value vs worth

 

Not all bargains are great value. 

Our corner shop (not on the corner at all, but up the road) quite often has choc on offer.  Whilst purchasing something very dull the other day, I picked up a couple of Ripple bars for me & Mark.  Then I saw that I could get a bar of Galaxy Giganticus for £2.50.

Hmmmm.  A little Ripple for 69p, or a three times the amount of choc in the form of a huuuuge half bar dipped, in strips, into a hot cup of tea, for £1.25?

What to do?

This is the modern dilemma for the regular consumer.  3 for 2, BOGOFs and buy one get one half price offers fill supermarket shelves promising us value by the bucket load.  But what is it worth?

That is a different issue altogether.  Surely these offers can only be of worth if they are already a regular feature on your shopping list?  Or there is the danger of ending up with four boxes of banana flavoured mini Weetabix because they are on offer, and not because anyone likes them.  Or will eat them.  I have fallen into this trap once too often. 

I have decided I will bow to value no more.  I will have a life filled with worth.  I will not stand in Sainsburys cursing the fact that Iams and Diet Coke are on offer at Tesco - I will cough up the extra few quid and save myself the torture of a second supermarket visit accompanied by the lilting melody of Oliver's bitter complaining.  Not to mention the saving on petrol.  No more will I bow to the pressure of being compelled to eat two doughnuts because the second one was free.  Good value, but good worth?
NO!  The second one is filled not with jam, but remorse and self loathing. 

I bought the Ripples.  The potential value of the bigger bar was there - but the worth was not.  We would have scoffed the lot in one go and felt the need to go and run ten miles in reparation. 

Oh so not worth it.

And I am a Cadburys girl at heart.

C'est tout.

G*A*Y*. Apparently.

Couple of crochet updates:

The join-as-you-go Mosaic blanket is coming along nicely at 8 squares (minimum before I can stop) per day.  I spend a further 2 hours per week (usually when Oliver is otherwise occupied with lessons in something and there is no escape for me elsewhere) crocheting middles, so I never run out during a session.

I also started this:

A cowl for Oliver, which I thought was a bloody good idea, although Mark thinks is 'gay'.  This use of the word gay always makes me laugh (really, it does) because it doesn't mean anything.  It is a terribly abused word in this sense.  One meaning of the word gay (apart from homosexual or jolly happy and carefree) is 'showy'.  My cowl is not even that.  But still gay, apparently.  I still have not been able to establish whether it is the colour, or style which makes it qualify for the gay accessory category, but as Oliver took one look and declared it 'fine' before turning his attentions to more pressing matters (Minecraft) I shall fret no more.

At work one evening a male colleague took one look at my shoes and declared them 'so gay'. 

They are peach coloured Converse. 

I ask you. 

Marmalade - the results show

One should remember that going off-piste with a recipe requires other, more drastic changes further down the line in order to accommodate the first foray into the unknown.

Sigh.

Thus, once the orange juice mixture started to boil away, the muslin had an unfortunate experience.

I emptied it and threw the lot into the cauldron.

In for a penny.

An hour of wearing out the lino by pacing up and down later, I realised the mush had to come out. 

Tits.

I had no more muslin (amazing I had the first one, really), and only a crappy old sieve to take on the job.  It did it, and with a lot of grunting, groaning and squishing of the ladle, I was left with a decent amount of orange stuff to further work with.

Now I had to find a shed load of sugar to put in it.  Then it occurred to me that instead of the recipe's original 2kg requirement, I would need 4kg, as I had doubled up on everything else.

I cannot bring myself to tell you the bad words this produced.  Who has 4kg of sugar kicking about in the cupboard?  Don't tell me - I don't want to know.

Yet more caution was thrown to the wind as I threw in my entire sugar supply, including caster, granulated and half an bag of brown.  This was nowhere near the required 4kg, but I was losing interest fast and only concerned with getting something orange and spreadable into my jars by now, all quality control abandoned.

Stranger than fiction, it set and has an odd paste-like consistency with a slightly the-other-side of bitter flavour which is perfectly acceptable on toast. 

Conclusion

Fuck me sideways.

experi-mental

Inspired by Sue's post, I managed to get my grubby mitts on a couple of bags of Seville oranges this morning.  This was from a greengrocers, where I was quizzed at the till as to whether or not I intended to make marmalade with them.  I got the distinct impression that had I said no I would not have been allowed to buy them.  So I bit back the reply I wanted to give about a new-found hobby juggling knives and citrus fruits, and handed over £3, already doubting the wisdom of my purchase.
 
I could buy two jars of proper marmalade for that and do away with the annoyance of hours of boiling and steamy windows.  I hate steamy windows.  I think this shuddering dread is leftover from my childhood when the kitchen was always steamed up, smelly and simmering with the bile of my mother's hatred of cooking.

Sue used Delia's recipe, which I took a look at and then plumped for my WI book of preserves just for ease of having it open on the kitchen side while I toil.  Then I discovered I needed a lemon.

Tits.

Unbelievably the local corner shop had lemons in stock.  Then when I got back I discovered I needed two lemons.

Jaysus, the air was blue.  On again with the coat and one ill-tempered stomp up the road later, I was raring to go.

I have the preserving pan, the muslin, the wax discs - oh yes.

Then I went off piste.

I looked at my teetering pile of fruit and my pathetic not-up-to-the-job lemon squeezer and decided instantly that I couldn't face squeezing all them fruits and then finely chopping the rind with my blunt knife, so I have done something which may turn out later to be a Very Bad Thing.

I chucked the lot in the juicer.

Zut alors.

It's one of those juicers that sucks every last bit of moisture out of your fruit and veg and leaves you with a pile of dry fuzz to fertilize your roses or whatnot.  I have placed as much as will fit of the dry fuzz into the muslin and tied it to the handle of the pan.  I have a ever-increasing feeling of dread that boiling up a vat of what is essentially orange juice cannot lead to anything good.

I will report back on the outcome of today's experiment, which I sincerely hope will be over before Mark comes home and sees what I have done.

This should be good.

St John and the jolly gloves

This week we had my Mother in Law's interment.

She actually died last February, and was cremated then, but the ashes have sat with the Funeral Directors (not literally, I hope) until now.  Mark and his sister decided upon having them interred with their Grandparents grave at a teeny church in the middle of nowhere named, appropriately, St John's in The Wilderness.  How cool.

It is under ten miles from our front door.  I have lived here all my life and I have never heard of it, much less been there.  It was lovely, as you can see.

Arriving uncharacteristically early, the six of us in attendance took a stroll out around the graveyard (as you do).  I was all for sitting in the car with the heater on full blast, but hey ho.  On approaching the graveside, it became apparent that the hole being excavated by the gravedigger was - how shall I put it - in the wrong place.  Bloody Norah.  He was very matter of fact about it, filling in the incorrect cavity and quickly knocking out another in a few graves further on. 

This little drama aside, I have to say I thought this was a very comforting way to end things.  In my opinion a burial is too harrowing and a cremation too clinical.  This felt 'nice' and more healing than either of the two other methods.  Although obviously the cremation had to take place first in this case.  Maybe it had a lot to do with the time lapse between the cremation and interment.  In any case, I 'liked' it for it's simplicity, intimacy and ceremony. 

I have told Mark and Oliver that I couldn't give a shit what they do with my body after I die, just to do whatever takes their fancy at the time.  Death, I feel, is all about the living. 

There was some debate as to what to wear.  I went for warmth over occasion in the end with 'sober' colours, but things I would normally wear for the winter.  As we were preparing to leave, Oliver came to me with his gloves, asking if there was another pair as he thought his were 'too jolly for today'.

Oh his choice of words makes me chortle.  I always picture chubby blokes with red cheeks whenever I hear the word 'jolly'. 

Never a chubby bloke with red cheeks around when you need one.

rolling off the tongue.

January rolls inexorably on.

I have wanted to use that word for ages.  (Inexorably, not January, or rolls.)  I even got off my arse to look it up manually in ye olde dictionary to ensure I had the right word.  There are quite a lot of words that I don't know the meaning of, but years of reading have given me a concept of them by seeing them in context.  I bloody love reading.  But I am a crap reader in terms of material.  I will read the first two pages and decide immediately if I can read the book or not.  I am not one of these people who will read a book sweating blood from their eyeballs because the determination to reach the end is greater than the pleasure of the story.  Balls to that.  I like the style, or I don't.  Life is too short to battle the written word.  In this sense, my Kindle is TOP.  Downloading samples is THE way to go - no more expensive literary mistakes, lots and lots of trying before buying. 

Happy days.

Anyhoo, I didn't intend to write about reading at all.  I actually wanted to blog mainly about this:

I am on a schedule of 8 squares per day (have I already blogged that?? sorry if so.) in order to finish mid April, giving me enough time to do a border in time for Katie's 17th birthday.  I have abandoned the whole idea of the whopping 1000+ squares, and instead am going for a more realistic 764 double size.  I've never worked to a crochet schedule before - I feel very industrious.  I am up 20 squares on my target so far, so I have breathing space for disaster days when I can't be arsed.  On Mondays and Tuesdays when Oliver is occupied with German and Tennis, I knock out these:

 

Middles. 

A friend at work looked at the pics and said 'no offence, but it looks like something your Granny would make - really old fashioned'.. None taken!!  Well chuffed me - job done, that is exactly the look I want.  Not so keen on the back, however as the 'join as you go' method is all too apparent, but I am telling myself that this rustic handmade look is all ok....

Still no alcohol. 

Is all good.

Still looking forward to a large glass in February though.

Have now managed to download a Word app onto my laptop, (oh yay for me),  so can crack on with the novel. 

Thrown into a panic the other evening with the clear presence of red in Oliver's wee.  After gathering several jars of samples over 12 hours (no easy task I have to report), it seems the culprit is raw beetroot juice for breakfast.  Phew.

Be still my beating heart.

Too many ailments to be scared of, too little time.

it's just the next month along, you know.

Without blithering on about resolutions or fresh starts to the New Year (BORING), I should like to just state the following:

I am not drinking alcohol in January.

I want to be able to complete the Rubik's Cube in under 5 minutes by year end.

I want to be well into writing my book as the year winds on.

The first one is proving an eye opener in several ways.  I realise that I most certainly do miss glugging wine.  I certainly am having better quality sleep without it.  My weight is much easier to keep under 'control' as the evening drinking is not leading to outrageous late night scoffing, let alone the 1500ish calories in a bottle of wine anyhow.  I am more miserable generally as I feel I have nothing treat-y to look forward to in the evenings, and Oliver has remarked several times this week how unhappy I seem.

Bloody hell.

I sure must have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol if stopping it has had such an impact on my general 'being'.  Mind you, if I was on a diet I would be sodding miserable too.  I think alcohol takes the edge off of my niggles, and then I just get on with it.  As the edges of my niggles are not being sedated with wine I find I am more needing of talking out every last issue with Mark, to his utter delight, I can tell you.

Roll on February, with half the quantity of wine I am used to, with much of my life back on track.

The Rubik's cube.

Ahhhh, such happy memories.  I was one of the first to have one of these at school in the eighties - I could 'do a colour'  before anyone else until my smart-arsed friends got one and could do at least two colours apiece.

sniff.

and meh.

Now I have a hankering to be able to do it all - and fast.  I recall my Grandfather completing it with the aid of a paperback instruction manual and a giant magnifying glass.  It took him months.  The magnifying glass was because of his cataracts, mind you, not because it aided the solution in any way shape or form.

I completed it the other night using 13 steps on Wiki-how.  Times they are a-changing.

Now I just have to remember the steps to improve on my best time of 9 days.

Writing my book.

I have wanted to 'be a writer' for as long as I can remember.  I always saw myself writing a book on a laptop in my mind's eye.  Just after Christmas Mark produced one from the depths of our storage pouffe and dropped it on my lap saying I could have it.

Blimey.

My mind has been whizzing since.  I have an idea which has been in my head for a long time, and now is the time to squeeze it out.  I have even purchased a memory stick for the purpose.

Don't think JK Rowling need watch her back just yet though.

Is this going to work?

A mosaic of many colours, quick to knock out, join as you go, but needing over 1000 to make up a king sized blanket.  Gulp.  It is intended for my niece for her birthday in April.  This means lots of squares per day, realistically.

Luckily, realistic is not my middle name.

Tootle pip.