Monday 30th September

I've been practicing patience these past couple of days... meeting adversity with a (wry) smile and exercising considerable restraint over my vocabulary.

Why?

I had a promising crockpot crumble coming along nicely yesterday afternoon... due to ready for half past 6. What a pity that I ccompletely forgot about it until we were going to bed...

BB went downstairs to rescue it. 

Once cooled it was clear that the only thing to be done with it was to empty (scrape) the contents into the compost bin and pretend the whole episode never happened. 

Last night, before I bound off the knitting, I measured up the second piece for poncho no 2 against the first side, and discovered that, annoyingly, I had knitted too much. I checked my measurements. Twice. I ripped it back, checked again, and bound off.

This morning I checked again before sewing the two pieces together, and discovered that one piece is 5 inches too short, and the other 8 inches short. How? What? Seriously? 

Undoing a bound off edge and picking up the stitches is a tediously laborious undertaking. So I tried a short cut, just picking up stitches from the cast on edge and seeing how that would work.

Halfway along picking up stitches (using a thinner needle)

One side, after knitting a few rows

The other side

I think I got away with it...

On Friday, driving through rain on our way home from our holiday, just over the Dartford Crossing, the mobile phone rang. It was the housekeeper for the holiday cottage;

 "where did you leave the key when you left?"

"We put it in the keysafe"

"I could only find the front door key, not the back door key."

"Ah." 

It's remarkably difficult to rummage through all one's pockets while driving along the M25 through rain and the spray thrown up by the other vehicles. In the event though not much rummaging was needed as the key was in one of the storage trays by the gear lever.

I did offer to turn round; we were only ('only'!) about an hour away, but luckily she said it would be fine to post it. I parcelled it up while BB unloaded the car, and then he took it straight round to the post office. The 24 hour tracked service turned out to be not very expensive and she let us know she received it on Saturday morning.

If troubles really do come in threes, then that should be the lot for now...

Sunday 29th September

 I read this poem yesterday. At first reading it seemed clear enough; a couple on a walk, pausing to sit on a bench. Perhaps they are walking along the coast path, near the Seven Sisters, a series of chalk cliffs.

And then it started a train of thought about it being a spiritual walk with God, just the two of us together...

Saturday 28th September

Autumn is here! I'm wearing slippers! I was very glad I took these to the holiday cottage; the floors there were all yellow bricks.

You can see the brick floor in the kitchen. Isn't it lovely that they left the old coal fired range, not all that different to the one used every day in the house where BB grew up. Luckily we were provided with an electric cooker, fridge and microwave.

I was reading the latest newsletter written by Austin Kleon, an artist and writer in California, this time on the subject of Autumn;

He has a quotation from Thoreau; "Live in each season as it passes"

And also this, written by Kurt Vonnegut;

Admitted he lives somewhere in the States rather than England. It's still an interesting thought.

Wednesday this week was the middle day of our holiday. In the morning we went out in between the showers for a wander upstream (I think).

A touch of colour; I think is a mallow flower

After lunch the sun came out and we walked beside the river in the other direction 

For a little wile it was really lovely outside. We were walking along the top of the bank between the river and the field stretching to the edge of the world. 

Friday 27th September

We've just come home from an eagerly anticipated short stay in a Landmark Trust Holiday cottage. Their holiday cottages are always very unusual and this was no exception;

Stoker's Cottage, next to an old pumping engine in Stretham, near Ely. Here's the cottage, 

And here's the pumping engine house next door!

The key was hanging in a keysafe in the old privy at the back of the cottage; the privy seat was still there, boarded over. I'm pleased to say that the cottage came with full mod. cons. as they used to say!

On Monday we didn't do anything much apart from unpacking and settling in. We could have enjoyed a lovely fire

but that would have been unwise with all the oxygen equipment around. I was very cosy tucked up under an old-fashioned woollen blanket. 

Oon Tuesday we drove for 40 minutes to Oxburgh Hall, which happens to be 40mins from where Bob and Ang live! We met inperson for the first time ever, and had lun ch together. Ang and I must have talked almost non-stop with Bob and BB occasionally getting a few words in here and there.

We also did the September Cover Collaboration Swap.

Here's my patch

It's a little pen pocket, stitched onto a sample of fabric sent to me by HSL chairs. The pocket comes from a fabric panel of differently shaped and patterned labels in the Downton Abbey style that Ang sent as a flat gift some time ago. I slipped a biro bookmark inside the pocket as a flat gift.

I also took the opportunity to pass on a couple of very heavy books that I thought she would like; Gentle Domesticity by Jane Brockett and Tender by Nigel Slater. I did check to make sure she didn't have them already.

Here's Ang's piece for September 

I knew she was going for something in Autum colours. The design is taken from some beach art created from pebbles collected a couple of weeks ago on a family trip (the day which ended with Bob hurting his ankle and going to A and E , if you follow her blog)

The colours and detail are just beautiful; I recommend you click on the picture and zoom in.

While I was folding the cloth up, I noticed the back; I find is as interesting as the front.

Ang also gave us a very non-flat gift; a lovely box of Norfolk produce including a jar of her own marmalade. 

What a wonderful way to start the holiday!

Thursday 26th September

 There's nothing to beat coffee, not even tea (and I am a tea-drinker too).

But for first thing in the morning  and after meals I'll choose coffee every time.

When I was younger, the other mothers used to turn up at our house after dropping off all the children at school.  It took my mother a while to discover the secret of her popularity (apart from her warm hospitality - she always ran her central heating higher than everyone else!)

Here's a clue;

She always made the coffee in an Italian stove top maker, using freshly ground beans. This was back in the sixties, when everyone else was drinking instant all the time.

At university we drank 'mellow Bird's, to make you smile' instant coffee...

But some years after we were married we bought one of these, in about 1979 or so.

We plugged it in to a timer, so the coffee was ready when we came down to breakfast. Luxury.

There was always the single cup version;

Then came the cafetiere. 

And the single cup version which I tried using at work for a while - too messy, I found.

Now we have one of these

And like nespresso coffee best of all, so much so that we have a portable hand operated version to take on holiday! 

It would be fun to pretend that this is BB rustling up some coffees somewhere in the wilds, but no, this is from the advertisement. 

BB used to have a Cona coffee maker back in the 1960s.... it looks more like the sort of equipment I used at my first job in a laboratory. 

There was a time when people had percolators... but I've never used them. 

Well, I've just finished a delicious nespresso coffee - the arpeggio pod served with hot milk. Thank you very much indeed, BB.

Wednesday 25th September

 I've been having a satisfying time with Wordle recently. I don't do it every day, and I frequently fail, so to succeed in 3 tries, and even, on one happy occasion to succeed in 1 try, is very pleasing. Once, my 'starter word', HOUSE happened to be the right word for the day... how lucky was that? (I doubt it will happen again)

Currently my starter words are HOUSE PLEAT PEACH or PAINT used more or less at random. HOUSE was the 'hole in one' word.

I'm very tempted by this Commonplace book simply because of the title;

So it's been added to my wishlist. Who is Hugh Cawdor? 

I've bought Alec McGuiness's Commonplace book. It's very erudite and literary so far; it will be interesting to see whether it continues in the same manner. 

Tuesday 24th September

 Pairing up socks has been a bit problematical for a while. Last year, or maybe the year before, or perhaps the year before that? BB and I both independently bought socks online from the Sock Shop. They were perfect in every way except that we chose nearly identical patterns. As he has size 10 feet and mine are size 5, the socks were constantly getting mixed up unless we paid great attention when sorting the laundry.

I reckon I have solved the problem with my latest sock purchases; three pairs like this (I'm wearing one)

and three with autumnal woodland flowers and acorns and squirrels on them.

That should work, unless BB gets a sudden penchant for bright red stripy socks...

(It's still too warm yet to start wearing my home-knitted socks) 

Monday 23rd September - My Oxygenated Life

 We're slowly settling down to having the two large oxygen concentrators - one upstairs in the bedroom, one downstairs between the sitting room and the dining room ends of the downstairs room.

Having the oxygen support on long leads has made such a difference. Even apparently sedentary activities such as knitting and sewing used to make me breathless, but now, with just 1 litre per minute, I can carry on without pausing. I hardly ever check my oxygen levels at home now. Just occasionally, like now, I twiddle the settings to 2 l/m, as sitting up and typing on the laptop needs a bit more for me to be comfortable. It's easy to tell; if I can't do whatever I am doing while breathing just through my nose, then I could probably do with a bit of a boost.

So long as I remember to dial it back down again afterwards! Many's the time I've settled down ready for sleep, and realized that a positive tornado of oxygen is whooshing up my nose because the machine's still set to 6 l/m from getting ready for bed...

And so long as I remember which machine I am using; I tend to use the inogen portable concentrator to go from the upstairs machine to the downstairs machine and vice versa, first thing in the mornings or last thing at bedtime. I have been known to switch one machine on, and the other off, but forget to swap cannulas... and then I start getting snappy and bad-tempered as my levels drop until one or other of us realise what I have done. 

Still, we're both getting more savvy, and more nimble at dodging the snake-like coils of green tubing that follow me in my wake. There was a tricky moment the other day when BB was carefully placing his foot at the same moment that I was twitching the tangle out of his way... 

I'm reminded of the 1985 film of 'A Room With A View'; I remember noticing how the women in the film had to 'manage' their long skirts, which all had a short train at the back. Every time they wanted to move they had to grab hold of the back of their skirt and twitch it - just like you see at the very beginning of this clip. Such an impractical and ungainly fashion. Well, that's me now, grabbing hold of the oxygen tubing and twitching it out of the way!

   Seriously though, home oxygen has proved to be a great enabler, and with the cylinders and portable concentrators I am more comfortable than I have been all year.

Sunday 22nd September

 I've chosen just a couple of verses from one of the readings at today's service, from the book of James, chapter 3; 

13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. 

....17 ... the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. 

There's something to aspire to! It's a big 'ask'.

The next verse

18 Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.

leads me to pray for peacemakers working for peace in all wars and conflicts everywhere. 

  

Friday 20th September

 Once again Thursday evening ran away with me. It was a pretty ordinary day, apart from the warm summery weather that allowed us to spend a good deal of the afternoon sitting out in the garden.

Thursday night is when I meet with a couple of very good friends for a zoom fellowship, church home group,  call it what you will. There isn't much time left to write a blog post before or afterwards, hence the missing Thursday posts.

Today we met up with another couple at a favourite cafe for coffee. 

It was a day full of surprises, beginning with being startled by a large, equally startled spider which had thought my shoes were a safe place to call home... BB trapped it and threw it into the garden.

The cafe doesn't open until 10. We discovered this after passing a car apparently stopped just before the entrance and swinging up the short drive to find the entrance gates padlocked; it was still 5 minutes before 10. We extricated ourselves and waited in a nearby farm gateway; so that's why the other car had stopped! In the following five minutes a queue of naybe ten cars formed up tidily behind the first car, and several arrived from the other direction. We might have been the second car to arrive, but we had to wait for our turn!

Our pleasant coffee together with friends was suddenly interrupted;

I never give too much attention to thunderstorm warning as they circle around our town without actually arriving.  Not so today!

The thunder thundered, the lightning lighteninged, the rain rained like a monsoon - I remember monsoons from when I lived in Indonesia as a teenager at it was just like that. The rain was bouncing up from the stone paving, and beginning to form a river running down to the fields.

Every so often a few walkers would appear with the water pouring off their clothes; it's only a short but pleasant walk across a few fields to the edge of the town... long enough to have set off in sunshine and arrive completely soaked!

We were fine, sitting under the substantial umbrella. The people inside the cafe kept looking out at us as though we were specimens in a zoo...

When we left about half an hour later the sun was shining, the chairs and tables drying off, the water more or less gone from the paving. It was as though we'd had the whole of a typical English autumn in one morning, and September's summer had returned.

Wednesday 18th September

We stopped by the local Nature Reserve for a coffee this afternoon. And also to check out the path leading from the car part to the visitor centre to make sure it is suitable for my aged father to rollate his way along.

The sun has been so welcome these past few days. I've been calling it a 'September Summer', and it certainly makes up for the sad apology for Summer in the past couple of months.

The flowers and seed heads are simply beautiful around the cafe area. The photographs will be blurred, I'm sure, for the wind had really strengthened through the afternoon. 

I was wondering if the water lily flowers follow the sun through the day, like sunflowers. There were several beautiful water lilies in this little pond.

These seed heads are like smaller versions of my cardoons

Tall yellow mullein flowers

Seeing the sedum flowering always used to make feel a little sad as it meant that the Summer term was nearly over and the Autumn term would be starting all too soon

Now I am free from the restrictions of school terms! 1

Tuesday 17th September

Have you seen the moon? Have you seen THE MOON? It's huge! I looked out earlier this evening but it was still behind the bungalows opposite.  Now it has risen, but appears to have become tangled up in the branches of the cherry tree that grows along our road. I expect it will have freed itself in a short while.

We won't be staying up for the eclipse though. Hopefully we'll both be fast asleep. 

I've been trying out my teeny weeny palette. If I had bought the real original one, it would have come with a similar sized sketch book for tiny pictures.

Irresistible. Until you spot the price...

At the moment I'm working out how to manage with just these colours, and only a tiny area, and also testing out how well the paper in my notebook stands up to the watercolour.

I'm pretty pleased with how things are going so far;

(Flash photography always improves pictures!)

I received an alarming advertising email from World of Books, where I buy a lot of secondhand books online;

Oh my word!

Monday 16th September

Here's my new 'bestest thing'; not the open watercolour box, but 5he little wooden box beside it.

The little wooden box is actually two pieces, held closed by magnets, and when you open it the two halves fit side by side and hold together with more magnets to make a tiny weeny paint box just two inches square.

I had a messy couple of minutes filling the Wells with paint from tubes, and now I need to leave it out in the open to let the paint solidify a bit.

The 'real' version of this box costs $$$$, looks beautifully finished and is made from walnut. This is a cheap cheapy copy from amazon which I thought I'd try before putting the real one on my wishlist. I can't wait to use it.

Meanwhile,  my cardoons continue to give me great pleasure; the seed heads look wonderful in the sun, 

Amanda look what happens when they open out!

Sunday 15th September

For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: "In returning and rest shall ye be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength; but ye would not. 

Isaiah 30;15 KJV

Well, I did ought to have done so sooner.

And I am doing so now.

How about you?

Saturday 14th September

Yesterday was an 'all I want to do is read lightweight books and eat biscuits' day.

So the shenanigans with the oxygen concentrator and my phone were extremely unwelcome.  However, I did read lightweight books and eat biscuits so it wasn't a complete disaster. Hang on, but eating biscuits, even best quality expensive Island shortbread biscuits, all day, can hardly said to be a good use of time? 

What's done is done, and what was not done was not done. Which is why I had two sessions of ballet exercises to do today; yesterday's and today's. And my step count wasn't wonderful. 

The splendid magnificent fix for my mobile phone, the cliff-hanger end to yesterday's post.... did not work. So today, first thing in the morning before the town really woke up, BB strode off to the shop to get their technical insight.

'Oh, yeah, we've been seeing that a lot recently. It's to with the roll out of 5G. I'll give you a new SIM.' said the man in the shop.

(I write that as though I know what I'm talking about).

Meanwhile, I was at home, lamenting that the back garden was all cold and chill and in the shadow, and the sun was on the front of the hoouse. I wanted to sit outside in the sun with a cup of tea without looking like a nosey neighbour. How could I achieve this?

I armed myself with tea, a bucket and some scraper type garden tools. Then I could sit at the front, and look as though I was gardening. I did actually clear a few weeds from paved area around the front door as well. 

I'll do that again!

And my phone is now working perfectly.

Thursday 12th and Friday 13th September

Goodness me; I had only just spotted that it was Friday the thirteenth as I typed it into to the title of this blog post.

Just as well, as I might have attributed the various trials of the day to the date and not to just ordinary life...

My downstairs oxygen concentrator kept showing an orange warning light. We went through the usual tests and procedures - making sure the long snakey cannula was unkinked, changing the bit that goes in my nose, cleaning the filters, all to no avail. But technician appeared in the afternoon and swapped out the machine which now appears to be running happily.

We had attached little thingamajigs to the two front castors as the snakey cannula catches as I walk round into the kitchen, pulling me up with a jerk like a dog on a choke collar if I haven't spotted what is happening in time. Then we removed them in case that was causing the orange light, but I can't think how. We'll put them back later and find out.

The past couple of nights have been properly cold. We were caught out on Wednesday night; I couldn't get to sleep, and in the end prowled as quietly as I could round to where I knew there was a crocheted blanket. Just as I got there BB rose up like a surfacing whale, a dark shadow in the dark room, and said he was too cold too. Luckily there was a patchwork quilt as well as the crochet blanket, and we've slept soundly. 

Both blankets have 'history'. Each crochet granny square was a complete ball of Adriafil knitcol DK wool. There were so many enticing colourways that I just bought one of each. I used to work on the granny squares in the car on the tedious one-and-a-half hour journey to and from my godmother's house every week during the final six months of her life; she had always been an excellent knitter and crocheter, and the colours and feel of the wool gave her huge pleasure, as well as encouraging me along. I put the squares together during the first months of lockdown.

All the fabrics in the patchwork are reused; a skirt given to me by a church friend whose daughter didn't want it, two Laura Ashley garments that had been worn threadbare by another church friend, a dress of my mother's and a bridesmaid dress I wore for a friend's wedding the month before our own. The backing is n old pink sheet, and the padding is a Man Utd (!) fleece I bought in a charity shop!

I said I'd post a picture of my new garden bench, bought with some money left to me by my godfather. It's immediately outside out french windows. 

Today turned out to be a perfect day for taking out a tray to sit in the sun. 

  Such a change in the weather in one day - I'm sure there was an air frost this morning, and this afternoon I had to move into the shade after a while because it was too hot!

I said 'trials' as in more than one; suddenly the telephone bit of my mobile phone has stopped working properly. It's a bit weird; when I make or receive a call it's as though the speaker  doesn't work. However there's no problem with the sound when I listen to youtube, or use voice recorder, or phone using whatsapp.

One for the mobile phone shop, we reckon. BB will take a stroll into town tomorrow and see what they say.

STOP PRESS; BB has just announced that he has found something that might be a solution... you will have to wait for the next installment...