Saturday 22nd April - I saw a...mouse?

Well, maybe... yesterday I was charmed and alarmed to see a fairly large mouse running along the wall of the raised flowerbed near the house. It sat on the wall for a few moments before disappearing down the gap between the back of the bed and the fence.

So I spent this morning watching and following a couple of video tutorials on drawing mice, in my 'rough book'. The artists in the tutorials used pencils - I used my fountain pen. I am pretty pleased with the results.

Today, our gardener says she saw a small RAT scuttling along the fence down to the bottom of the garden.

Oh.

Friday 21st April - I have had some sherry. Expect typos

 The last three days have been heavy on admin, and heavy on zooms; only two extra zooms on top the of scheduled 6 piano zooms and one church house group zoom, but it seems that the effect of increasing numbers of zoom sessions is more than one might think. Still, it's the end of the week, and no more zooms until Sunday (church livestream, not really a zoom, followed by two 'chatty' zooms)

I've written up all the piano lessons apart from the two today. I like to leave a day before I write up the lesson - is that laziness at the end of the day? Or a chance to reflect on the lesson? Or maybe both?

I've written up and emailed the notes from the house group zoom, and printed a set to post/deliver to our non-internet member.

And - this is the biggie - I have started gathering together the facts and figures to construct a tax return... the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as far as I can manage.

 It's not been all playing the piano keyboard and tapping the computer keyboard. 

I've been watching youtubes on drawing trees;

I finished my sketch-a-day journal on 1st April, and rather than buy yet another notebook, I decided to use my Commonplace Book for the daily sketches. I've had a series of Commonplace Books on the go for a number of years, to note down poems, quotations, etc etc and this particular book has pages which are able to cope with pen and ink, and watercolour (as long as it isn't too wet). 

Just before Easter I bought the companion book to 'Bored Of Lunch - Slow Cooker recipe book', which is 'Bored of Lunch - Air Fryer recipe book'

I had a go at the low-calorie sausage rolls, made with tortilla wraps instead of pastry. They were pretty good - we shared half for supper, and will have the other half for supper tomorrow. The picture shows half the batch. 

I didn't quite understand the instructions so this is what I did; I used half a dozen decent quality sausages (not the low-calorie ones specified), one egg, three large tortilla wraps.

Skin the sausages, and mix the meat with extra herbs if you like. Divide into three lumps.

Beat the egg to use partly as glue, and partly as egg wash (I wonder if milk would be as good?)

Take a tortilla, lay flat and trim off a little of four edges to square it up a bit. Squidge the meat into a long thin sausage and lay near one edge, roll up the wrap and sausage using a generous application of egg-wash to make sure the thing sticks and stays rolled up. Repeat for other two tortillas. 

Cut each roll into bite sizes - I got about 16-18 pieces - glaze with egg wash and cook for 11 mins at 200C. Not bad. I cooked them on silicone air-fryer liner which you can see in the picture - it sits in the basket and saves on washing up.

Some kitting today - the mitre-square blanket. I am slowly re-doing the cuffs of the socks in order to do a stretchier cast off, and that needs brain. 

No cross stitch - I am short on brain power today, and now that I've drunk that glass of sherry the brain power is going fast.

Thursday 20th April - Half-way - That pesky delete button - Feinman - Asimov - Gardner

 I did some sums as I was feeling that I had A Long Way To Go with the current cross stitch. Hurrah - I'm half-way through - I've done about 800 stitches, and there are two blocks, of 330 and 460 stitches to go. Now it is looking more achievable.

It will be more than this, because my stitching tends to be make a dozen crosses, sigh, un-thread my needle and undo three crosses, thread the needle and make another dozen. Hopefully I will improve my success rate as I continue.

I really must stop trying to publish comments using my phone. The number of times I have caught the 'delete' instead of the 'publish' command is ridiculous. If I zoomed the screen before I started touching the commands that would save me - and you.

So, Jane-from-Dorset, I apologise to you for not publishing your comment which was as follows;

Jane from Dorset has left a new comment on your post 'Tuesday 18th April - Yogurt, Seeds, Quantum Physics':

Yes, do add some skimmed milk powder, it improves the quality of the yoghurt.

The Feynman diagram news sounds interesting-off to investigate as we spent a whole course using these at university.

As soon as one touches 'delete' it becomes impossible to rescue the situation, apart from copying the comments and adding it, but under my own name. Which I have done. 

The picture I found of a Feynman diagram was from a video on youtube. So if anyone is interested, have search. Feynman is mostly beyond me - in the sense that I'm not willing to invest in the time and mental energy it would take to understand the science. But I do enjoy his lighter weight books - I suspect as a personality one would have to consider him as a 'man of his time', but there's no doubting his giant intellect and lively writing style.

The first science writer that really grabbed my attention as Isaac Asimov - maybe better known for his science fiction, especially the Foundation series and the robot stories. But I remember reading 'View From a Height' sub-titles 'a brilliant overview of the exciting realm of science'. I am tempted to get a second-hand copy to see what made such a vivid impression.... maybe not at that price...

 And I leaned from a twitter friend (a real person - I do actually know him!) that you can buy Martin Gardner books - so there's another treat in store for Mathematicians. In fact the bookshop of the American Mathematical Society will let you have a complete collection, including his columns Scientific American for $99. Himself is Very Tempted.

I only managed to sow broad beans - white flowered, and crimson flowered, and peas on Tuesday. It was too cold. It's too cold again today; lovely bright sun, but that wind!

Tuesday 18th April - Yogurt, Seeds, Quantum Physics

 So here I am, tapping out notes for yesterday's piano student; she's spent the whole Easter break having a wonderful time with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and Einaudi and other things, and consequently forgotten how to play the various pieces we were working on for her Grade 7. Ah well. She's playing, and loving what she's playing which is the main thing. They often drop out when they are teenagers because there are so many other things filling their time, and bringing more instant rewards than unwillingly slogging through a Haydn sonata.

Really, I am watching the weather. It is a sunny, balmy morning, with a bit of a breeze. Yesterday I plotted the veg patch and went through my seeds;

These are the ones I want to plant today and I have promised myself that as soon as I finish typing I will be out there, even though the sun has disappeared and the wind is getting stronger. 

Tomatoes and flower seeds need to be started on the windowsills freed up by moving the salvia cuttings.

I've also been making yogurt; Heat milk until boiling, allow to cool to blood heat (just nice and warm when you stick  finger in to test). Put half a small tub of live yogurt into a wide-mouthed food flask and keep stirring as you slowly add the milk. Seal, and leave alone for 24 hours.

The resulting yogurt is rather thinner than I like (do you remember 'drinking yogurt' - not quite as thin as that) so I strain it.

Here's how much I ended up with - about two carton's worth. This batch is the texture of cream cheese, with a pleasantly milk taste.

As for quantum physics - I really don't have a clue. We (Himself and I) as sitting opposite each other at the table, working away on our respective laptops. I thought he was deep into the online grocery order, as he looked up with that glazed expression one gets after scrolling through myriads of little pictures to select the right kind of whatever. But no, his head was full of some recent development in quantum physics to do with solving a problem to do with predicting tunneling events... I was thinking of tunnels under the ground, but this is to do particle physics. We do have some hobbies in common. I can confidently say that this is not one of them.

Still, if this new development renders Feinman diagrams obsolete, does that release me from any obligation to try and learn about them?

Sunday 16th April - The quickest to clean dirt from under your fingernails

 

... is to do the washing up. Confess - you thought I was going to write 'is to make pastry'....

Anyway, my hands are all clean and pink now.

I've been gardening. My gloves were in 'the other shed' rather than in 'my shed', and anyway, I always say I'm only going to do a little bit and don't need my gloves, but as always one thing leads to another.

I've re-potted the salvia 'Armistead' and salvia 'hot lips' cuttings that have been overwintering on my windowsill. The Armistead ones have been flowering (in March and April? madness) and grown too big for their pots, so now they are in an unheated polythene greenhouse and I hope they will survive. The forecast looks hopeful at any rate. I think all the salvias in the flowerbed have died. They are not terribly hardy so cuttings are a good idea. 

And, with the help of Himself, I have tidied and arranged the vegetable 'garden' ready to make a start in the next few days, DV. It's looking like this at the moment (everything is always subject to change!)

Now I need to figure out what to plant where. The nearest pots need to have low-growing stuff, the two big black ones can have tall things and the others - anything, I suppose. The morning sun comes from where I was standing, and the afternoon sun from the left. The pots nearest the fence will be quite shaded - spinach? Lettuce, maybe?

The main idea is to have the rows no more than 2 deep, otherwise I can't manage to reach over to the ones in the middle, as I found last year.

Onwards - to tidy the horrors that you can't see to the left of the picture. Tomorrow, perhaps. 

Sunday 16th April - Contemplation - Meditation - whatever you call it

I host a weekly zoom church home group. If you are not familiar home groups, many churches encourage members of the congregation to join a midweek group for friendship, and also Christian study/prayer etc. 

Our's is not a typical on-line group as three of the members are non-zoomers, so stay in touch by weekly emails about the meeting that they didn't join. Another member doesn't do internet, so I post a copy of the email, and she zooms from a friend's house. It works for us.

Now that Lent has finished, and Easter Day is past, as usual we come to the question of what to do next?

We have decided to take a small chunk - a verse or two - from the Bible, and just sit with it in silence for 5 minutes, before sharing our thoughts. No notes, no carefully prepared questions to answer, no right or wrong answers...  

All the above is by way of introduction to what I am suggesting to you; take five minutes during the day (morning suits me) and contemplate something.

I plan to take one line at a time from The Lord's Prayer, and just think about it, and see where my thoughts travel to, every morning, starting from today. And my thoughts today were to share this idea with you. 

Now, you might not be a Christian - you might not be religious at all.

So, instead of contemplating 'The Lord's Prayer', line by line, you could choose a prayer or story from your own faith. Or, if you don't want to think about religious topics, I could make suggestions; here's a week's worth of hopefully neutral topics for contemplation;

A tree

A house

A fire

An apron

A flower

The sun

A road

Five minutes of slow, silent, contemplation, linking images and thoughts together. Why not give it a go?