Thursday 24th August - Falling in Love Again

 Yes, it's true... we are in love (I don't mean with each other, no, that hasn't come out right. We've been married for nearly 46 years and we are most definitely still in love...)

but a new love has come into our lives.

It is a bright red Fiat 500x petrol hybrid It is smooth, polite, deferential, willing, cooperative and incredibly well behaved. We have owned it for only ten hours, and our minds are made up.

It is also an automatic; I've never driven one before. I was seriously concerned as to how I would cope. I was also very apprehensive because since Lockdown in 2020 my driving journeys, mostly to visit friends locally, could be counted on my fingers, not including thumbs, so I am seriously out of practice.

Himself drove it the twenty miles from the dealers mostly in a silence of deep concentration but occasionally saying 'oh joy' or 'that was so much easier' every mile or so.

I have driven it round our local residential roads with some success so far, in that I didn't have any scrapes, bumps or near misses. Himself sat as copilot offering encouragement as necessary. I mostly concentrated on Turning Left, but have tried Turning Right and Reversing Out Of A Cul-de-Sac. It took a couple of circuits, but I am beginning to get the sequence of 'Mirror Signal Manoeuvre' in the right order, and to be able to interpret what I see in the mirrors rather than alternately staring straight ahead or looking wildly round in all directions without registering what I see. What impressed me most is that I only tried to use the clutch pedal once! ("Tuck your LEFT foot as far back and out of the way as you can").

If I can add half an hour's driving every day in ever increasing circles, and start introducing Traffic Lights and then Roundabouts I am hopeful that I'll get back into the swing of things. After all, in my previous existence before Covid I used to travel anything up to 100 miles a day from one end of the County to another between schools, filling in the time between driving with teaching samba drumming, djembe drumming, trumpet, clarinet, flute, recorder, ukulele, guitar and sometimes piano, cello or viola!

Luckily I did not teach ALL these instruments in the same day, just half a dozen on a busier day. Loading the car used to be a mix of memory test and puzzle solving. Do I miss those days? On the whole, no. The music, the fun, the companionship, the buzz, yes. The exhausting classroom management of difficult classes, and lugging instruments and resources in and out of schools, no.

........

We didn't go out slugging last night. This morning I discovered one of my pak choi had been et. I have sprinkled coffee grounds around then next, and somehow I need to summon the energy to go slugging tonight. Ang asked what I did with the slugs and snails. I drop them into the council garden waste bin, whereupon they spend their days trying to climb up and out. The slugs sometimes manage to ooooooze their way to freedom. 

..........

Somehow half an hour's cross stitch got done this evening. Not the best time for me, but there wasn't that much left in this particular section and and just about managed to finish it without too much unpicking. I absolutely LOVE my Sarah Homfray variegated threads. You can feel the quality as you sew. The colours are beautiful with so many shades in each skein. Worth the money.

   

Sunday 16th July - Broad beans for supper

 The crimson flowered broad beans are ready now, and we had some with supper tonight. They do taste good, nothing like the horrid sullen grey slabs that we were served at school. The convent prep school I went to had an extensive kitchen garden beyond the playing fields. This produced a seemingly never-ending supply of spinach (served slimy and sandy), red cabbage (boiled to a repellent grey colour) and the aforementioned broad beans. 

Luckily I was a day girl, and my mother was an excellent cook or I would never have eaten any of these vegetables again. Pity the boarders...

When I boarded (at a different school) much later on, I pitied us boarders too then. I think the supper dish called, if I remember rightly, 'kidney turbago' went back untouched. The smell, as of a public lavatory, was enough to stop us in our tracks.

Nowadays I'm a grownup (in years anyway) and eat what I like. I even leave the crusts from my sandwiches if I don't feel like eating them!

The mitred square blanket continues...

I had a mega 'sewing in the ends' session yesterday evening while watching television; sewing about 30 ends was no great hardship with various programmes to distracted Mr.

I completed the missing corner today, and will carry on until the current double knitting stash runs out. It's the sort of thing that one can always add to. At this width it us more of a wrap than a blanket.

This time round I've experimented with using patterned and self-striping yarns, and mixing and matching two sizes of squares. 

I found the pattern and concept here at Loiuse Tilbrook designs, but have modified it slightly to suit my less than meticulous nature. The main difference is that I found it was too much of a fuss to remember whether I was knitting a right-side, decreasing row, or a an ordinary wrong-side row. So I knit to the central marker, slip the marker, and then k2tog on every row. That makes it easier to knit and watch TV at the same time.

I'm also not that bothered the my diagonal lines caused by the central decreases go in different directions.

Unlike when I am cross-stitching; 

I managed to do 45 mins cross stitching today so I've reached where I hoped to be yesterday.  Never mind. Tomorrow is another day. Progress was slowed at one point as I became totally confused when I changed the direction of a line from vertical to horizontal and couldn't work out which stitch was the criss (lying underneath) and which was the cross. I think I got there in the end!

 

Sunday 18th June - Rain!

We slept through the thunderstorm last night, and woke to the school hymn (it's a Christina Rossetti poem)

Morning has broken,

Like the first morning

Blackbird has spoken

Like the first word. 

The paths were already dry, but the leaves and grass glistened with drops of water. And the smell - is it called 'petrichor'? The smell after rain on dry land? Just lovely.

The sun soon broke through and by mid morning it felt as hot and dry as ever... until Kate in the afternoon when it rained steadily, purposefully, drenchingly.

I am embarking on the trickiest bit of the stitching now for the cross-stitch project, having finished the right hand motif during the livestream of the church service. I'm saving the easier bottom section until last. 

I've half dozed most of the afternoon. I'm in good company:

Friday 2nd June - I'm at the stage where

I feel so much better that as well as sowing the carrots again (the watering can wasn't that heavy) and

slipping some copper rings around the stalks of a couple of broad bean plants to fend off snails and slugs

I also staked my one remaining pea shoot this morning.

Then I came over all jelly legged and went inside. I did manage to make the mid-morning coffee without mishap, although there was a moment when I nearly poured milk into the water glasses...

Cross Stitching

I thought this would be a nice quick one to do for May;

As usual I did my charting on an enlarged copy of the actual fabric which seems to almost work for me

Although something changed in the execution and I  needed to copy the half-finished work to help sort out what to do in the white space.

Thursday 11th May - new skills, full to-do-list, chocolate o'clock,

The new skill I acquired today was how to unpick a whole line of my current cross stitching with scissors!!! I have avoided using scissors until now, but this time it was unavoidable. I did try to see if I could redo the chart for the remaining half - let me tell you it would have been far quicker to just accept the inevitable...

However, the various charts I tried did give me some more ideas so I am hoping that the result of exercising patience and self-control will result in a better finished piece. So far, so good, especially now I have removed the offending area!

Various things added themselves to the to-do list as the day went along; for example giving the back door mat a good clean. Why would one do that? Ah, therein lies a tale.

Personally, I always carry the entire compost caddy out to 'the worms' as we affectionately call the compost bin. We have switched to using brown paper bags for the kitchen waste as it decomposes better, and I don't trust them in the situation where the scraps and peelings are a bit soggy, just in case this

happens... which, as you can see, it DID happen. Those caddies hold a surprising amount of... gunk.

Another item added was the making of a cake; on Thursdays we now go to Waitrose armed with a shopping list provided by my father, and then take it round to his flat and sort through the fridge. This week there were two eggs left from the half dozen, but someone had put a plastic milk bottle on its side above the egg box which had almost disintegrated. We dealt the the puddle, and swapped the eggs over and took the two old ones home. Rather than have eggs which had been soaked in milk hanging around, we made a cake...

Air fryer sponge cake

Make an ordinary 2-egg victoria sponge type recipe (2 eggs, 4oz each sugar, butter, SR flour - maybe a little more flour, in which case add a little milk or coffee essence). Combine - I do 'all-in-one' method, and bake in a suitable container for 23mins at 160C - at least that's what our air fryer needs. Coffee cake for elevenses tomorrow.

Chocolate o'clock has got out of hand. It seems to be happening twice a day! But I have reduced the size of my potion from 4 squares back down to one. Mostly. Quite often. 

 

    

Monday 8th May - In and out of the garden

It has been a grey day for most of the day, but I managed to get quite a bit done. I go out every day to encourage the broad beans. They give me a ridiculous amount of pleasure. I just stand and contemplate the little leaves bravely pushing up through the soil.

Not all the peas have come up, so I have planted another dozen or so in individual pots so that I haveca Plan B. And with the help of Himself, doing the heavy work of filling the bigger pots, the three tomato plants are now in their 'forever' homes.

Cross Stitching - 

it's always a big relief when I get to the point of starting to stitch. I spent an hour this morning, only unpicking about four times - not bad for getting back into the rhythm after a break of over a week.

Knitting - 

I've managed to unpick and reknit the cuff of one sock, and learned a stretchy bind off from youtube which is easy to do. So that sock is finished, and I have undone the cuff of the other sock, and picked up (most) of the stitches. Is the end in sight? We shall see.

Drawings - 

I copied this from a photograph, the idea being to draw a picture of this church on a card I wanted to send, This is the practice version,  which I drew in my diary which is why it is on dot paper. It's quite small, around three or four inches square.

Would it look better with a bit of colour added? I think so... (the first picture was taken in daylight, the second with the main light on)

In the end I scanned, printed and stuck a copy onto the card because I was running out of time.

Wednesday 26th April - Notebooks, cross stitch, daffodils

In other words, a random set of topics...

Notebooks

I think I've got it sort of sorted;

On the left, my current Commonplace Book which doubles as the new Sketch-a-day journal, and under it (with the little monogram) my paper diary/note book.

On the right, previous Commonplace books and sketch journal.

In the middle, a couple of old journals which are now torn into pieces and in the recycling. That sounds a bit drastic! That's because the writings in these are me expressing whatever upset me, annoyed me, stuff that I really wouldn't want anyone else to read. So, to avoid consequences, these journals are destroyed unseen by other eyes.

Finally, there is another diary upstairs where I write about the events of the day. Like a good friend dropping by yesterday with a bunch of daffodils;

Sunshine.

Or the mouse/rat (I had another go at drawing it)

Cross stitch

Another 160 stitches (crosses) completed. That leaves about 270 to go...

Tuesday 25th April - The long wait is over

Posting to this blog, and keeping up with projects and admin has been erratic for the last couple of months.

There's a reason for this;

Here are some of the daily drawings that I held back;

Thursday 19th January - top right, an appointment with a wonderful gastroenterology consultant (Himself was also there, but I ran our of space to include him in the drawing);

Back in December 2022 I had a routine CT scan of my lungs. At the follow-up appointment with the Lung clinic consultant in January, I learned that my lungs were more or less unchanged, but the scan had shown something in the pancreas area. She said she had asked for me to be referred to the local hospital gastroenterology department for further investigation. This appointment came through pretty quickly, and resulted in an MRI scan just a few days later; bottom left drawing!  

It was a long scan - about 30 minutes, maybe more; hard to tell with your eyes firmly shut! But then I had to wait - and wait - and wait to hear the results. I had been assured by the specialists - lung and gastroenterologist - that the most likely thing was that the unidentified objects would be harmless cysts. I had been in contact with the medical secretary because they wanted to get hold of the original CT scan, so I knew that my case had been reviewed within a week, but then she said the follow-up appointment would be 8-10 weeks... Oh. My. Word. 

I tried to stay calm by thinking that they would get in touch sooner if rapid action was required - I had been referred as a 'fast-track referral'. Even so, 8-10 weeks.

Meanwhile my father (who will be 94 in a couple of months) was ill in March for three or four weeks, so there was worry and appointments and so on for him as well...

Well, he has recovered and is back to his usual self, playing bridge every week, going to the quiz night, and hopefully even joining the weekly chair-exercise sessions which are beginning again!

And yesterday;

We had my follow-up appointment; yes, they ARE just cysts, and nothing else needs to be done about them (let sleeping cysts lie?). Another hugely helpful, knowledgeable, kind consultant - surgeon this time - took the time to explain everything very clearly.

I'm very relieved, and it is only now that the effort of staying calm, coping with the daily round of life plus dealing with what I think of as 'unexpected items in bagging area' is making itself felt. 

Normal service might be resumed soon...

Cross Country Collaboration

There have been many days over the past few weeks when I have been completely unable to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. But today was a marathon cross-stitch day. I have worked out that I will need to do 1,910 stitches for April's picture. Today, after an hour or so this morning, and again in the afternoon, I have completed 1,380 stitches! You don't know how good this makes me feel! So that means just 530 to go. I might even get it into the post box on Sunday!