Tag: Everyday life

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creating Christmas * day 2

One of the most pleasurable tasks on my Christmas list is making the cake. We are not a fan of the very dark rich and sticky fruit cakes but much prefer a rather more mellow cake with plenty of ‘cake’ around the fruit. The recipe that I have used for years called the ‘Virtualy Organic Christmas cake’ just fits the bill – it has equal amounts of currants, raisins and sultanas and chopped dried unsulphured apricots instead of candied peel.

And plenty of brandy.

Last year was the first year using my new oven and I felt the cake was a tad overdone but this year with a bit of fine tuning with the temperature and using the circotherm setting it turned out much better. We have unintentionally started a new tradition with the grandchildren – I put marzipan and white roll out icing on top of the cake ready for the three grandchildren to add the decorations of their choice on Christmas Eve.

This was Christmas 2020 when Little L decorated the cake for us with these lovely decorations from B&M ….

And Christmas 2021 when Sweetie and Freddie were old enough to join in and they added the Christmas tree candles.

This year I found some snowmen and penguins in the same range to add to the collection – I can’t wait to see their finished effort.

We had Freddie all day today from 8.15 this morning until 6.30 tonight to give mum and dad a bit of free time. As you can imagine we are totally exhausted and will spend the rest of the evening doing some relaxing TV viewing if we can find anything we want to watch. To say there are more channels than ever there is often little on that we want to watch and we find ourselves switching over to BBC iplayer to watch Inspector Montalbano and are currently wading through all 37 episodes. They do require concentration though to keep up with the subtitles but if I fall asleep I can wind it back.

I thought I felt a cold coming on this morning – I had bouts of sneezing and a sore throat and quickly reach for the high strength Vitamin C. There seems to be a bit of a pattern to all this at the moment – I am not well and out of action for a while….I then recover and life suddenly becomes hectic….perhaps too hectic as we try to catch up on things that got left when I was under the weather. We then become overtired and stressed trying to fit too much in and then before I know it I start to feel poorly again. Tomorrow will be a busy day I have cards to make and will need a quick trip into town then a 30th birthday party to get ready for (my friend’s daughter) with an early start of 5.30pm for a chocolate surprise and mocktails.

Sunday we will be visiting my mum who is not good at the moment – she seems to be confused (though she won’t admit it is her) and a bit more agressive towards the people helping her. She asked her hairdresser to perm her hair and cut it much shorter. Mum is now claiming the perm hasn’t taken and that the hairdresser didn’t cut her hair at all. The hairdresser is naturally upset at the accusation.

The community nurses going in to dress the ulcer on her leg are now at their wits end because she keeps removing the dressings and bandages and sticking an ordinary plaster on the wound. It is now infected. The doctor made a home visit this week to look at her leg and ran a few memory type tests while she was there. She has concern over two of the tests that mum failed but she was OK on many of them. She thinks she may have a urine infection that can cause confusion in the elderly. My sister is so stressed with it all and is going away for a few days.

Once we have seen mum we will be staying over with my daughter so we can wait in for a delivery and possibly meeting up for an hour or two with my SIL who will be up in the area visiting one of her relations. Then it will be back home for my hospital appointment, the ultra sound scan on my shoulder and a delivery of our own (the TV stand).

It will be Thursday before we will be able to draw breath! I am beginning to think that we might not be ready in time for Christmas! How are you doing?

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dear diary >> looking forward

Thank you for all the kind comments and well wishes. I seem to be reporting a lot this year about illness, so I am hoping the start of next year will see a big improvement to my health. Illness of any kind can often drag you down and I do feel like each time I just get going again something else happens and like a game of snakes and ladders I find myself sliding back down a slippery slope once again.

This Covid virus has certainly taken its toll on both of us and the fatigue is only just beginning to go. Yesterday we managed another very short walk down the lane although it was quite miserable in the drizzle and eerily quiet – still it was good to be out in the fresh air and feel the weather on our faces. Each day I manage to do a little more than the day before so that is a good sign. I am lucky that I didn’t have a cough or breathlessness but I do feel very stuffed up and that peculiar taste and smell that developed still lingers.

Our homemade soup makes a satisfying meal for us as our appetites are slowly getting back to normal – today we will make a batch of mushroom soup between us – DH will do the chopping and I the cooking and then no doubt we will have a rest to get over the exertion! We have an apple crumble in the freezer but I am not sure I could do it justice yet so I will probably opt for a fruit yoghurt instead.

My life at the moment is as dull as the weather and I am looking forward to brighter and more productive days ahead now the worst of the virus is over and I am able to at least think about festive plans. This year our plans will be kept simple – often they are the best anyway. As some of my readers will know our family operates a Secret Santa – it is something we have done since 2013 and we have never looked back we are all thankful to spend less time shopping and it leaves more time to have family get togethers – eating, drinking, chatting and playing those all important party games.

It was quite encouraging to hear Martin Lewis give out a similar message last night on his program. Over the years it seems Christmas has become about the gifts and the shopping and very little else. When I was a little girl I always looked forward to going into Sheffield city centre at night to see the lights and the displays in the department store windows. Of course back then there were probably a dozen large department stores throughout the town and each put on a magical display. With all the council cutbacks our local town has a very poor display and somehow the new flickery LED lights don’t have quite the same impact as those old fashioned brightly coloured light bulbs that streamed across the road. We have no department stores left and hardly anyone has a window display. No doubt this is the reason that we now search out light displays to go to during the festive season at National Trust properties though they are a might more expensive than the free shows we used to have in all our towns and cities.

I always enjoy making a few little things for Christmas but this year I know I will be short on time. I am currently looking for inspiration for a Christmas card design – I quite often do a linocut – there is something quite simple and satisfying about this technique….ah well maybe I can magic up a little enthusiasm to make a start, after all Christmas waits for no-one.

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dear diary >> keeping warm

Not surprisingly, each day for a long while I have intended to write a blog post but somehow life just got in the way and now dear DH and I have been struck down by the virus after avoiding it like the plague for so long. The virus itself came after a visit to the hospital about my shoulder – co-incidence maybe… or maybe not.

The symptoms resembled a good dose of flu, with fever, aching and a lot of prostration and sleep. There was no cold, runny rose, sneezing or cough for me just a sore throat and I am left with a rather strange smell and taste that won’t leave me that I can only liken to castor oil, but hopefully in time it will go. As we go into week 2 of the virus the tiredness is the overiding factor now that is rather hard to shake off but we have nothing scheduled in the diary this week so I am just going to ease myself back into life again and collapse on the sofa when I need to. We are aiming today for a short walk mainly to see daylight which seems in short supply at the moment and to get some movement into our muscles. Like flu it has left us lethargic and weak and we are putting all our energies into keeping warm, eating as well as we can and reading my favourite books.

Before I succomed to the virus I had spent a great deal of time making new cards for birthdays and occasions out of old ones so I thought I would share them tomorrow for the monthly Scrap Happy challenge day. Even if you are not creative they are so easy to make and not only do they re-use some of those lovely cards we are given these days but in these hard financial times making your own saves money.

I hope everyone else out there is keeping well, I keep reading my favourite blogs as I find the energy and concentration but commenting will be sparse until I feel back to normal. Being ‘laid up’ does allow me a lot of thinking time and I have been making plans in my head for adjusting certain areas of my life I am not happy with, change is never easy is it as we often fall unintentionally into bad habits. More sleep and exercise will be at the top of my agenda.

With Christmas looming on the horizon and the fact I have now lost a bit of time I don’t want to feel rushed or panicked when I start to get back to normal as it takes all the enjoyment away. I noticed how busy the roads have become recently and just going to Sainsbury’s in town for our weekly shop has become a whole morning or afternoon task and we are having to find quieter non-direct routes to avoid the lengthy queues – it appears there is no longer a quiet time to go.

Luckily we had a pantry full of food before we fell ill and I did manage to make some fresh tomato and red pepper soup one morning though I had to do it in 3 stages with a sit down rest between. I am so thankful I don’t have children to look after and can just go at my own pace for a while until recovery is complete.

Thankfully, I cannot pass on my germs over the blog and you are spared from seeing me in my post covid state kitted out in an old snuggly jumper and looking like I have passed through a hedge backwards!

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dear diary >> busy doing nothing

Well I know I was busy all day but it felt like I had achieved very little. But….the pastry did get mixed and we now have some lentil pies and a quiche base in the freezer – I could have made more but silly me had not noticed the plain flour jar was running low. To compensate for the shortfall I added in some spelt flour and it has made a nice pastry. I used to prefer wholemeal pastry but it is quite heavy on our digestion these days so I switched to Doves Farm organic white which is unbleached. We don’t have pastry very often these days as too much of it does seem to take longer to digest.

I should have titled this post a ‘Tale of two candles‘ as I spent a good two hours in the broom cupboard trying to accomodate my excessive amount of assorted candles (many of them I inherited from my daughters) and make a ‘pleasing arrangement‘ as DH would say.

As always when organising storage there is always the odd thing that just doesn’t quite fit and in this case it was the very annoying two tall pillar candles. Too tall to stand upright on the shelf and just a smidgen too long to be contained in any receptacle that I have. In the end all I could do was lay them on their side -but this is not ideal as they roll about a bit.

The short stubby ones and the tea lights all fitted quite nicely into the 3 storage boxes and I found the best way of storing the long thin ones is upright in glass jars. To make room for the candles I had to adjust the three shelves in the broom cupboard so the top shelf had a larger gap to fit two stacked storage boxes and the bottom two shelves had a narrower gap. But whilst solving this problem I unknowingly created another and when I came to close the cupboard door the contents of the storage container fastened to the door were now too tall for the narrower gap between the bottom and second shelf and the handles of the cleaning and bottle brushes no longer fitted comfortably between the shelves when the door is closed but hit the shelf and stopped the door closing.

So now I have removed some of the taller cleaning brushes and will have to find a new home for them….argh!

I am quite pleased with the result though and all my candles are now in one easily accessible place. The two infuriating pillar candles will be lit as soon as the evenings draw in a bit more. I don’t really want it to feel like autumn yet as I think it is going to be a long, cold winter – what a shame we cannot bottle this summer heat.

My next task is to re-house the coolbags as I would like to get rid of the old kitchen cabinet in the garage where they currently reside. It is a base cabinet and sticks out a long way but does a good job of storing the cool bags and keeps them dust free. They would fit in the cupboard that has all our cleaning products like car shampoo and oven cleaner but I think the smell might spread into the coolbag over time. I am not sure I would want my picnic sandwiches to taste of metal polish or patio cleaner!! Another storage problem to mull over.

DH was busy ironing again – his reward was spending time at the computer (his favourite pastime). He also mounted the second water butt on some bricks with a slab on top which is much more stable than the plastic feet that come with it. This butt is not connected to a drain pipe but we pour in the ‘run off’ water we collect whilst the hot water is coming through in the kitchen. It is surprising how much you can lose down the drain. We are also keeping a bucket in the shower to collect any clean water there when showering. It rained…only a little yesterday early evening – I am hoping just enough to top up the water butt (as we have a hose pipe ban here now) and freshen up the borders and planters and save me having to water today.

Today we /me/or he is making Leek and Potato soup to use up the plentiful supply of potatoes I have and the remains of the leeks. If I have chance I will prepare the tomato soup ingredients at the same time.

This afternoon we are downing tools and going up the road to see two friends of ours K&R. R has recently come out of hospital after an operation and at the moment cannot drive so they are both stuck at home as K had to give up driving because of a macular problem. We have been taking K with us when we go shopping to help out as she is well in her 80’s now but today we are just visiting and having a cup of tea and a catch up chat.