After you, Madam.

Stupid buggers.

This cat flap has been in situ for many, many months now, and they use it quite gratefully in the wee hours.  However, during the day, when we are in, they sit and gaze mournfully at the door handle, mewing pitifully until either a) one of us loses our temper and jumps up to open the door for them or b) they get shoved through the cat flap by the scruff of their neck like a turkey being stuffed with ill humour on Christmas morning.  More often than not though, I decide to brazen it out and ignore them, occasionally screaming 'go out the frigging flap' across the kitchen through gritted teeth.  For this I am treated to a look of contempt which would curdle milk at twenty paces and that only a cat can pull off.

Meh.

The Cat Flap War rages on.

Last week we joined the local Golf and Country Club.  Tres posh.  I have the thought in my head that Oliver, being home educated, is disadvantaged of usual physical activities open to your regular schoolboy.  ie PE lessons and twatting about in the playground twice a day.  This led me to researching sporty type locations - one being David Lloyd health clubs. 

My goodness, (or words to that effect) that is one mightily priced place.  For the price of a weekly shop I would be allowed to visit between the hours of 6.30am and 4pm.  Since I only wanted to be able to play tennis and swim with Oliver, and maybe cough up for the extra pilates class now and again, I felt this was unfairly overpriced and said so.  Smug Adam, who was showing me around, said that they could not take away the gym membership to reduce the price as it was 'hard to police' who was using it, and that I would probably find I would use it anyway.  Hah, NOT Adam.  Just get a door and a digi lock or swipe pad like other gyms, you knob.  He annoyed me.  A lot.  I didn't join.

Instead I have taken on an extra shift for work and coughed for the local G&CC where I don't feel duty bound to enter the gym AT ALL and Oliver can play tennis, golf and swim to his heart's content.  That is, whenever I can be arsed to drive down there.  The biggest draw is the fact they have an outdoor pool with space to 'lounge', so my keenness to join up is largely driven by my vision of hot summer afternoons spent sunbathing and splashing about in cool water.  This will, no doubt be entirely spoilt by Oliver whining at me that he is bored as there will be no electricity supply to plug himself into for the purposes of uploading himself into the internet.

I am already bracing myself for this argument. 

I shall overcome.

In other news we have been driving to the nether reaches of the country for Oliver to play Pokemon, that is, Wakefield, which is about as far north as I have ever been apart from when we flew to Iceland. 

 

 

I felt like a softy southerner the minute I got out of the car.  I kid you not, I struggled to understand much of what was said to me throughout the day, as people tended to talk north language which I am unfamiliar with.  This said, the general friendliness of people did outstrip what I have experienced down this way, so maybe there is some truth in the north-south divide.  Oliver did not have a good tournament, coming in 14th, but as this is around his National Ranking, he can't really expect much more than that I suppose.  He met up with old friends from previous tournaments though, and it is this camaraderie within the Pokémon community which keeps me keen to encourage the whole hobby.  I see lads (we are talking men in their twenties here, remember I am quite old now) turning up and greeting each other with such warmth and humour that I see it and want that for my son.  I saw it at the Worlds in Vancouver last year too - the friendship between players which has been established over the years.  Nice.

I have, against all my principles, started a facebook account for Oliver.  I bloody hate facebook.  With a passion.  HOWEVER - I can see that for Oliver, with all his Pokémon friends the other side of Bristol, it is bloody useful.  I have told him that I do not want to see 'friends' on there who live down the road or relations we see on a regular basis.  Pointless.  In my opinion.  Which is right, obvs.

I am one month away from completing this:

Nuff said. 

surprisingly, there is rain.

I have just written a whole blog post, with pics, went to amend a capital letter 'A' and wiped out the whole lot with a keystroke.

Screaming obscenities at the screen and thumping the keyboard with my fist has not made it reappear, so I am reconciled to doing it all again.

How words can make one weep.

First I was banging on about the weather. 

Scary.

Then I was recounting my crochet morning and how these hearts have entranced and bored me within one hour. 

The other day I was forced to begin another cowl, as I had lost my 5mm hook. 

Then, from inside the ball of yarn, it reappeared.

Not a word.

The mosaic blanket is on track and I am starting to appreciate the rustic reverse.

And I have managed to keep my poinsettia alive.

Incroyable.

That's about it, although why I didn't keep it this concise in the first place is a bloody mystery to me.

Fin.

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.