Today has mostly been about apples.....

So on Friday, my mother and sister headed off for Turkey for ten days, leaving me with my usual obligation of feeding the The Mavis.... though luckily my duties are lessened by the fact that sister's other half is picking up some days when he's staying there... my hands and ankles are grateful...

My mother left me with a small challenge..... in the shape of two shopping bags full of apples....and the instructions "can you do something with these please"...... and the woman only has one miniature apple tree...

Yesterday, after having my hair reduced from somewhere around my waist to back up to a sensible length just above my shoulders..... colour change imminent, when I can decide on what colour........ I spent several hours trawling through recipes trying to work out what on earth to make with the damn things....

So today, I have stewed (with cinnamon and with cloves) two huge batches of the things, I have baked mini apple pies and Norwegian apple cake, I have cooked up apple chutney and even attempted apple curd.....

I never ever want to see, smell and definitely not peel another apple again...... ever....

Though I am quite pleased to say I managed all this without burning myself, blowing anything up, destroying anything or having alarms go off (which is quite an achievement really for me)

The internet ate my blog post...

I wrote a blog post whilst I was at work today... not an important one... just a general mumble about all sorts... but it appears to have disappeared into the ether between my work computer and my home computer..... I hope I didn't write any naughty words in it that the censoring demons that work in the IT department will be jumping up and down about.

Anyway, having been kidnapped and taken out for a rather nice meal, and, erm not had to drive, I shouldn't really be anywhere near the blogsphere just in case I say something I shouldn't whilst under the influence of, erm, some alcoholic stuff.....

So now I am going to meander off and do the whole medicated moisturiser thing before I go to bed... being careful tonight to turn on the light and not pick up and slather my poorly leg in hair minimising cream by mistake....... cos I learnt from experience last night after an hour or so that burns like hell and is a bugger to get off again balancing in the bath at 1 am when you also discover you've no hot water....

So whilst I do that..... have a picture

In Hope's world there is always something to smile about 

A sudden craving....

Having been vegetarian for over half my life I have learnt that sometimes I really have to listen to what my body is telling me when it suddenly demands certain foods.... I think I learnt this the hard way when after 2 years of being vegan I ended up with a serious vitamin deficiency that landed me in hospital being treated for severe anaemia....never again will I go down that route....

Whilst I am not brilliant at the whole healthy balanced meals things.... I am crap at breakfasts - which unless I'm bullied happen at about 10.30 am and involve a pot of yoghurt.... and when I am just cooking for me I tend to be quite lazy ... added to which I have a love of dairy products, from cheese to ice cream....Though I am pretty good generally at the whole moderation thing....

Anyway, my body's usual demands are for pretty normal things.... marmite... which thankfully I love ... when it needs salt.... or raw peppers and bananas when it wants potassium.....  Okay so it also demands roast chicken on a regular basis but that is a hormonal thing and easily cured by a packet of roast chicken crisps (though I do curse the rotisserie chicken counters they have in supermarkets these days)... and four months on it still demands caffeine at regular intervals but I am ignoring that....

So, imagine my surprise when I am just about to stop work and have lunch this afternoon my body suddenly tells me that it really really wants a bacon sandwich.... on white bread... with brown sauce..... Now here's the thing... I hate brown sauce and as for bacon *shudder* even the smell of it cooking makes me nauseous.... even when I did eat meat I never liked bacon.....but for five minutes today I looked at my pita bread with hummus and salad and all I wanted was this blinking bacon sandwich......  

Now one of my closest friends, and the full mother to my half daughter, is pregnant again and we've always joked that we have some sort of weird psychic connection.... so as a joke I texted her and asked her if she could tell the alien duck she's carrying (alien cos it's growing in her stomach, duck because her 3 year old declared that this is what the scan picture was of) to quit craving things that I really didn't like..... the text I got back about an hour later made it all a bit surreal, because for the first time in weeks, at around the time I suddenly was craving this damn sandwich, she was sitting down to exactly that for her lunch...... I am not sure exactly how half motherhood works... but it looks like I may have a connection to the latest spawn already :)

It's definitely been a Monday....

Today has been one of those days where I wished I'd never bothered to get out of bed in the first place.... okay, so that never happens in reality as I am usually half way down the stairs throwing on clothing of some sort by the time the first early warning whimper is issued by the dogs....

Today did start reasonably well.... I was organised enough to make a proper lunch and clean the kitchen before work.... only for Hugo to turn his nose up at his own breakfast and go raid the veggie chicken sandwich I'd made and spread the contents across the hall.... by the time I'd cursed, quite a lot, at him and cleaned up I was five minutes late and lunchless...

I have a huge long list of files I need to draft documents on .... so did I spend my day getting on with them... no instead I had to hand hold a fully trained and allegedly competent solicitor through a task which usually would be left to an admin assistant to do... but no he wanted to do it himself.... I think I had about 30 e-mails or telephone calls, all in a tizzy about what he should be doing..... okay, so not entirely his fault as the person who supervises him was in court in the other side of the country.... I gave up on trying to do my own work in the end...

I did go on a bit of a spending spree at lunch time though... that is to say with no opportunity to purchase shower gel I found myself logging onto Amazon and through the joy of their one-click option... and my ability to demonstrate a highly possessive kleptomaniac when I am pissed off... bought, erm, a few, books.... thank goodness I am well enough trained to stay in budget or the mood I was in I'd have a to read list sat on the Kindle that I couldn't get through before next March.....

That said, the first one I want to read, Body Magic, means re-reading Mind Magic first to refresh my memory.... but I can start that tomorrow as I finally got round to reading Keeping Promise Rock (as recommended in my quest to work out what exactly angst is)...... I really enjoyed the book (though the middle dragged a bit).... but alas I am still none the wiser as to the whole angst thing..... I will trawl through some reviews of other books and find more books people say are "angsty" and try them .... I might work it out one day......

And to round the day off.... it is tipping it down with rain and none of the dogs want to go out which means I shall be up at midnight when they remember that there was a reason I kick them out before bed time......

Because I am a good girl....

No, honestly, I am..... well, okay, most of the time I am....other times I might possibly be not quite so good, but I would never admit that if questioned....

Finally! striped husband socks...
no not for striped husbands...

anyway.... I have completed part of my homework....see the completed word!!  Yep, I finished a project that's been hanging around for about a year (okay, I've done other projects in between but this was one of those I just couldn't for the life of me finish..... but today I have and the husband socks are finally done... (I even kitchenered without having a hissy fit).... and no I have still no idea why it took me so long to get round to finishing this particular project

Now I have to hope that the husband they are intended for likes them and that they are the right size!  I shall pass them to the owner of the appropriate husband when she comes to visit in the near future...

So, one down, one to go before Wednesday......... erm.........

Tomorrow I get to go be social, as we are having the usual run of fantastic weather because everyone has gone back to work/school my sister and her other half have invited me and mother to a bbq .... though I feel my invitation my have something to do with the 10 days she is about to go to Turkey for and Mavis the Cat feeding duties.....

Right, well, as the dogs have gone to bed and the cats are on their third meal of the day I think I am going to go play on the interwebs for a while .....

Updating by numbers....

1.  I finally discovered Hugo's special hiding place for my socks....... I mean, why didn't I think to look inside the cover of the duvet on the guest bed??  It wasn't just my socks I found... there was also a selection of cat toys that he's obviously hoarding from his mother (she's the one that likes to wake me in the middle of the night to play catch with the blue sparkly mice) and a piece of liquorice root (which I bought for my father and then lost a packet... I found what I thought was most of the packet - it had been hijacked out of my shopping by the cats - almost immediately, but I'd obviously missed this bit!

2.  Daddy long legs season has begun.... whilst sitting reading in the kitchen this evening I was visited by a couple of said creatures.... now I don't mind them.... and it's great exercise for the dogs who spent a good 90 minutes trying to catch the daddy long legs ... eventually Hope managed a death defying leap and brought one down (it involved her leaping onto the top of the freezer then halfway up the wall)... but she lost it to Kammi who for all her small, white, cute fluffiness you don't want to mess with.... well not if your Hope anyway... Ivan did a bit of chasing....... Gretchen didn't stir from her spot on the floor between my feet save to raise her head and glare that they were all disturbing her sleep and would pay for it later.....

3.  Tonight was my "talk about myself" session.... and cos I am a good girl (no honestly, stop laughing, yes, you) I had done my homework from last week.  We, well I with some prompting, have come to the conclusion that I do have a fear of finishing things, but this is because I have difficulty finding a focus on what I am going to do next so I put off reaching the end of things.... This week I have to finish two of my unfinished projects (apparently finishing reading a book does not count, dammit!)....There has already been a vote for the finishing of the husband socks, and I think the other thing I ought to do is finish one of the 4 outstanding short stories I started but then didn't get to the end of for the Goodreads YA GLBT group's monthly photo prompt... mind you that involves making a decision as to which story... and decision making is my other big "fail" area....

4.  In a fit of organisation (possibly brought about by the fact I have visitors to stay in just over a month) I have obtained a new electric shower ... erm, that makes it sound like it fell of the back of a lorry... it didn't... my sister purchased it for her house, then had a new boiler put in and her bathroom redone, including a power shower so she never used the electric one and I have been gifted it.... being even more organised I have arranged for a plumber/electrician (well, I have asked my mother to phone the family plumber/electrician) to come and fit it.... oh and to fix the scarily dangerous hanging down wire that was a light fitting in the lounge at the same time (yeah, I know, it's only been waiting to be done for, er, about 3 months)

5.  I have had an official summons from my sister and her other half to go to Sunday lunch.... apparently it's going to be a "family meal"..... I am suspicious.... (well, my mind goes into overdrive sometimes)

Erm... ah... oops?

Well it had been a while, in fact almost four months, but I suppose it had to happen sooner or later....

yep my magical powers struck again ........

Saturday night I was up far too late (well into Sunday morning really) because I got sucked into a chat room on a new website I joined (though I didn't actually join in the chatter, I just lurked with intent)..... So, being a bit tired after the 5 am dog walk and feeding routine I decided sod it, it's Sunday, I am going read for a while, so I made myself comfortable in my corner of the sofa and must have drifted off because the next thing I knew was that there were protest songs coming from the stairs where the cats had wondered if I expected them to somehow feed themselves....

Having apologised to them profusely, well, filled their dishes up after which they promptly ignored me I decided it was actually time to get my backside into gear and get organised.....

Now, here I should explain, I live in a reasonably modern house, that is to say it was built in the 1980's, but it has the original boiler/heating system and a horrible electric shower which goes over the bath .....  So this morning I switched on said shower, got in (after having my feet attacked by Hugo who likes to wait for me to get one leg into the bath before attacking the other foot.... it's strange what amuses a cat)... there I was midway through my ablutions (shower gel of choice this morning was tea tree and mint) when suddenly, there was a bang, quite a loud bang, from the vicinity of just behind me on the wall, where the shower unit is... and then the water went cold.... the dogs started barking and the house alarm went off...

Now the house alarm going off like that signals that the electricity trip switch on the fuse box has switched itself off.... so I tentatively reached out and switched the water off .. before legging it downstairs to tell Ivan that the world wasn't coming to an end (bless him, he doesn't half over react at times) and to switch off the alarm, once I'd flipped the trip switch...... could I remember the alarm code as I am standing in the cupboard (which doubles as the downstairs toilet) staring blankly at the alarm panel.... whilst naked and dripping water and soap all over the place......

At which point my neighbour's teenage son knocks on the front door... his mother having sent him round to check I was okay.....

Luckily, I managed to remember the alarm code, reassured the child through the closed door that I was fine, and get myself organised enough to go finish washing..... albeit without using the shower...

Seems I'll be calling the plumber this week to get myself a nice new shower..... but why do these things always happen to me?