Tuesday 27th June - semi comatose

 That's us two. Slumped in front of 'trash tv' as I call it... train journeys, antiques, repeats of bake off... but why?

Well, having read the above advice I wandered out into the front garden to take some cuttings from our two overgrown rock roses. We'd been discussing what to do with them... Yoicks! The white one had engulfed our ancient and beautiful fuschia. Somewhere in the depths of the foliage and woody stems I could just make out a few determined Ruby red fuschia flowers. I took my cuttings, six white, and six pink, and then Himself set too with loppers and cut it back to just the main stalk. This took all morning, and he was only able to get it all in the garden bin by chopping the branches into tiny little pieces.

Meanwhile I carried on tidying and watering, and went and made lunch.

We've a strange bare patch in the front flower bed now, (which makes it much easier to keep an interested eye on the comings and goings along the road!) It will be even easier once the other bush is taken down, once the garden waste bin lorry has been.

I tried taking basil cuttings from a supermarket pot basil plant last week. I snipped some likely looking stems and put themin water. Then I divided the massively pot bound original into four and replanted them into a much larger pot. They are thriving,  and the cuttings have all grown roots, so now I have one huge pot of basil and four tiny ones.

Encouraged by this success, I have picked some stems of parsley and put them in water. Fingers crossed they root too...

I have three kinds of mint, parsley, coriander, thyme, rosemary and basil. All except two of the mints started life as supermarket pots.

Tuesday 21st February - an unbelievable day

Why am I describing today as unbelievable?

To start with I came downstairs very early for me - just past 8 am. I vowed to myself I would NOT HAVE ANOTHER COFFEE until after I had written up and sent off the emails from yesterday evening's lessons. It's the only way to persuade myself to get on with them - at the moment those lessons, especially the last one, feel like quite hard work; remember this?

We've moved her lesson to Monday evening now... she's nowhere near as flopped as this, and neither am I, thank heavens. It's the 'learning a new piece of music' phase - many people, including me, find this hard graft. Last time we started a new piece, 'yeah, it's okay, I suppose' became 'this is my new favourite piece' the following week, so fingers crossed this yesterday's piece...

I've also 'decluttered' four book of jazzy piece, posting them off to be used as more interesting sight-reading material than the 'Right at Sight', 'Improve your sight reading' type tutorials. Hands up is you LOVED sightreading new music when you were younger. What, hardly anyone? I am SO not surprised!

I've posted what I neded to post to another friend, and handed over two beginner crochet books for another friend's daughter - hooray! Stuff getting done!

Then, I cooked a lovely couple of pieces of salmon for lunch... in the CROCKPOT! wowsers! I thought fish could not be done in the crockpot, but this is what you do;

Line the base with greaseproof paper in order to be able to lift out the fish.

Put your flavourings in first - a slice or so of lemon, a little onion (I had some spring onions that I thought would do), herbs, sliced up garlic clove, that sort of thing. 

Then put in your fish, preferably in a single layer. Mine were fillets, so I cut then in half, arranged the thick pieces side by side, and then put in the thinner pieces slightly draped over each other.

Add your cooking liquid to nearly cover the fish - water, or water and white wine, or vegetable stock, or vegetable stock and dry cider in my case, with more lemon juice, and leave it alone for either one hour on high, or two hours on low. Check by flaking apart with two forks to make sure it is cooked through.

Oh yessss! That recipe is a keeper!

While it was doing its stuff, I opened my Hobbycraft delivery from yeterday, and made a Spring reath for outside.

 It is the vine wreath from before, and a 'spring flowers wreath' tied on with fine string. I'm going for the 'casual' look.

After lunch it was 'modge podge' time - a bottle of this was also in the parcel. It's a paper glue that lots of the junk journalers use, so I thought I would give it a go.

Here's my front cover; as I plan to use this throughout Lent I thought this was an appropriate picture. 

Here's an experiment with collage, using four different squares of origami paper, near the end of the book. My word, but it quickly becomes a messy process...

And finally, a hurried preparation of two pages at the front, because I will be needing one of them for tomorrow! 

I suspect some flowers may be added to those little Japanese vases on Thursday... 

And now it is time to heat some soup for our supper, before we watch Richard Osman's House of Games...

Why is it that sometimes I am a whirlwind of activity and energy, and on other days even watching tv seems like a Big Ask.... very weird.

   

Thursday 26th January - 5-a-day

 And another day missed! I'll tell you what happened; when I had finished teaching the last lesson of the day I zombied out in front of Antiques Road Trip (yes, really) and played Freecell all evening.

I know that fruit and vegetables is really be what 5-a-day is all about; and my Christmas Smoothie-maker is helping along that road. Along with an attempt to have some fruit and a bit of salad stuff every day.  

I don't suppose you need a designated smoothie maker, but this one is very convenient. I had loaded the goblet with approx 80g frozen 'smoothie fruit mix' from a the freezer, half a small tub of plain yogurt, a small teaspoon of honey and some hot water from the kettle, to take the chill off the frozen fruit. Whizz! and pour! and there's one of my five-a-day!

This isn't the five-a-day I meant in the title though. On Wednesdays I have 5 zoom meeting; 11 am, 3 pm, 4 pm, 5pm, a break for Richard Osman's House of Games and a light tea or supper, and then the final zoom at 6.30 pm. Four piano lessons and one family zoom with my father and my brother.

After that I feel whizzed up and poured out. Back in the old days I used to sit and play 'Angry Birds' for at least half an hour after I finished teaching, to unwind and 'get it all out of my system'.

Now that I am an ex-school class music teacher I can confess to such shocking behaviour. 

I had thought I might try being Freecell, Sudoku, and twitter-free through January... the answer is that this is fine when things go well and I finish the day still unruffled and in control.

However there are some days when it is .... bring on the Angry Birds! (Sadly deleted from my tech now as the ad's became toooo irritating)  

  

Monday 19th November - It's Monday

Monday - Funday? No, but an OK day. A 'Back-to-work' day. I was mulling over how much I had enjoyed being at home Not Working , especially as although I wasn't well, I wasn't exactly ill. I whiled away a few minutes calculating the financial effects of giving up this, that or the other job. Hmm. Maybe not yet. (But soon?)

He gave me a lift to and from the local school in the afternoon, which saved me walking in cold and unsettled weather (he went shopping in between, so it fitted in quite well)

I didn't do quite a full day of teaching, as one poor little mite was unwell and couldn't come. That gave me some time to spend continuing the long-winded process of re-doing the hem of one of the jerseys I knitted; this will be the second time that I have gone through this. A lesson on patience and perseverance. But there's no point in leaving it how it was, if that meant I didn't want to wear it.

After I wrote the last post we stayed up to watch a Joan Hickson 'Miss Marple' last night; '4.50 from Paddington'. One of my favourites; and one of the later ones. There was a smidgeon of 1950s glamour here and there.



We also watched Dr Who - mainly based on Amazon shopping as far as I could make out. Never Pop Bubble Wrap. You have been warned.



There isn't much news - how can there be 'news' every day? I wouldn't life to be Too Exciting.

Today's music was the hottest stuff around in its day - John Evelyn wrote about the composer violinist in his diary.

'Ground after the Scotch Humour'  composed by Nicola Matteis


 

Friday 26th October - What a day!

Capuchin Monkey
borrowed from my music site
www.themusicjuingle.co.uk
drawn by "the artist" and
included by permission (from me)

When you are busy, and when the school term is eight weeks (less one day) long (and I know I have chuntered about this already), and when you have been teaching from 9:45am to 6pm, with twenty minutes for lunch, and a half an hour break between school teaching and piano teaching at home, and when the last four lessons at the school were three beginner recorder classes and one - let's call them the "slowly improving recorder class"








when you reach the end of the teaching part of the day,

Keyboard Snake, also borrowed from my music site www.themusicjungle.co.uk
drawn by "the artist" and included by permission (from me)

and you cook and eat supper (thank heavens for that pulled pot-roast-lamb that I put into the freezer a week or so ago),

and watch some television (Inspector Frost and the Gruesome Granny - suitably "easy-watching")

when you go to bed, and your eyes shut before you can finish the Sudoku (which you are doing because you've left your book downstairs and your Kindle has gone flat so in spite of having upwards of 200 books in the bedroom you can't find anything to read)

then next day you can hardly remember what happened until you start to blog about it!

But that was all yesterday, and today we've spent the whole day in Arundel, looking at this and that and the other. Which is partly why yesterday had disappeared under the overlay of what we did today.

It does seem a bit wasteful, to have your days so packed full that in the end you can barely remember what happened yesterday, let alone last week. That is the advantage of keeping a diary - at least you spend some time reflecting on the events of the day, revisiting the good parts, mulling things over, before they vanish from your mind.  

Saturday 22nd December - The New TV

We have installed The New TV. It has a whopping great 32 inch screen, replacing our old 23 inch screen tv that we bought, oh, seven or so years ago. I remember someone saying "you'd better make sure you close the curtains at night - that's a HUGE screen you've got now and might tempt thieves " when we replaced the even older tv with the 23 inch screen.

This one has been positioned as far away from the settee as we can get, and gleams blackly at us when switched off. The first programme I sat and watched was "Masterchef"; Michel Roux's eyes mesmerisingly huge as he glared at the camera as he demanded "it must be PERFECT". I shrank back into the cushions and prayed that he could not see the ordinary platefuls of "mince-and-veg-and pasta" that we were having for supper, sitting on the settee n front of The Box.

I'm planning to launch a new TV channel (in my dreams) called "wallpaper". You will be able to choose from "cosy coal fire",

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4461572.stm

 "wood burning stove"

http://www.directstoves.com/

 "aquarium",

http://www.worldofwater.co.uk/pages/Setting-Up-A-Tropical-Aquarium:-Introduction.html

"view from the train" (you should position your chairs sideways on to the screen for this one),

http://www.visitsouthdevon.co.uk/information-and-map/train-travel

Actually, I am procrastinating again. I still haven't done anything about sorting out the dining-room.

Tuesday 14th August - mofarahrunningawayfromthings

www.mofarahrunningawayfromthings.tumblr.com




hahahaha - well worth wasting some time on this site!

I had barely heard of Mo Farah, no, let's be truthful, I hadn't heard of Mo Farah until I watched a celebrity special episode of the game programme "The Cube"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cube_(game_show)

where athletes were trying to win money for their chosen charity.

I was vaguely aware that this quiet, charismatic young man was steadily winning - in fact he was the first person to "beat the cube" by completing every challenge with skill and grace and charm.

I think I am now a fan!