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We managed to get a couple of portions of broad beans from the four we planted.
There’s possibly another meals worth still to pick.
We’re not quite Tom & Barbara Good yet.
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I have bought a USB turntable so I have been spending the last few days digitizing all my old vinyl records.
They have been in a box in the loft of every house i’ve lived in for the past 15 years & I have wanted to have a listen to them for ages, Thinking that they would bring back fond memories.
Unfortunately what has been running through my mind the most is the fact that I haven’t half bought some crap in my time.
There were quite a few Stock Aitken Waterman type songs (well I was a teenager in the ’80’s so you can’t really blame me for that) & some decent club anthems too (yes, I was a raver too!)
The very 1st record I ever bought was in the box too. ‘Motor Bike Beat‘ by The Revillos. Bought 21 years ago & I still knew every word.
Went to Ikea at Warrington last night to see what was in the sale, which was nothing worth having, but I did find a pound coin down the back of one of the sofas.
Yippee!!
Well, here it is again. Saturday is my 36th birthday. That means that I have been around the Chinese zodiac three times, it’s 20 years since I left school and I have smoked for more than half my life.
It’s a downhill ride till I’m 70 although, on a slightly plus side, I’m still going uphill if I intend to live until 80.
At least I’m not in my sister’s shoes just yet. Joanne is 2 years older than me so is staring at fortyness in quite close quarters.
As we do almost every year, Peter & I are going away for a long weekend to escape from people singing that bloody song at me and expecting me to be cheerful. Which I never am.
It’s not that I’m miserable about it but I just can’t bring myself to get excited. It’s just another day. The only real different is that the percentage of junk mail in the post is lower than it is every other day. Once I have opened the post & tried to balance the six cards that I get, then the day turn back into an ordinary one.
Only six cards!! I hear you cry! How sad!
Actually it’s because I’m not one of the Waltons and I don’t tell people when it is.
In fact I tend to get more cards from companies & shops than I do from real people. Naturally, they go straight into the recycle bag. I can’t imagine how sad I would have to be to display cards from Matalan or my bank.
So today the cats went to the vets for their jabs before going to the cattery (I now have 5 deep scratches in my arms) & tomorrow we fly to Madrid for 5 days.
Hasta Luego
I was having a wander around the shops the other day when I noticed an electric kettle on special offer. That’s nice, I thought to myself as I walked past but I didn’t buy it as the one we already had was doing it’s job just fine. I thought no more about it.
Today, I was making a sandwich for Peter & myself for lunch and the kettle was on for a coffee. As the kettle was about half way up to boiling it suddenly cut out. It hadn’t gone bang so I didn’t think it had blow a fuse and the washing machine was still going so it wasn’t a power cut. I plugged it into a different socket, nothing. I changed the fuse in the plug, again nothing. The kettle had simply died.
I hadn’t told anyone, living or mechanical, about admiring another kettle. Could it be that the, now deceased, kettle was psychic, had sensed my thoughts and seen fit to commit hare kare?
Thankfully, last year, I had bought a whistling hob kettle although only for show in enamel blue to match the kitchen, so we weren’t left gagging for a brew. As the hob kettle started to whistle as it came to the boil I was suddenly transported back in time. I said to Peter, “It’s like being back in my granny’s kitchen”.
Peter smiled and said, “Funny, I was just thinking of my grandmother too”
Today, in the UK, is Spring Bank Holiday and, as per usual, it is raining. I am unaware of how the weather knows it is a Bank Holiday but it always seems to, and almost always without fail decides to make the day a washout.
The fact that it rains is not the only reason I dislike Bank holidays, I also hate the fact that it is like having 2 Sundays in the week.
I could have spent the extra day doing some more work on building the garden, which frankly needs as much time as possible, but instead am forced to watch the garden fill up with puddles.
At the beginning of the weekend we had built the rising walls that will eventually become the steps leading to the back (top) of the garden. I added the word top as the back of the garden is level with the first (second if you’re American) floor of the house.
When we bought the house (Jan 2005) the garden wasn’t a very nice, or even usable space. Just 2 steeply sloping patches of grass which were held back by breeze block walls with a thin path up the middle leading to a badly crazy paved patio area at the top and a pond with water that was almost black.
So far, we have replaced the walls with brick and have built a new pond nearer to the house and created a terraced garden with areas for sitting and beds for plants.
The patio at the top has been replaced by a greenhouse, which is currently full of tomato plants. The new patio will be situated at the bottom, closer to the house and a damn site more private.
But all this has to wait because the weather is so bad. I am a very keen gardener but I draw the line at doing it in the rain.
Recently, and scarily increasingly, I have been beginning to worry about the state of my mental health. Not that I was going mad but that I was losing even the tiniest amount of memory span.
I would see a commercial or hear about some product or service on the TV or radio & want to find out more about it. So I would come upstairs to the office & open up my browser. To my dismay, by the time I clicked my mouse on the search bar I had no idea what I was going to do & would start to look through something different.
What was worse was that I didn’t even have to make the journey upstairs. I could be sitting browsing the net or one of favourite sites, see something interesting, open a new browser & it would be gone, leaving me the to wander off course until something triggered the memory of the thing I should have been looking for all along.
The amount of times I have had to walk backwards around the house desperately trying to remember what I was doing is nothing short of terrifying.
Peter, who is older than I am, finds this hilarious & says things like ‘Welcome to my world’. Not a comfort at all.
Relief has been delivered to me in the discovery that this is not the early onset of Alzheimer’s. All this time I have simply been ‘Wilfing‘.
Wilf stands for ‘What am I looking for?’ and for me it is a godsend, or would be if I believed in a god. (Yes I know that ‘god’ is supposed to have a capital g but if as I don’t think it exists, I doubt it matters)
A YouGov survey of over 2400 people found that two thirds of people spend time on the Internet not looking at anything in particular. Just aimlessly milling around the pages. Which, in itself, is no bad thing. I have stumbled upon many interesting things while meandering through cyberspace. Granted there are considerably more things which are just there to distract you from what you should be doing.
The fact that any, or most, of us are ‘guilty’ of wilfing is not in the least surprising. If you understand the way supermarkets carefully place items around the store to distract you, hopefully into buying something you didn’t come in for, then surely you will see that the Internet in being shaped in the same way. There are millions of sites out there all vying for your attention & if they can catch your eye, they can lead you off your chosen path & maybe even make a sale.
You, dear reader, are most likely wilfing as you read this.
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We had very strong winds & a snow storm over the last weekend which left all the daffodils in the garden lying on their sides. Rather than have them eaten by slugs we cut them & brought them inside.
So there are currently three large vases full of daffs in the house. The smell is wonderful but it’s starting to set off my hay fever.
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Went to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Earl’s Court on Friday. One of Peter’s customers had a stall there so he was helping them out & managed to get an exhibitor pass for me.
I remember going to an IH when I was a child, this was sometime in the 70’s which I know is a long time ago, and I got Thelma Barlow’s autograph (Mavis Riley from Coronation Street). At the time Corrie star were higher up the list of celebrity than they are now, or maybe the list has just filled with non entities. Don’t get me started on that one.
The 2007 IHE was like flicking through the shopping channels. If you are a cable or satellite viewer & while skipping through the 700+ channels, only to find nothing worth watching, have had a stroll through the world of TV shopping, then you’ll know the ‘quality’ of item I’m talking about.
There were every kind of mop & iron, knives that never need sharpening, light bulbs with sticky pads, that sad brush on a hose for washing your car, a magnetic thing that washes the outside of your window while you do the insides. No end of crap.
On some of the bigger stands there were TV screens that could out do Odeon Cinema. Chalets & huts for the garden which would probably qualify for there own postcode.
There was even a hot tub that could hold 20 people & was bigger than my lounge at home. I don’t think I know 20 people I want to share a bath with, & I don’t even want to imagine the speed the electricity meter would have to spin to clock up all the power used to heat the water.
The only thing we did do was change our power supplier to Npower & the main clincher in the deal was that they gave us two of the orbs that they use in their adverts.
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My apologies to anyone, if there is anyone reading, for my lack of posts in the last month. Not a lot has happened worth reporting although I have been busy making more DVD’s for Peter & also trying to learn how to use the Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 software I bought from Ebay.
I also bought an instructional DVD, supposedly to teach me how but I can’t watch it for too long as the guys voice gets on my nerves.He talk incessantly & at one point even chuckled to himself.
Anyway I joined a group on Flickr devoted to the program & have learned more from them in a month than I could learn in ages with Mr whiny man.
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