Friday 29th March - Three in a row?

I had a rare moment of shopping time today. That's because of picking up a prescription at Sainsburys, so I needed  to spend at least £10 in order not to have to pay the parking fee.

It might have been cheaper to pay the parking fee...

Yesterday's burst of energy, which included hoovering or sweeping the whole house as the dust everywhere was getting on my nerves, resulted in me waking up feeling still asleep and never really managing to reach 'awake' at any stage.

I zombied around the supermarket, and came home with a cucumber, a lettuce, a bag of rice for making rice puddings (we have too much milk), a packet of cheap little self-inking stampers to be the next set of rewards for piano pupils, (do you really want to know all this?) a tub of boullion powder because I thought shopper-in-chief may have forgotten to buy some (he hadn't), a bag of dried apricots because I like them in my lunch boxes, and, ever the eternal optimist, a packet of tea.

Not just any tea;

I had some when I got home, but it is a bit too soon to see if they work. Or maybe you have to finish the whole packet?

Friday 28th September - 'My Day Off' as a list

My Friday as a list;

1. Wake up (before the alarm, regrettably)
2. Do a Suduko
3. Rub it out because it went wrong
4. Write up yesterday's diary entry with irritations assistance from the cat.
5. Get dressed, take morning pills, discover I forgot last night's pills, never mind as that will save me sorting them out for tonight, shall I, shan't I shall I do my teeth? Oh all right then I will.
6. Downstairs for breakfast
7. Walk to the local school for Child Protection Training. All children are now safe from me.
8. Walk home.
9. Answer email queries about this and that
10. Do on-line repeat prescription form
11. Discuss schedule with Himself; shall we go out for lunch? End up staying in.
12. Wash the patio door windows
13. Do piano practice and admin.
14. Chase parent about piano exam entry, make the entries including captured parent's child.
15. Meanwhile He makes signature dishes of flakemeal shortbread and ginger biscuits. 
16. Cook eggy bread, fried tomatoes, add some swiss chard from veg patch. Followed by tea and ginger biscuits

Afternoon

• Gardening; dispose of old lettuce plants in compost bin. 
• Stir up and refresh earth in lettuce tub, squishing scores of slugs eggs as I go.
• Extract tubful of earth from the base of the compost bin, relabel lettuce tub as 'broad bean tub' and plant broad beans.
• Chuck all the stuff that didn't end up composted - mostly tea bags and a few food labels, one ancient chicken bone.
• Go upstairs and change all my clothes (on account of sitting in flowerbed in order to rummage in compost bin) 
• Clean the bathroom basin as I filled it with earth from the garden when cleaning my nails
• Fiddle with telephone, transferring music files
• Install and test sound recorder on phone
• Transfer more music files
• Discover really bright idea for teaching James Bond Theme to beginner guitar class (shall I do this next week, or save for upcoming lesson observation? hmm)
• Write this blog post
• Do more piano practice because I need to get four sessions done before Monday to avoid shaming myself on the practice challenge chart at school
• Go to the evening drumming workshop - I weighed my djembe on Thursday afternoon. One whole stone - more than 7kg. That explains a lot

Evening will probably be

• Prep for tomorrow's teaching
•  Enjoy the rest of my day of!!!!

 

Daily List Saturday 22nd April - Flooring

Flooring and Floors

1.The parquet floor in the house I remember first. All the way through the downstairs. And the electric floor polisher that was required to keep it shiny. My mother said she used to sweep all our toys behind the large armchairs in the sitting room at the end of the day.

Our next-door neighbours have the same kind of floor in their downstairs, but covered with carpet. This is the first moment that I have realised that our house, and that house, were built within a few years of each other.

2.Tiles - the next house had red tiles in the large hallway. Cold underfoot. I expect they needed polishing too. I remember my mother using the electric floor polisher to deal with the gigantic mahogany table, that, when fully extended with the extra leaves and the support leg, filled the room and could seat the twenty. A contrast to my aunt, who has a similar table, and was adamant that one had to polish it by hand, with the grain at all times.

3.Black rubber underlay. The sitting-room carpet in the first house I lived in after we were married had worn away to just the black rubber. Which, having seen the remains of the pattern in the unused corners of the room, was a blessing.

4.Earth. My grandmother's sitting-room was apparently a bare earth floor when she bought the cottage. That was replaced with, I think, cork, and a carpet in those jig-saw rectangles that you still see occasionally.

5.Flagstones. My grandmother's cottage again - the passage through the house was of stones, worn into a landscape of hollows and hills. Lethal, as one grew older. I would be sorry, but completely understanding, if the people who live their now had replaced them.

6.Marley Tiles. Unspeakable. To be covered up, ripped up, replaced. As we did in the house before this one.

7.Wood laminate. One of the most beautiful features of our house is the wooden floor that covers all the downstairs, and the hall, stairs and landing. It replaces

8.Carpet, the most hideous dark brown sculpted pile carpet, that we had to pay extra for when we bought this house all those years ago. I hated that carpet from the day we moved in, and I'm still rejoicing at the transformation the wood floor has made. He did it, all by himself; I smile every time I see the neat work where the stairs turn a corner.

9.Shag pile carpet in the kitchen. Oh yes indeedy. The second house we lived in had this. The owners must have lived on fish and chip take-aways; I call tell you know that shag pile does not belong in a kitchen.

10.Sometime in the future we will replace the many unsatisfactory floorings in our bedroom with wood laminate. The cheap beige carpet that was there when we moved in more than thirty years ago is not wearing well - we are through to the floor boards in most of the main areas, and the boards are not of good quality so we can't just strip out the carpet and have done.  Every so often I take a pair of heavy-duty scissors and cut away another trailing, frayed section of carpet, and hoover up the crumbling dusty underlay. We've got four rugs down over the worst patches... It will be a might job, though, to do a sliding block puzzle with the furniture and put down a smooth, splinter- and nail-free floor.

Daily List Friday 21st April - Slugs

I did this one in my head as we were driving along yesterday...

This inspiration came from our visit to Copyhold Hollow on Thursday.

Slugs

1.The pitying / indulgent looks given to me by one of the visitors and the owner of Copyhold Hollow when I admitted that I threw slugs over the back fence. It is not as bad as it sounds - we back onto common land, so I am not chucking them all into a neighbour's garden. But, as the other ladies kindly informed me, slugs are homing creatures. I knew that. Did you? I was just hoping that a good long distance lob over the wilderness at the back of the house would be enough to discourage them. Looks like 20m should do it - I'll need to measure to see how far I can throw them.

2.How else to get rid of slugs; "I think they should be killed as quickly as possible. After all, it's not their fault that they are slugs. I chop them into bits with my spade." so says one of the people in the bizarre conversation continuing from item 1 above.

3."I gather them in a bucket and feed them to the chickens." said the other lady. "Now that's a very sensible idea," replied lady number 1. I've gone off the idea of free range eggs from the garden gate. Although that's probably me just being a bit too sensitive.

4.Do you remember, back in the days when half-a-grapefruit for breakfast was the fashion, and you scraped away at the flesh with a blunt teaspoon and sprayed juice everywhere? And then everyone's flowerbeds had up-turned grapefuit halves here and there to lure slugs to their doom?

5.And beer traps - drowning them? What a waste of beer. Unless it was mass-produced chemical ales, in which case the slugs were welcome. They should have been more discerning in their tastes.

6.We went round a very beautiful NGS garden last summer, with a bed row of perfectly uneaten hostas under the hedge bordering the tennis court (it was that kind of house). In among the hostas were little terracotta houses, like miniature dolmens. There were slug pellets hidden inside... It all looked very decorative.

7.Not only do we have to contend with Spanish bluebells,

Spanish Bluebells

Native Bluebells

             
there are also voracious Spanish slugs to consider.


8.In fact, who knew that there are so many different slugs?

9.Slugwash Lane - we drove past a little country lane with this extraordinary name. Who used to wash slugs? With what? Why? You can buy £4,000,000 houses down there. Imagine paying that sort of price to live in Slugwash Lane?

10.Yesterday evening I covered the earth in my "kitchen garden" with this new-fangled sheep's wool pellets which is meant to dissuade slugs. While doing that, I found that a snail had taken up residence just inside the lip of my pak choi container. That would explain why so many of my pak choi were missing their newest, most tender leaves.
  faugh - what a stink. I should have used disposable gloves.

But it seems to have worked - when I checked this afternoon the Pak Choi and spinack are looking no worse that they did yesterday. I didn't bother to cover the sping onions as they don't seem to be so popular.

From a review; "Oh and until it rains you will have a delightful smell of Australian sheep farm ..."

They are not wrong.

Daily List Monday 20th April - Morning

1.Not that piece of music by Grieg. Of all the pieces in the Peer Gynt Suite, that is not my favourite.

2.New day, new start,new beginnings (cliche, cliche, cliche)

3.Darkness to light. Unless is it winter. Or horrible weather. Or too early insome other way, like being awake at 2am

4.Dawn Chorus - at York University it was more a case of "Those dratted ducks" than "Oooh, lovely dawn chorus". On Easter Sunday, the owls were hooting as we made our way to the meeting place for the dawn service. If you have clicked on the link, you will hear what I am using as a starting point for class music on 11th May.

illustration from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgNeH9_8l0w

5.Croissants, and fresh, real coffee. Or muesli, if it is an ordinary day. (I tend to reserve "Full English Breakfasts" for lunch or High Tea).

6.Looking at the weather - a Very British Thing. Other countries don't have Weather - it is the same every day of the season.

7.The moon, pale, looking transparent in a pale blue morning sky (I know it isn't - how can anything made of cheese be transparent)

8.The way the colours in the sky change - from inky blue to gold to pale. How colours slowly appear in the view.

9.Golden light creeping into the room

10.Saying "Good morning" to people, with affection and good intent.

Daily List Wednesday 19th April - Counting

It's a bit of a cheat, calling this a daily list. The Official Daily List is in a notebook by my bed. This is the copy, (unless I have done it here on the blog first, in which case it is more of a prequel). Since I can't be bothered to go upstairs and get my notebook, this version is not exactly the same. But, if I hadn't said, how could you tell?

Counting

1.Easter Eggs. Too many to admit to, especially if I was just counting the ones that I have eaten. I keep trying to get him to eat more, so that there were fewer for me.

2.Coins. I love counting money, which is probably why I have different piggy-banks here and there. There is an old cider bottle in the corner. It used to collect sixpences, then halfpennies, and now 5p pieces. I spent an entire Sunday School lesson tipping out the 5p pieces and letting the children count them, share them out (while making it clear that I was not GIVING the money to them!). We did, in the end, decide upon 5 charities to share them with, resulting in some surprised representatives receiving bags of 5p pieces.

3.Feynman was curious to know whether people "saw" the numbers when they were counting in their head, or "heard" them. He just had that kind of curiosity.

4.Counting stitches and counting rows. It's what you do when you knit. Over and over again. My godmother, who has lived in England since 1950-something still counts her stitches in her native Finnish.


5.Counting pills. It's one way of making sure I have dealt out the right ones for morning and evening. Blue, pink, white, grey, yellow, shiny, chalky, large, small, round, capsule-shaped... until they change the supplier and the big yellow one becomes a small green one. Why? My top drawer looks like a mini-pharmacy. If I grow rich I will employ a PA to keep track of when I need to put in repeat prescription requests.

6.Counting little tokens; we play lots of board games when we are all together. Who's got the longest road? How much trouble is there on the board? How many victory points has he got?

7.How many seedlings have come up? How many have been eaten by slugs?

8.Sudoku is a bit of a "thing"; I like the "killer sudoku" games best. 7+8 or 6+9 = 15. 1+2+4=7. 6+8+9=23. I know these, and too many other combinations too well. Just a grid or so before bedtime.

9.Four. The number of days left of the Easter Holidays before term begins

10.Twenty-three. The number of days before I have to commit to the music exam entries. It's a bit nerve wracking, deciding on the 12th May who will be ready to take their exam on or after 12th June.

Yan, tan tethera. Did you know there's a wikipedia site for counting sheep?

And did you notice I haven't counted my "blessings"? It's one thing to do that on a regular basis but Quite Another to do that out loud.You might miss someone important out by accident and then what would happen?

Daily List - mud, Arundel - Tuesday 18th April

It won't last, you know, this daily list thing. You and I will both get tired of it sooner rather than later, I suspect. The idea is you make the list when you first wake up.

Today, I woke abruptly from a rather unpleasant dream where my car was just about to get buried in a mudslide and I had climbed out of the window and was balanced on the roof shouting at the men driving mega-earth-moving-machines to get them to stop. And also to try and work out how to get rescued. I'm not sure how I was rescued; I think I had to climb into the slippery bucket of the huge digger that had been dropping mud by my car, as bringing in a helicopter risked me getting blown off the roof. By then I was properly awake, and ready to go back to sleep again.

Seeing as it was also about 5 in the morning, list-making was not going to happen at that moment. However, later on that day we went out to lunch (at the Black Rabbit in Arundel). We only had two courses - no room for pudding and anyway we have a carton of posh custard and a bag of  bananas to use up tonight. Sitting outside, next to the river, looking out over the meadows across to the downs (me) or towards the castle (him), today's topic chose itself.

The River

1."The Wind in the Willows" which I have just finised reading. The River flows through the story. I've just started "The Willows in Winter" - a sequel written by William Horwood, and the River plays a leading role in that one too.

2.Looking for miniature water creatures in the River Misbourne, in Chalfont St Peter, with a sampling kit I got from some educational scheme for testing river water purity, when I was about 10. Test-tubes, and a hand lens, and an identification chart. Hot, and wet, and muddy, and not as exciting as it looked on the packet.

3.Long summer afternoons sitting on the banks of the little muddy stream at the back of our house. The children catching little fish - I've no idea what - and keeping them in plastic tubs until it was time to back. I had a rug to sit on, a flask of coffee and my book.

4.The tidal River Arun at Arundel - sometimes high, sometimes low. Today it was mid-way, slow, and deceptively unthreatening.

5.The River Ouse at York, creeping up the embankment, over the pavement, across the road and into the pubs. Our house was higher up the hill, fortunately.

6.The Aire in Leeds, black and treacly as it slowly slipped past where we were sitting in the gardens of Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds, one Summer afternoon back in the 1970s. Slow bubbles, methane, probably, certainly not fish, rose to the surface. Pollution was a real issue back then - we didn't settle as there was a definite smell...

7.The river running through the centre of Boughton-on-the-Water, and a duck-race (hundreds of little numbered yellow plastic ducks tipped into the water - if yours crossed the finished line first, you won a prize). Apparently the races have been abandoned. It's a long and complicated story (and we were not involved, promise.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/22/police-called-to-charity-rubber-duck-race-in-cotswolds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourton-on-the-Water

8.The river in the book "On The Banks Of Plum Creek" which called to Laura (Ingalls Wilder), and nearly drowned
her. I've always remembered the picture;



Luckily she managed to pull herself out of the water and run home.

9. A boat holiday on the River Thames, many, many years ago. The foolish look on the dog's face when he fell in, and the terrible smell of wet dog when we drove home in the car.

10.And, of course, this, just downstream from the Niagara Falls.

Daily List - Monday 17th April - Sunflowers

So, ten things to do with sunflowers

1.They have such bright faces - sunflowers always cheer me up.

2.The flower heads follow the sun - there are loads of time-lapses on the internet like this one 

3.One little tiny seed produces all these new seeds, arranged in a beautiful mathematical formation.

             

4.They've clearly read the Bible - "John 12:24 "Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over." OK, he's talking about wheat, but maybe they didn't have sunflowers there. (This comes from "The Message" - an interesting newish version)


5.They bring back memories of when I gave a packet of mixed sunflowers to a friend, tucked in a birthday card. He planted them along the fence in hs front garden, and they were amazing.

6.I like the seeds in my breakfast cereal.

7. Van Gogh, however you like to pronounce his name.

     and whichever version you like

8.I remember my father planting sunflowers along his fence too - they spent their life looking down the street to see what was going on, rather than delighting people sitting in his garden!

9.When the leaves first pop up through the soil, they wear the stripy seed covers like little hats, and cling on to them until they are ready to let go.

10.I've never yet managed to grow sunflowers.

Daily List - Sunday 16th April

It tells me somewhere on the internet that you should make a list of ten things every morning when you wake up. Apparently this will make you more cleverer. We shall see.

Today is Easter Day. It is 7am, and we have just come back from a dawn service at the top of the hill. I've consumed a bowl of porridge with maple syrup and just about stopped shivering. It was COLD up there!



Sunrise

1. Birdsong (today we heard owls)
2. Surprising the cats
3.Dark turns into light
4.Shadows become shapes become things
5.Breakfast (and first coffee of the day)
6.Monochrome world becomes multi-coloured
7.The day warms up - both in temperature and in the colour of the light
8.Sunlight reaching the blossom on the apple tree (assuming itbis going to be a sunny day
9.New day, new start
10.Opportunities....