Sunday 29th March - Lent Inspirations - of wind and waves and weather

Twice in the daily readings I am following in St Mark's gospel this week Jesus has done the 'calming the storm' thing.

The first time, he was asleep in the boat with the disciples, on a cushion - just imagine incuding that detail in the story - when a storm came up.

The second time, in Chapter 6, he had sent them on ahead in a boat, immediately after one of the Big  Spontaneous Picnics with No Preplanned Catering events. (spoiler alert; I've noticed that he's going to do another of these mass meals in a few pages' time).

Jesus was hanging back to give himself some prayer time, but spotted them struggling to row in heavy dangerous seas. We all know the stories - he walks over (how fast can he walk?), they all think he's a ghost, but he calms them down, allays their fears, and climbs into the boat with them, calming things down, both the weather and the panics.

Reading that passage brought immense comfort to me this week - it was the bit where he spotted their distress, hot-footed it across the waves, and climbed into the boat with them for the rest of the journey.

Well, we're all in the same boat together for the rest of this covid19 journey. I'm really, really glad to have Jesus aboard with us.

May the peace of Christ keep everything calm, allay our fears, and surround us with peace.

Saturday 28th March - The Letter Arrives

Oh well, I was expecting it, but it still feels a bit - surreal.

I had a letter this morning from the hospital informing me that I'm in the 'at-risk' category of people, and should stay away from all contact (except my Nearest Dearest) for the next 12 weeks. I reckong thats round about mid-June.

We've sort of been acting as this were the case for a week or so now, but it has all become a bit more Real.

Nearest-Dearest has been getting increasingly twitchy about his foraging expeditions, for fear of bringing uinvited guests home. We shall be fine for the next four or five weeks anyway, and there are friends and neighbours, and hopefully on-line delivery opportunities once things settle down. He's lso old enough to be included in the 'you really out to stay home' category.

At the moment my father seems to be ok for supplies, which is just as well, as if possible we would prefer not to get too close. The sheltered flats where he lives are putting things in place to try and reduce the risks, and he still gets lunch every day - delivered to his flat, rather than all eating together in the dinig room.

We saw each other briefly yesterday, when we handed over a few bits and pieces of shopping that he had requested. 

Meanwhile, life goes on as per the 'New Normal'. Maybe a little less knitting or crochet than yesterday, a little less gardening... At the beginning of the week I managed to extract a decent amount of earth from the base of the compost container, leaving it hollowed out. He's now stirred it all so that everything collapsed into the void, and there's room for more. It was perilously close to Full!

Some of my seeds have germinated;

I saw on twitter that some streets in another town had put bears in their windows - teddy, not live - to create a 'bear hunt' for the familes who go out for along the streets. Good plan, I thought. I suspect ours might be the only bear-in-a-window for miles around at the moment - I wonder if it will become a 'thing' here?

This is the bear I was given when I was about nine years old. It plays Brahms lullaby if you wind the winder, accompanied by a sort of grumbling noise which I think is the mechanism. My friend had a bear just like it, but with a growl instead of a music box. She swore to me that it used to talk to her at night, and I desperately wanted to believe her. 

The other excitement was I taught my first on-line piano lesson this afternoon. I contacted a family that I thought would be happy to be 'guinea pigs' for the experiment, and it went more or less ok - sound quality is rough, but good enough to teach a half-way decent lesson. 

So there we go. The New Normal...

Thursday 26th March - I had a title

I had a snappy title for today's post, but I've forgotten it.

Now, I have remembered to take a picture of the primula that I just managed to save in time;

There. It's fine now, which is a relief! Little happinesses like these make the days chug along.

The solar powered dinosaur has been completed,

and was taken out to strut its stuff in the sun. Leo (one of the cats) came to investigate; she was confised by the disnosaur's apparently random stop-start motion, not realizing that it coincided with her moving around and blocking the light onto the solar panel. But then she's a cat. What does she know about solar power? 

Himslef's unearthed the bigger chess set, not the little one I gave him all those years ago which didn't have instructions, but the bells and whistles and (I thought) better one. It takes half a dozen C batteries - that gives you an idea of its age, so first step was to find a charger that would fit and be the right everything electronical to make it work.

(The meccano car and the jigsaw are lined up as possible next projects)

However it is apparently too clever;  on the easy levels it is extremely simple, and as soon as you choose more serious levels it becomes 'very obscure'. So the hunt is on to find the original 1980s version, all green and red LEDs. And then there will be batteries and chargers to look for...

Now this arrived in the post for me today - a comment from a fellow blogger nudged me into ordering at long last. Not Peter Wimsey detective fiction, but a selection of essays. I'm looking forward to reading it in due course.

Reading and books is getting a little out of hand. I really should get on and finish one of the books I am partway through before I start another, or indeed, buy any more. I'm 90% of the way through 'Tragedy at Law' by Cyril Hare, and the murder has only just happened - but I have no idea who dunnit. There is a butler of sorts in the plot...

 Other than that, everything carries on. The weather improves - colder this morning, but warmer this afternoon, and more has been done in the garden. We're all fine - my father, Himself and the offspring.

My biggest problem is not the fact that I can't go out anywhere, but that I am staying 24/7 in a household where There Be Biscuits. It would be soooo easy to spend my time grazing on biscuits, snacks, nuts, this that and the other. But I am determined to try and end this period weighing no more than when I started.

Wednesday 25th March - Yesterday - the greenhouse

We seem to be moving into a rhythm...

I have a long lazy morning in bed, surrounded by books, drawing materials, browsing twitter, facebook, kindle, bbc news and various blogs on my tablet, while Himself is busy, doing - I don't know, really... I hear the washing machine going, and the dishwasher, sometimes the bread machine bleeps, sometimes there is silence...

Yesterday he took the car to the garage for its MOT, luckily not due until towards the end of next month. Halfway there he had a phone call (handless, or whatever it is called, hands-free, that's it) to say the garage was closing. So he turned round and came home.

That was good news for me; friends have passed on a small plastic 'greenhouse' which their daughter had when she was in student digs. And here it is, apart from two metal grills which are not in shot.

You might notice that there are no instructions... This always reminds me of the time when I was chuffed to bits to have found an affordable but reasonably demanding electronic chess set to give him one Christmas nearly forty years ago. That didn't have its instructions either... he was kind enough to say that fathoming out how to work it was as much of a delight as eventually being able to play chess. So I was pleased to be able to give him another challenge today.

I left him to the task and went to make soup;

After a while the components had moved, and been combined.

I went off and finished the soup, portioning it into pots for the freezer. (Sweat chopped onion, sliced up tired celery, diced elderly carrots in a mix of butter and chilli oil, with garlic and bay leaves Add enough water to cover and leave on low heat until carrots soft. Process and leave very thick - takes less room in the freezer and stock can always be added later.)

(Chilli oil - put a couple of dried chillis in a bottle with decent olive oil and leave for a couple of weeks. It's potent stuff, don't use too much!)

We have several dozen of this little one-portion pots left over from when I used to take vegetable puree, apple sauce, and rice pudding to my godmother every time we visited. I label things for the freezer by writing date/contents etc on a piece of masking tape and sticking it on the lid.

By the end of the day it looked like this - the greenhouse, not the soup;

This picture was taken around 4pm - it will be in full sun soon. There are pots sown with lettuce seeds in there, but all my seeds are pretty ancient (sow before 2017, that sort of thing). We shall see, or not see, in due course.

This is the first of the mystery knit-a-long patterns I'm attempting from the Arne and Carlos blog. I was quite pleased with it; I'd be happier if I had read the instructions properly before I started. It is supposed to be 13 cm by 14 cm. I've managed to persuade it to reshape from 11 cm by 16 cm to nearly 13 cm by a bit bigger than 14 cm. I was going to redo with  better attempt at following the instructions, but then I discovered there are FIVE patterns to knit every week! It's a fiddly business - their patterns only use two colours, and so does mine, but I deliberately bought yarn that changes colour all the time - mustakes ar so much les eesi two spotte.

I've started playing the piano for pleasure again. The daily work of teaching, and also the worries about my godmother over the last year had made me so tired at the end of the day that I had no brain-space for playing the piano. But what to play? Nothing too difficult, nothing too emotional, nothing too easy, nothing too cerebral?

In the end I've chosen a straightforward waltz, Dvorak of 54 number 1, the first on this youtube. The other waltzes are a bit hectic for me at the moment!

I'm also considering Les Anes by Grovlez  which a friend of mine at school used to play - I bought the music but had never properly learned it myself.

Oh well. Today was good. And tomorrow will be as well. All will be well, and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

Monday 23rd March - A Very Good Excuse

I now have the perfect excuse for staying at home all day; this covid-19 business has reached the point where that looks like being the best approach to take.

So, no more gallivanting and gadding about. I'm not that bothered at the moment; ask me again in 12 weeks time...

Himself goes out on infrequent foraging trips, hunting down a carton of  eggs, or some vegetables...

" Stealthily, the hunter approaches the target area, surveying the terrain. Can he slip in, acquire the swag, defeat the self-serve tills and make his getaway before he is forced to interract with any other person? 

Yet agan he returns victorious, lugging a box of cat food, a cabbage, an apple crumble and carton of cat food and even the eggs."

I have created a random samle list of things that I could do

 

from which I might make a selection for the day, and then add other things as they occur, and then colour them in if they get done. If they didn't get done - oh well, tomorrow is another day.
(I should reassure you by explaining that 'have a bath' only got written down for Saturday because I had just had a bath, and that way I could colour it in straight away. We have continued to maintain a high standard of personal hygiene.)

I'm a bit emabarrassed by the state of this plant - a friend gave it to me last week, and I forgot to water it yesterday. I left it in a tray of water all afternoon, and then planted it with some other primulas to keep it company. It has perked up quite a lot - I shall report on its progress tomorrow. Or whenever.

I was out in the garden, ostensibly to get some more earth out of the bottom of our compost bin. That didn't happen - I was distracted by trying to rearrange the various tubs and trivia which were unarranged all round the vegetable area. This entailed moving heavy earth filled tubs arround, and other tubs which had filled with water, and scooping up an accumulation of soil and weeds, and even sorting out the shed! It was one of those 'one thing leads to another' afternoon, and nothing seemed to lead to excavating the compost bin or planting any seeds.

Lovely lovely internet - I have ordered cress seeds to send to the isolating offspring, and some tomato seeds which apparently entails buying marigolds and basil to keep the pests away. And nasturtiums because - I forget why. I think I just liked the look of the packet.

As far as I know everyone is well at the moment. Long may that last...

Boris Johnson is just about to address the nation so I will watch and listen now for as long as I can stand. 

Oh my. That's about the most sensible and sane he has ever appeared on tv.

Sunday 22nd March - Lent Inspirations - (God)Mothering Sunday

For many people will be a peculiar day for all sorts of reasons;

Regular church goers will be missing their Sunday services - not just because for the religious and spiritual conent, but also meeting up with friends. I've not been a regular churchgoer this year - one of my Lent Resolutions was to go every Sunday. cue laughter all round.

Many will be feeling strange because they are not visiting their mothers, or having to just wave at them, hand over a card, and go without giving them a hug or a kiss. My own mother died four years ago, and my god mother died before Christmas. I miss them, but I'm also glad not to be worrying about them now. My children gave me my present and cards when they came last Sunday so I haven't gone without!

I'll be joining with the church fellowship countrywide in putting a candle in the window at 7pm. A battery candle. I don't think it will help matters if all the Christians set fire to their curtains this evening in an effort to promote a call to prayer.

This is the candle we bought my godmother for Christmas several years ago, because she loved candles, but at 90 years old she didn't trust herself with real ones any more. When I picked it up from the corner of her sideboard while clearing her house (she died last year), I was astonished to see how worn the remote control had become - a small gesture on our part had meant far more to her than I had thought. I was touched that such a small gift from us could hold so much meaning for her.

Anyway, Lent Inspirations;

I'm offering the Collect for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity as my 'Inspiration' for this week;

LORD, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

When I first encountered this prayer, I thought it absurd that we should ask God to prevent, or thwart, everything we try and do. It was much later that I discovered the older meaning of 'prevent', as explained by Dr Peter Toon

Here we use a verb Prevent whose meaning in this context is the old one to anticipate, to forestall, to be beforehand with. 

(taken from The Prayer Book Society website.)

So this is a prayer that we may be surrounded by God's Grace, and that this will which will make us continually given to all good works.

I think we shall all have cause to be thankful for the good works of people around us, and I hope that I am able to offer 'good works' in my turn. 

Prayers for all of us, everywhere, however we have been touched by these peculiar times. ('Peculiar' also had a slightly different meaning in the past... I leave that as an internet rabbit hole for you to disappear into sometime.)