Sunday 22nd March - Rehearsing clocks changing

We woke up early, around 5am, and were sufficiently awake that 5.30 felt like breakfast time... which meant that 10am was long past elevenses (toast and jam). Toast meant we could hold off lunch until 12, just, and then a little tea time-ish moment at about 3 and supper at 6.

I'd quite like to stay awake to watch a PD James murder mystery this evening... don't know if I will manage.

Next week the clocks go forward. I don't know if we were rehearsing for next week or for next Autumn; that's too much like hard work to sort out without paper and pencil and various charts. Who cares, anyway? Apart from the cats who don't understand why mealtimes change. McCavity was perfectly happy to have breakfast early today, and Leo confused as to why, when she went upstairs, I wasn't there (because I was getting breakfast downstairs...)

Next week I'm getting a new clock for keeping track of lesson start and finish times. The little alarm clock that sits neatly on the music rack of the piano gave up the ghost last week resulting, in several over-running lessons. New batteries had no effect, and on close inspection (He took it to bits) it seems that the plastic gears have given up. I expect it will arrive just in time for me to set the time and then change it again. 

I've been sorting out what I could call 'the vegetable garden'; actually an array of  patio tubs set out on the old shed base. 'Sorting out the veg garden' became much easier once Himself came and joined me; I stood around directing where the tubs should be and he shifted them around. I only changed my mind once or twice, honest. There was a short-lived difference of opinion as to how many holes should be drilled into the two largest tubs; my priority was drainage, and his priority was ensuring the base didn't split. We compromised. I've sown seeds in some of the tubs, others still need weeding or topping up. 

You may recognise the round tubs from their previous function; they used to be the drums from my junk samba kit!

I've been testing one of my notebooks to assess its suitability for use as a garden journal

It is a bit of a compromise but seems to behave reasonably for fountain pen, pigments pen and watercolour, as long as the paper doesn't get too wet, so I have ordered one. It will have to run from March to March... I can persuade myself that this is OK as Spring starts at the beginning of March.

Saturday 20th March - Equinox. Vegetables. Books. Strawberry Pots

I think one of the best things about these weird Covid times is ordering stuff on-line, and getting deliveries.

I ordered the 'Persephone Books' bi-annual newsletter, and it arrived today so I have been enjoying reading the articles. The bookshop is in Lambs Conduit Street in Bloomsbury, London - a favourite haunt. An hour or so in the shop, followed by refreshments in the nearby Foundling Hospital is my idea of a good time.

 I discovered a cache of Persephone newsletters from 2013-2014 which has been my main reading recently, and decided to order the current one. On the strength of this, I also ordered a couple of Persephone books - second-hand - which arrived today. They are sitting in 'quarantine corner, in the hall, until a few days have passed and I can open the parcel.

My 'graze box' was released from 'quarantine corner' today;

this must be one of the most extravagant ways of buying snacks, but more than half the pleasure is in getting the box through the post and discovering what is inside. Chocolate dip, cinnamon biscuits with afternoon tea, and a couple of savoury nut and crispy thingy selections. 

My Lakeland cutlery organiser box also came today and is in quarantine, especially as I suspect the order was only packed yesterday. There's another happiness moment in waiting...

Spring! Time to think about sowing seeds and so on! It is the Equinox tonight - I'm sure that means something important. Equal day and night. I've had good reason to order a strawberry planter for the plants that have recovered from being delivered as nearly-dead stalks last week and need to go into something more substantial than some pots in the spare bedroom. Also a plastic trowel that can live outside the back door for the unlovely task of clearing up after the foxes (they 'dump' on the grass) and our ancient cats (they 'dump' on top of the soil in the flowerbeds). And another load of seeds for more exotic veg than the ones I have two packets of already.

This year I am determined to have a more serious attempt at following this planting scheme;

 The plan is to have a number of large tubs, each of which will have a spring crop followed by a summer crop of vegetables. Judging by the illustrations and the instructions in 'All You Can Eat in Three Square Feet' it should be simple. I've made notes, and bought seeds, and acquired soil and tubs. I wonder how close my efforts will get to these photographs. Watch this space.

Friday 19th March - Dreams...

 I woke in a state of suppressed rage last night, at about 3am. Someone, I don't know who, had snatched the tea cosy I am knitting out of my hands, pulled the needles out and chucked it in the bin because 'it was just an expensive way of wasting time'. I was so furious that I went to the common room (what common room? where?) which has a grand piano in the corner, and spent two hours alternately hammering through Hanon piano studies at top speed,

and then doing slow, intensely detailed work learning a Schubert Scherzo. This probably to do with a fairly frustrating piano lesson I taught on the Hanon, and other rather more melodious studies, and the Schubert yesterday evening. The student, a teenager (!) has a large collection of  Japanese plush toy snails

which tend to interrupt the lesson at very frequent intervals. 

'Do you like my snails, Miss?'

I used to say something slightly positive about the snails and bring the conversation back to the piano, but now I just say

'No, not really, and I'd like you to play bar 10 with the fingering and rhythm we've just been talking about.' 

Harsh. 

We are all ready for a holiday.

One consequence of the weird dream was that I did sit down and the piano and do some serious practice today; maybe a couple of hours, learning the Schubert - it is SUCH a pretty piece - partly for my own pleasure, and partly to work out how to teach the next bit. One thing lead to another; I can still sort of play the early part of Schumann 'Papillons' - my, that's SO stretchy - Ashkenazy makes it look easy. And I still can't play Fantasiestucke.

The tea cosy - is progressing well;

I'm just creating the lids of the teapots that march round the middle of the cosy. It is a delight to be using the correct yarn, which is in one long piece rather than bits, and on the proper needles. There will still be loads of ends to darn in, but nothing like the number for like the trial version.

The cotton bag I am using to keep everything in is a Japanese 'bento bag', created from a length, or two lengths, if you want the lined version which is much nicer, of fabric three times longer than wide, folded and sewn and turned and hey presto a bag has happened.  

https://tinyhappy.typepad.com/tiny_happy/2016/08/tutorial-lined-bento-bag.html

I'm over the dream rage now - maybe a brief spell in the garden in the afternoon sunshine was the final part of the cure. I have sown sunflower seeds, and savoury seeds (sounds like they should grow into canapes, but it is a herb) and cucamelon seeds. They are all upstairs in a spare bedroom - hopefully I will remember to water them. Cucamelon?

Melothria scabra, also known as the cucamelon, is a vine grown for its edible fruit. Fruits are about the size of grapes and taste like cucumbers with a tinge of sourness. Vernacular names include mouse melon, Mexican sour gherkin, cucamelon, Mexican miniature watermelon, Mexican sour cucumber and pepquinos.^[1][2][3]

This plant is native to Mexico and Central America,^[3] where it is called sandita : 'little watermelon', from sandía : 'watermelon'. It is believed to have been a domesticated crop before Western colonization of the Americas began.

Not something I have come across before,. They were a Christmas present, and We Shall See what happens...

Also broad beans; four seed, one in each corner of a container outside.

Spring is here at last! 

 
 
 
  

 

Sunday 14th March - Tea cosy day and Polish Cake

 Some people might have thought this was Mothering Sunday - which it was. Or someone in particular's birthday. Which it was.

Both of these occasions were celebrated in the morning with breakfast in bed - I brought it up as a birthday treat, we both enjoyed it as our respective treats.

Both occasions were celebrated with presents and card, and later in the evening by a zoom call with the offsprings. Excellent!

But, in the afternoon, I darned in the half dozen remaining tails of yarn still straggling out of the back of the tea cosy, made two lines of stitching either side of the 'cut here line', and then did the actual for real first time ever 'cut along the line'.

I folded back the flaps and stitched them down (not my best stitching, sadly) and - hey presto - a tea cosy.

There are no pictures of the process because I was so involved in what I was doing that I forgot to take any. It was less of a 'hey presto'  and more of a 'hey adagio' thing - it took most of an episode of 'Morse'.

The final instructions are to 'block' the tea cosy, which means wash it and set it to dry over a domed bowl. The colours have significantly improved with washing - the sort of dusty pink, dusty fawn and dusty blue shades of the ancient yarn (unravelled from an old sweater by my godmother in an mistaken act of thriftiness) were those muted colours because they were - dusty. Or, to be truthful, a bit dirty.

You might be able to make out my six-cup brown teapot, (perched on top of another bowl to get the required height) acting as the 'domed bowl'. The cosy is far too big for it - I might give it to the church kitchen for one of their 'institutional' size teapots.

This teapot, my two-cup size, is the one that needs a tea cosy.

I have cast on the 144 stitches of finer, real Shetland yarn from the Shetland Isles (2 ply instead of 4 ply) on smaller needles (3mm instead of 4mm) and am hoping for the best.

No other news, apart from this;

Polish Cake also called Biscuit Cake or Fridge Cake

(I don't know if this is Polish as 'from Poland' or polish as in 'gets polished off very quickly')

Melt together 4 oz butter, 1 1/2 oz cocoa powder, 2 oz caster sugar, 1 heaped tablespoon golden syrup.

Crush 8 oz rich tea biscuits into smallish pieces but not into powder. 

Stir the biscuits into the gloop and mix well so that all of every biscuit is covered.

Press firmly into an 8 inch round tin or equivalent 

Melt 4 oz plain chocolate (100 grams is fine, I found) and cover the top of the biscuit mix

Chill in the fridge, serve in small squares, no more than an inch across.

My mother used to make this on special occasions - I can't think why it was thought to be so extravagant and special because the ingredients are not all that expensive, and it is one of the easiest things to make. I used left over speculaas biscuits which gave this a wonderful flavour, a little like the lebbuchen we didn't manage to buy at Christmas time.

The batch I made last week was gone before the weekend, so we had to make do with Birthday Chocolates (don't be sad for us, they were very, very good). Once I have finished typing this post I'm going to use up some more of the speculaas biscuits - it was a very big packet!  

Friday 12th March - Tulips

  A couple of days ago a box of tulips and a mother's day card were delivered

This evening most of the buds have opened and they are looking lovely. Thank you very much indeedy - you know who you are! I shall be enjoying them for a while yet.

The white vase was given to me, along with a dozen yellow and red roses, by Himself way back in 1978 to encourage me while I was studying for finals at university. We both knew that maths at university level was a bridge too far for me - I scraped through by memorising the theorems so that I could write them out for the first part of the question, and then I would make an effort to apply said theorem to solve some problem or other - inserting likely looking figures into the equations and doing things to them before moving on to the next question... I got a 2i or 2ii - can't remember which now - only because it was a joint subject degree with music. The flowers undoubtedly helped. Anyway, I always remember the pleasure I felt at seeing the vase and flowers all those years ago when I get it out.

Here's the rug I was talking about a couple of posts ago;

The plan is to cut and stick a number of these rugs together to form a floor covering of sorts for the bedroom. It has a much more luxurious pile than we were expecting, but we're not complaining!

'Visible Mending' has become 'A Thing'; there are loads of posts and tutorials and articles all over the internet. I thought I'd give it a try... here's a repaired tea-towel. I rather like the effect, and it is a lot easier than trying to do invisible mending.

I've been shredding bank statements and credit card bills. It took four sessions over two days, (to give the shredder a chance to cool down!) to get rid of 2010 - 2015. I have a horrible feeling that somewhere upstairs, at the back of a cupboard, I will find the previous twenty years. I store things in boxes like these, usefully and truthfully labelled. Someone out there knows me too well.  

I have five boxes like these - I can't remember what the pink ones are labelled, nor hat it is them. It will be a surprise for me next time I go looking.

I was a little sad that the flowerbeds are so bare. We did try and plant tulips back in the autumn, but the beds were so full of flowers that it was a job to find any space to plant them. Now, of course, when the plants have all been cut back and all is bare, not the time for planting bulbs. Then I had a brainwave; Sainsbury's sell pots of tete-a-tete narcissi (narcissuses?) so I asked a friend to buy me 8 pots. I am hardening them off, and will plant them next week in the garden.

We've also bought a rosemary herb plant; meant to go on the windowsill and be used for cooking, but I've put it in a bigger pot and that too will go in the garden next week.  

I have a feeling they are all still outside... but it is 9pm and raining and I'm not going out now. So hopefully they will cope tonight...

Were you hoping for real news? There isn't much, these days! We chug along from day to day, watching the world go by....

Sunday 7th March - Day of Rest

 It is very quiet here this afternoon.

There was a little flurry of activity this morning, when IKEA unexpectedly delivered half a dozen cheap (Very cheap!) rugs. We intend to 'cut and paste' them into a uniform surface for the bedroom floor, replacing a horrible mixture of floorboards, rugs and remains of ancient carpet in due course.

Receiving the rugs was not a big event. Breaking into one of the tightly wrapped rolls took some determination, but we proved to be stronger than the polythene and our reward was to see the rug spread on a patch of carpet/floorboard/rug. I think it will look good when they are all joined together.

No, the hard part was finding the double-sided carpet tape. After going through increasingly un-likely shelves and cupboards, checking the shed, standing in the middle of the floor and pondering, it was discovered in a pile of boxes waiting until their quarantine time had elapsed and we could open them.

People may wonder why we have put up with the bedroom carpet situation for nearly 40 years... that's because you don't know that in our first house we were too broke to replace the living room carpet,. where the pile had completely disappeared and all we were left with was black rubber. 

In our second house we discovered that the bedroom carpet, (a pretty, but very old fashioned pattern of pink roses on a cream background) turned out to be cunningly arranged offcuts from the sitting room, and the narrow strip between the bed and the window was just a series of square carpet samples laid edge to edge. 

Our third house was brand new; vinyl tiles downstairs and chipboard upstairs. We eventually put new carpets everywhere. Oh my, we felt like millionaires. Or maybe like 'normal' people.

Here, our fourth house, there were so many things that were a priority - re-wiring, replacing the dangerous central heating system, getting rid of the truly hideous living room carpet which was the same as the worn and dangerous stair carpet, replacing the rotten windows with double glazing, repairing the drive and so on and so on, that our bedroom carpet was very low on the list. Ah well. Cut and paste seems like an easy option now.

There has been a complete mix up with my vegetable and flower seeds order, with the result that I now have over 4000 seed to plant; I ordered red lettuce and green lettuce and cut and come again lettuce and spring onions and spinach and nasturtiums and sunflowers and savoury to plant next to broad beans to discourage aphids.

At the last minute I added a packet of sweet peas and deleted the special offer strawberry plants and the free delivery offer had expired making the strawberry plants very expensive.

As you can see I received two packets of everything except the sweet peas, and no broad beans. Maybe I forgot to order the broad beans. And also a separate delivery of five strawberry plants. 

I can see that my little vegetable patch consisting of about ten large containers is going to be insufficient for all these lettuces. I can't work out whether I have paid for ALL these packets, or half, and I don't think I can summon up the energy to delve through the paperwork. It would be quite fun to hand out lettuce seedlings to unsuspecting passers-by... 

The tea cosy saga continues...

I have darned in another 80-ish ends today already - not even tea time - and yes, I did start counting them. There are about 35 left to go - yes, I did roughly count them. Then it will be time to Cut The Steek.

To be continued...

  

Thursday 4th March - Spinning like a top

 Or maybe discombobulated would be a better word to describe the week so far?

There were things to get done; on Tuesday I went for the routine 12-weekly blood test, which means driving a shortish distance to the hospital, and then a long loop home in order to keep the car battery charged. 

That doesn't seem like much, but, for people living such an entirely sheltered life like us, having the engineer in the house yesterday, and then being in a series of corridors and waiting rooms with strangers at the hospital on Tuesday was curiously overwhelming. We sat about like 'old' people. Oh, hang on a moment...

Wednesday passed fairly quietly - I taught three piano lessons and a theory lesson and all went well.

Then Thursday was like a three-ring circus. 

It started calmly enough - I left a message at a hospital department in London with someone who had been playing telephone leapfrog with me for a week or so regarding an upcoming appointment, 

and then I phoned a former piano student as I do every Thursday - we had a good natter - 

but then there was a ring at the door and it was another friend, also a piano student, come to collect some music I passing on to her, so telephone friend and I said goodbye and I chatted to music friend,

 until there was another telephone call, this time from the leap-frogger, so I said goodbye to the music friend and gave my attention to leap-frog lady - are you still with me?

Her message was 'had I received a letter about my next appointment on 4th March?' and I replied 'no' and she asked 'can you be ready for a telephone appointment at 1210 on 4th March?' and I said 'yes, that's today and it is already 5 to 12 so we'd better stop this call!' which we did. 

I went to the kitchen to retrieve the paperwork - I keep it all stuck to the front of the fridge otherwise who knows where it would end up? - where Himself  was in the final stages of doing lunch, ready to dish up around 12.15. 'Oh!' he said. 'Ah. Um. Right. Let me think.'

I took the paperwork, and actually found the important letter and discovered it was meant to be a zoom appointment - how had l missed it? Never mind. I had one telephone 'on hold' ringing the GP to see if I could get hold of the blood test results, the other ready in case it turned out to be a telephone appointment, and meanwhile got myself logged in ready for a zoom appointment. The 'ready' telephone rang - another friend (I had a lot of friends yesterday!) asking if I had enough brochures for the World Day of Prayer Service - yes I'm fine, no I don't need any - then I hung up on the doctors who weren't going to answer, and - click click - the zoom appointment started...

needless to say I spent the rest of the day doing as little as possible - after all I am quite old these days!

Monday 1st March - the Toughest Day

 It's not Monday 1st March that is my toughest teaching day, it is any Monday in term-time!

And now, at supper time, I can slowly let myself relax, settle, wind down, slow down...

These days my maximum number of lessons on any day is four, and the most in-a-row is three. However did I manage to teach between ten and thirteen lessons every day, just a year ago?

The amount of physical, mental and nervous energy consumed varies hugely from lesson to lesson, it just so happens that Mondays are 'expensive' in terms of energy demand, which is why I end up more or less incapable of speech, movement, or any intelligent thought. There is a risk that today's blog post might be just a whinge if I'm not careful! I think it is trickier to deal with these lessons over zoom - being a physical presence in the teaching space one can accomplish so much with facial expression, body posture, which is completely ineffectual via a screen. 

There was the occasion that a student carried on playing, paying no attention to the points we had been discussion, so I just started playing 'chopsticks' on my piano at home... her face, when she finally stopped murdering a piece of music and looked up...  

So, if I have only taught four piano lessons, what else has happened today?

The Dolby Vivisol engineer came to do the routine service on the oxygen concentrator that sits close to my side of the bed, which I use at night. That has exercised our combined planning skills for a few days. In the end we opened all the windows, closed off the doors to the downstairs rooms, and spread a towel over the bed and my bedside table. He came, masked and gloved, and was escorted upstairs and watched minutely to check which surfaces he touched. After he had gone, the towels were put in the washing machine and all surfaces wiped. were we too fussy? No, after all he goes from house to house all day.

He is only the second person who has stepped into our house since March last year. The other man was - the Dolby Vivisol engineer, six months ago, for the routine service!

There have been a few deliveries, (it's His birthday quite soon) and various jobs completed around the house. Knitting has happened, and a bit of baking (Apple Scone pudding-ish sort of thing to use some apple discovered in the freezer).

Apart from that.... oh, the tea-pot cosy has moved on a few rows. Well, to be truly truthful, it will have moved on a few rows by bedtime!