Thursday 30th June - Slugs, snails, exploding milk

It is good to finish a grueling month with some small trivialities...

June has been full of medical matters ranging from the mundane - remembering to order repeat prescriptions - to the more extreme - Himself's cataract operations, and decisions regarding major surgery for my 93-year-old father. That last decision proved to be a complete non-event, in retrospect; it was made crystal clear that no surgery is necessary now, or in the future, and things can carry on as they are without any interventions or concerns. Well, what a relief!

The amount of brain space that has been filled with all these goings-on has been considerable. So here's hoping for a restful July...

Yesterday I went out 'slugging', with a torch, at about 10 pm just as we were finishing up downstairs before going to bed. I have a pair of kitchen tongs I bought especially for the purpose, but haven't tried 'slugging' after dark with a torch before. It took minutes to fill a small container with the brutes, picking them off my potatoes, broad beans, lettuces, brussels sprouts, kale... little beasts.

The next question was what to do with my haul. I could throw them over the back fence (into the waste ground, I hasten to add), but they would only come back. I haven't the heart to drown even these detestable slimy horrors into a bucket of water, salt or otherwise, neither do I like the idea of drowning them in beer traps. A friend of mines takes them over the road from hr garden and deposits them in the nearby cemetery; I bet there are hordes of very fat hedgehogs living there. And I overheard two other gardeners discussing the same problem; 'I feed them to the chickens'. 'What a good idea'. I know tht's all very natural but it did put me slightly off the idea of the eggs.

In the end I threw them into the council garden waste collection, as usual. They keep climbing up to the top of the bin, and I keep knocking them back down. I don't suppose this is any kinder than drowning them in beer, but, 'out of sight, out of mind' wins the day. It occurs to me that if I collect them into a cardboard box or container, I can just dump the whole thing in the bin and close my eyes to the problem.

Exploding milk? Oh, that's what happens when you put your espresso cup with just a little milk into the microwave for a mid morning espresso-with-hot-milk and accidentally press the button above the ten second timer. In other words the one minute button.

Ker-boom!

The cup survived, and I have cleaned the microwave.

Now, shall I do a bit of mindfulness meditation (aka 10 minutes shut-eye) or actually do something on the list?

Meditation is supposed to be Very Good for one... 

Monday 27th June - and the weekly round starts again

So far it's Monday afternoon and already three students have rearranged their lessons - one, maybe two changes I can hold in my head, but then ALL the rescheduling bursts out of my brain and I am left without any idea of what I am doing...

So, in other words, a normal week?

I've cooked lunch, it being a Monday (I'm now down to cook on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays, as this fits with my normal teaching schedule). I've discovered that I'm not terribly good at buying the ingredients - I am SO out of practice. The chicken Katsu curry is rescheduled for later in the week, as it turns out I thought of buying the chicken but then didn't. I know I have bought sausages, so that should be ok, and I found a couple of bits of salmon in the freezer last night. There was also half a jar of Green Thai Curry Paste, and I had a tin of coconut milk over from last week, so that's what we had for lunch today;

Green Thai Fish Curry,  for 2,  from the Olive website.

2tbsp Green Curry Paste

400g tin coconut milk

200g sugar snap peas (I used french beans, and pre-cooked them) 

400g skinless fish fillet (salmon, trout, white fish,) cut into biggish bits

fish sauce (I haven't got any)

1 red chilli, finely sliced (didn't have one of these)

 a handful of coriander leaves, chopped (I made do with dried coriander, parsley, and spring onions)

rice, to serve. (Warning - the curry bit doesn't take long, so start with getting the rice going!)

Method

Put curry paste and the thick solid top of the coconut milk in a pan, heat gently until sizzling. Add the rest of the coconut milk, bring to a simmer, add the sugar snaps (or beans!) and cook for 1 minute.

Add the fish and cook gently for 3 minutes or until done. Season with a few splashes of fish sauce. Sprinkle on the chopped coriander and serve.

There was loads and loads of liquid, alarmingly so, but in the end the rice took care of it. 

Very good, we shall be having it again!

We've finished the new potatoes I harvested last Thursday. They were utterly, utterly delicious and I am looking forward to emptying the next tub. What is also interesting is that none of them turned grey after cooking, which is a constant problem for me these days with leftover cooked shop bought potatoes.

Our front garden looks respectable again, thanks to Vicky. She set about the chaos of the border with a relentless sense of purpose, leaving order and clean edges and weed-free earth behind. 'Back garden next week,' she said.

Cooking the main meal at lunchtime (as described above).

I am hooked on Donna Leon's 'Inspector Brunetti' series, set in Venice, starting in about the 1990s. I began with the cheapest book, which was on offer for Kindle for 99p, but now have gone to the beginning of the series. I am so lucky - there are about 31 Inspector Brunetti books!

I keep a map of Venice handy (I could do with a magnifying glass as well)

  and have signed up for duolingo Italian - not that there is much Italian in the books. I can now eat an apple (mangia una mela) and drink some water (bevo l'acqua, or would that be beva?).

One of the students who had rescheduled her lesson today re-rescheduled her lesson, so I did teach her after all. I'm not sure whether that has made things easier or even more confusing for the rest of the week.

 

Thursday 23rd June - In and out of the Garden

 Mostly IN the garden, these last few days.

It would be more sensible to do the pottering in the morning, or the evening, but I have been foolishly doing it in the afternoon. Because - I don't know why because. Things don't always have reasons, or of they do, it might take a while for the reason to become apparent.

I have at last done something with the few remaining cuttings of rosemary and lavender I took last year. I gave several away, and killed some of the others through neglect, but have put the three lavenders and two rosemarys - or was it the other way round? - into posts and now sent them to their probably deaths outside the front door. The front of the house gets full sun all morning and early afternoon, and if we forget to water them, then that's that. We are not very good at remembering... rosemary for remembrance...

I nearly killed myself - figuratively speaking, but it felt like the end was near at the time - emptying a pot of potatoes. The foliage was looking unwell, so I followed the instructions for blight, which are to harvest and save what you can, chuck out the leaves (not into your compost) and see what you get.

I did throw out several small potatoes - a couple went 'squish' and a few more had soft black squidgy spots. I was grateful for my gloves! There are three more pots - one is looking a bit blighted so I will get onto that tomorrow. 

Drawings;

These are from last week, but I don't post them until I have finished both pages.

On Wednesday I entered a shop - pause for a fanfare of some kind - and caught sight of myself in a mirror all masked and behatted and bespectacled. Oh my word - I looked exactly like some mad old serial killer. The lenses make my eyes SO big!

We have invested in a microwave rice cooker and I have been experimenting with rice pudding in it. I prefer it WITHOUT the skin, which means simmering it on the hob and stirring to stop it burning, or microwaving and clearing up the mess when it has boiled over and climbed out of the bowl. This contraption looks promising. 

We are back to sitting under the apple tree again, dark and shady and, most importantly - COOL.

Once of the cats sleeps in this chair in the dining room, and there is great distress if we fail to half close the curtain in the afternoon, as she is then in full sun and has to vacate this preferred spot.

  On Tuesday we both placed a grocery order; he is carrying on with the main shopping, and I do a smaller one for things I want or need. We are trying a system where I cook lunch. our main meal, on Friday, Saturday and Monday as this fits in with the rest of my schedule. It is slightly easier if I think about what I want separately to the main order. This week I shall be cooking chicken katsu curry (wagamama spices kit), meatballs, with extra going into the freezer, and something else which I have made a note in my plans of but can't remember at the moment.

We do have to coordinate our orders to some degree, to avoid overflowing fridge or freezer! His order arrived, as usual, at 7 am on Wednesday (I am still asleep at that hour!) and mine came later at 9.30 - a more civilised hour of the day!  

Ruby Tandoh contributed this to the Ocado magazine back in January; I made it last week, using half quantities and one stock-pot sized tub of Red Dragon Thai Curry Paste. It was definitely chilli hot, but not too much for us.

I will wilt the spinach in the microwave next time, and then I will be able to do the whole thing in the air fryer. This time, the unwilted spinach made a huge heap on top of the other ingredients and would have caused havoc - smoke, fumes and whatnot - from touching the heating elements so I transferred it to the ordinary oven. Live and learn, live and learn...

Monday 20th June - I'm still here...

Last week was a bit 'full-on' so that only necessary things got done, and the rest of the time I spent doing almost nothing.

Himself had his cataracts sorted on Monday and Wednesday, and a follow up appointment on the Thursday, so I was doing the driving too and from the hospital, and also all the cooking, and anything else that he would normally have done.

In between I read trashy light fiction, played freecell or knitted. I did spend two afternoons whiling away the hours between delivery and collection to the hospital at a nearby stately home and gardens, even visiting the shop for buy a Father's Day card. My first visit to shop since February 2023!

Here's a first batch of pictures;

Saturday - I regularly see the starlings jostling on the TV aerials in the morning

Sunday - now the weather is warmer I am trying to remember to drink more often.

Monday 13th June - I took a photograph of these poppies at the Gardens I was visiting,. The colours were glorious.

Tuesday 14th June - I'm hoping the drain will remain clear until Himself feels ready to to pull out the washing machine and clear the filters...

I am due to start teaching after a week off. I have been practicing one of the student's pieces, and somehow added 1200 steps to my wristband fitness thingy without moving from the piano stool. It is an energetic piece... (this is NOT me playing!)

  

Saturday 11th June - A week? A whole week gone by?

 I did put 'update my blog' on my to-do list a couple of times, but.... time passes...

Luckily I can use my daily scribbles to work out what has been going on;

Ah, yes, Friday 3rd June - had morning coffee in their garden with nearby friends. That was lovely and peaceful, apart from when a tray of cups and cafetiere slowly slid off the little table. But we were outside - so no need to worry about carpets, and nothing broke. Although my husband, who tried to save the situation with his foot had to withdraw when his sock filled up with hot coffee.  

Saturday was a 'ziffit' day - they had a special offer for the jubilee weekend, I discovered. If we could find £10 worth of books they would add a whole £5. Of such small treats are many little happinesses born. We scoured the house and managed the minimum £10 to secure the bonus, and 5kg to have a courier collect the parcels. The ziffit rejects have all gone to the British Heart Foundation. That's 2 boxes and five bags of books OUT OF THE HOUSE!

Pentecost; someone posted this William Blake Poem on Twitter;

Unless the eye catch fire,
The God will not be seen.
Unless the ear catch fire,
The God will not be heard.
Unless the tongue catch fire,
The God will not be named.
Unless the heart catch fire,
The God will not be loved.
Unless the mind catch fire,
The God will not be known.

Monday; The herbs in my planter are looking decidedly tatty, so I added some herbs in pot to the grocery order and transferred them into these 'lead' (haha - some kind of ceramic/resin, I think) containers.

I reckon I need some practice at drawing people, so that's what I did. I also did a few more while I was waiting in the queue for a blood test. I try not to stare too hard. Faces are so much easier to draw when half is covered by a mask.

 Wednesday we did nothing. It rained on and off most of the day, the water coming down like stair rods (remember those), bouncing off the pavement and pooling in puddles everywhere in the garden.

Friday was the kind of day when everything you touch or decide to do, or any plans that have been made, change and shift as you go along. Not just for me, but for various friends as well. Very trying.

Ah well - it's the weekend, and a new day, we can all start again.

Sunday 5th June - Jubilee Sunday

 (No, I haven't forgotten that this is also the feast of Pentecost!)

I was thinking back over the Jubilee weekend and I think the little scene with Paddington Bear must be my favourite moment.

I was trying to find an uncut version of the little scene, but never mind. This was priceless.

Monday 4th June - Jubilee and all that

We walked up the road for coffee with friends yesterday, sitting in their garden and watching sparrows everywhere, fluttering here, no there, from garage to garden ornament to fence to tree and back again, busy, busy, busy. Reminds me of that quotation from 'Three Men in a Boat (not forgetting the dog)' by Jerome K Jerome;

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

It is all too regrettably true. 

I haven't walked along our road n that direction for some weeks, and was hoping to admire the jubilee decorations, but there were almost none. I think our little patch must be the only ones who have put on a show; here are ours;

Some years ago I found myself in the disgraceful position of not having any patriotic bunting, and none left in any of the local shops. In the end I cut up a couple of yards (metres? who knows, who cares? y'all know roughly what I mean) of union flag printed waterproof tablecloth and stuck the bigger piees to a length of tape with my favourite 'extremely tacky glue'

Many's the time I've become seriously sticky in a craft project with this stuff, and I can promise you that nothing stuck together with this will ever unstick again. 

Several houses to the left and right, on both sides of the road, put up a show of flags which all seem to be surviving the increasingly blowy weather. I shall be interested to see how it all copes with the promised/threatened thunderstorms due tonight or tomorrow morning.

News seems slight and trivial at home, taking in the bigger global picture. 

News, for us, seems to be emptying the compost bin, clearing the dump of empty pots and sacks of potting compost from behind the bigger shed and relocating the bin, and then replacing the contents. This took several sessions over the course of a week, but the job is done now. 

The events of last week (going up to London for my lung function tests, first meal inside a cafe since March 2020) and earlier this week (his pre-cataract appointment, and me buying my first ever coffee in a cafe since March 2020, and driving a fair distance, only the fifth time I had driven anywhere since March 2020) would not have seemed particularly remarkable or strenuous pre-lockdown. But the total effect, including a follow up appointment over zoom with the chest clinic for me, left us both feeling wiped out. So I spent most of Tuesday sitting on the settee, with a rug on my knees like a granny, because the weather had changed and it was cold. 

My google timeline of places visited in May was quite a change from the solitary red dot in the middle map.

I have plans to spend the waiting time while his cataract operations are underway visiting a place with Arts and Crafts associations. The gardens are beautiful, and I'm hoping the roses will be at their best. Also that the weather will oblige. Hence doodling/copying a few William Morris flower designs. 

Doing the daily scribble-sketches is certainly a way of keeping track on what happened each day.