queue moves along rapidly, an I'm done in plenty of time.
11:15 Drop in on rehab ward where my mother was; am recognised, the nurses are very kind and ask after both parents and also my cooker!
11:25 Head back to home town, park by post office sorting office to post blood sample (it's for a drug trial I am in) and letter. Find I have half-an-hour in hand, so lurk and update another couple of lesson reviews - a finished!)

12:00 Arrive at parents' flat, ready for an outing - my usual Wednesday schools have cancelled because of SATS testing so I have the rest of the day off. We have planned an outing, but the taxi has been held up - we are told it will be an hour late. No matter - we still have plenty of time, and chat and exchange news.

13:00 We begin the process of getting from the 3rd to the Ground floor. I will gloss over the intricacies of wedging one person, the wheelchair and my mother into the miniscule lift and extricating them at the ground floor. Suffice it to say that it's no easy task.

13:30 Taxi arrives, helpful driver can get the wheelchair out of the flat without all the ramps that we usually use, and takes us to local garden centre. Very pleasant lunch in wheelchair friendly surroundings, and time to buy petunias, clematis, birthday cards and a fish slice before heading home.

15:50 Back in the flat. Helpful taxi driver wheels wheelchair up over step and into lobby of the flats, and we once again wedge wheelchair and wheelchair driver into lift, and extract them at the top.

16:00 I'm home, ready for piano teaching. The students are a lovely bunch of people, and the lessons go smoothly, apart from when I am distracted by the cat dashing about on the grass, pouncing on imaginary monsters and killing falling apple blossom petals before rushing up to the top of the tree and disappearing into the leaves. "Er, could you just play that phrase again, please?" as I gather my scattered wits.  

yeah. That's the Mad Cat that was running around as if the hounds of hell were after her

18:30 Finished teaching. Supper. Television. Blogging. Thinking over the day. Even the sudden appearance of a HUMUNGOUS spider from under the fridge can't spoil a good day. Although I wish we HAD caught it and thrown it into the garden, but when the shutter made its electronic clicking noise it bolted back under the fridge again. I may not be quite so happy to see it next time it comes out. It's no use hoping that the cats will deal with it. They'll just leap for safety on top of the cupboards. Wimps.

19:00 While pasta is cooking, unpack delivery of amazing laundry drying thingamajig from Lakeland plastics. I just LURVE mail order boxes of things waiting for me in the garage.

And in three-quarters of an hour it will be
22:00 Bedtime. Hot chocolate. Good books to read. And then to sleep, which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.   

Saturday 12th May - Reading your Writing

I am soooo grateful that I have discovered Planet Blog. Thank you, everyone, for all your time and effort scouring the Internet to bring me new riches every day. Thank you for your time and effort in getting your thoughts into some semblance of order and rattling away at your keyboard. Thank you for sharing your insights, your sanity's, and your insanities.

I am soooooo enjoying reading what has become my personal daily magazine of news and nonsense. All day, I spend my time in encouraging, facilitating, collaborating, assisting, and when all else fails, TELLING students, en masse and individually how to read music, play music, and even make music. When it is finished, I can sit down and enter an alternate universe, thanks to you folks.

Just thought I'd mention it.

Thanks.

PS; just in case ArchDruid Eileen comes visiting; I have responded to her request and done some titivations to my blog. Hope you like the fish.