Tag: Everyday life

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dear diary ~ resurfacing in February

Saying goodbye to January and a welcome to February.

After a day or two of feeling considerably yuck, and just when I thought I had shaken off the worst, the virus decided it would linger a little longer. So I had to linger a little longer with it, sometimes on the sofa and sometimes I just gave in went back to bed and slept…the clock round in one instance.

I fully expect this was a reaction to not eating properly or getting to bed at a decent hour for a number of weeks on and off. My body was not going to wait any longer and decided an enforced rest was necessary.

I was disappointed though. At the start of the week, I had planned to embrace my patiently waiting task list, and suddenly and abruptly my plans were cut short as the cold rapidly took hold. At least I managed to go for my blood tests on Friday morning, so not all was lost.

The weather is pretty dismal here; blanket grey skies with an enveloping fog that is always lurking in the background. Drizzle competing with snow, and cold – always cold, so anything bright really stands out like the little red berries on our cotoneaster horizontalis outside the window.

There are other small flashes of colour too – the pretty pale yellow petals of the primulas poking over the tops of the terracotta pots dotted about the garden.

Still I have nothing against January, or February. I welcome the slowing down after Christmas, and like a crab scurrying away into its shell (I am a Cancerian), I love to retreat into my snug, warm home for a few weeks getting ready to emerge when the brighter weather beckons.

In my more lucid moments I have been reading and watching. Reading the Persephone book DH bought me for Christmas‘They were sisters’ by Dorothy Whipple – an engaging read but never expect an absolute happy or conclusive ending with her books, they often leave you with hope that situations might improve for the characters, but nothing more. She tells a good story though.

There is a film too from (1945) I might browse the Talking Pictures channel just in case they have it listed. We are not sufficiently in this century to have a paid TV subscription like Netflix – it would not be a good use of our money. We never had a TV at the cottage in Scotland and I actually preferred not to have one. On our earlier visits we didn’t have a phone or the internet either and were sufficiently cut off from the world to just absorb the peace and quiet. But then the longest we stayed there was only 3 weeks and most often it was only a week or weekend.

I will soon be starting the epic ‘How to End a Story‘ the collected diaries of Helen Garner but not before I have a browse through some of my recent library requests, ‘Unprocess Your Life’ by Rob Hobson, ‘Just One Thing’ by Michael Mosley and ‘The Doctor’s Kitchen’ by Rupy Aujla all in preparation to begin my next project of restoring our diet and health this month.

On the watching side, we have been viewing The Great Pottery Throwdown, Landscape Artist of the Year and the Agatha Christie adaptations on BBC iPlayer. I am also a fan of Art of the Garden on the Freeview Sky channel. I suppose anything with art in the title will always catch my attention.

We are pondering another art workshop, this one being held at a cheese and wine tasting venue in a neighbouring small town of Brighouse. An odd place for a painting and craft workshop (and there is no wine or cheese included) but they are making use of their room whilst it is not been used for tasting sessions. There is a social session and an artist led session to choose from.

Our idea is to jump in the car one day soon and check the place out before committing….and I will sneak in a visit to one of my favourite places – the large independent Boyes department store for a mooch around. You can always count on them to have something that you never knew you wanted and all at affordable prices. And yes, I do keep telling myself I shouldn’t even cross the threshold to avoid any temptation.

So how did my financial review last month go?

I spent as much time as I could in January addressing our financial position and fashioning a new budget for the year using last years figures, increasing them by a 10 or 20% margin to allow for the continually rising prices.

Once all the interest payments from our ISA savings have been accounted for we will be a few pounds richer. It always feels good to see the pounds increase when normally, all we experience, is the monthly decrease of our pension income.

I received the Vinted sales report for last year – a tidy £171 acquired on clothing items sold. Most of this is actually going to my daughter for the clothes she had accumulated but didn’t have time to sell herself. It is unfortunate she has not yet regained her pre-pregnancy size and these lovely clothes were languishing unworn in her wardrobe. Not all the clothes were advertised on Vinted as I took a lot to the charity shop as well so they didn’t miss out.

But we have yet to have the boiler service (next week), a probably large dental bill (postponed for 2 weeks), and we have a holiday upon us for a week on the North Yorkshire coast. A whole week looking out over the sea…I can’t wait.

Having a quick review of the housekeeping we managed to keep it down to just over £290 for the month, so I am pleased with that. It would be amazing to keep it at that figure every month, but I have to be realistic and I was starting January with a lot of stock in the pantry. Ideally, I would prefer to keep only ‘one in hand’, or ‘replace one as I use one’ but I have to be realistic and being ill, together with the bad weather, I realise I do need to keep the pantry well stocked for the first 3 months of the year at least as it gave us something to fall back on when we couldn’t get to town.

But yes, the coffers are definitely looking good so far this year.

Not being well enough for a trip to town, I did as maybe we should all do (and I know many of you already do) shop local. But really, a tin of non-organic Heinz baked beans £1.77 from the Co-op (I had to read the price label twice), I didn’t even look at the price of the loaf, courgettes and mushrooms, just offered them up at the till and paid by card.

I desparately needed a small present for my friend’s birthday too. The present box is currently empty, so after leaving the doctor’s surgery on Friday I had to find something in the village amongst the beauty parlours, dog parlours and turkish barbers (like everywhere we are short on proper shops now).

I completely forgot about the gift shop along the main street and had decided on a cyclamen from our lovely florist. But when we got there the cyclamens were on display outside and decidedly limp from the drizzle. It is the tiniest shop but she has one or two gifts inside and I spotted just the thing, these tiny mice. I bought an extra one while I was there to keep in the present box. I know my friend will love it as it is the sort of thing she would gift to me.

I delivered it to her doorstep and declined to go inside – so as not to spread my germs.

Of course just lying down not being able to participate in real life for a few days left time for thinking and daydreaming….. and thinking and daydreaming of organising and running our home. Some readers will know that I am very much a fan of Lean and using Lean methods to run my house. It is a system developed by Toyota in Japan many moons ago, and in my mind there are many good things practiced by the Japanese and Lean is one of them. It is a system I used at work with my team to good effect, but it works just as well for running an efficient home.

There are many strands to the whole concept. I will briefly explain:

Streaming, the idea that everything is progressed as a stream that is followed through from beginning to end – cooking, laundry, shopping;

Kaizen or continuous improvement where you look for ways to be more efficient and create solutions to any problem areas;

Muda, meaning waste and this encompasses anything from money, time or ingredients and especially the environment. Reducing this waste is particularly beneficial;

Seiri and 5S; Sort, set in order, shine or clean, standardise and sustain. This speaks for itself – wouldn’t we all love a home that ran itself efficiently by just following a few simple rules;

And lastly, you manage all this with the help of a simple Kanban board a home’s central dashboard if you like.

It is a while since I have really used these principles and I am eager to get back to streaming the management of our home again. Last year and 2024 were ususual years for us with a lot of coming and going with plenty of house selling and buying within the family and, as is quite the case, things move on and my systems and streams need an overhaul.

I have a few more areas of our finances to improve on and streamline before I move onto this months topic – our diet. You cannot have missed the number of TV programs, magazine articles and books all talking about the disadvantages of eating ultra-processed foods and the many advantages of eating well. It is something I researched last year and also signed up to the Zoe programme, started a few years ago by Tim Spector (who is also running the TV programme What Not to Eat). So no doubt I might have a few posts talking about my health journey.

But that is another day another post.

Have a good week everyone, back soon x

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dear diary ~ if it’s not one thing….

….it’s my mother, as DH and I often say when things happen.

And things are happening almost daily now with mum. She gets an idea in her head and can’t let go of it; we tell her the real version and within a few minutes she is telling us again of her rather skewed account.

Mum has not been eating much of her evening meals lately that my sister makes and puts in her freezer for her. The carer always ask her in the morning what she would like for tea and takes it out of the freezer to reheat at the 3 o’clock visit. She has been wasting quite a few meals recently having them heated up but then not eating them but opting to eat more cake and sandwiches instead and like last weekend asking for a Weetabix once the meal had been cooked which is quite wasteful. Needless to say my sister is not impressed after spending time cooking and providing meals for her. Anyway the long and short of this was a week of phone calls to me with mum accusing a carer of telling my sister she was eating Weetabix instead of her meal to cause trouble, which was not the case.

That was last week, and now she seems to have let go of that and developed a new, equally bizarre story this week with mum telling me she hopes she doesn’t have a Christmas like last year…it was the worst Christmas she has ever had! She sobs every time she tells me as she thinks, again mistakenly, that when she went to my sister’s on Christmas day last year (as she does every year), that my sister was ill in bed and her husband ‘had to do the best he could’ to feed and entertain her. She then reckons that no-one went to see her on Boxing day and she was left on her own. Well actually, my sister was not ill at all on Christmas day – it was a normal Christmas and we went up to see my mum on Boxing Day and spent the whole day with her until about 6pm when the carer came to help her to bed. So where she has got these ideas from I do not know.

There has been a noticeable decline in her mental state recently and for the last two weeks she has just begun to ring me at night after the last carer leaves at 7 o’clock after helping her to bed. She keeps ringing mainly to test her phone is working over and over like someone checking their door is locked. The most comical is when she rings me to help her over the phone to try and get a program on the TV. I tell her over and over the number of the channel and the time of the program until she finally brings it up on the telly (I can hear down the phone if she has got the correct one). Then everyday she will say to me I couldn’t get Vera on last night there must be something wrong with my TV! Sometimes you just lose the will….

It is hard to appreciate just how much her brain and thinking is so muddled now and full of absurd things, mixed with anxiety and paranoia. Dementia is a terrible affliction and difficult for those around her dealing with it, she often leaves us all exasperated.

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In between I have been busy though; both helping elder daughter with her epic move of the century and crafting for the Crisis coffee morning at church which helps to raise money for the homeless, we also spent an enjoyable morning at a lino cutting workshop I had booked for DH and I, carving out a lino cut design for my Christmas card this year.

It felt good to do something just for ourselves.

I had little time to produce something for the craft stall; I had been making some pomanders in the evening and using the transfers I got from The Works I decorated some small candles. So it was a start.

I also printed out and hand coloured the original snowdrop design I had made for the lino cutting session to make some new cards.

My idea was to assemble a few Christmassy items together and pop them into a box that could then be given as a gift to a friend. Each box to contain a homemade pomander, 2 small decorated candles, a pack of 4 handmade cards, 4 gift tags, 2 Christmas chocolates and a tiny Angel, (well everyone needs an Angel at Christmas) from a garland I happened to have.

Many long time readers might remember the little boxes I made for a previous Crisis event in 2023. If you want to see more of these click here.

….and I decided to carry on the theme again this time but not having any suitable boxes I used some rather lovely little handmade Indian paper bags I found in Homesense.

The pomanders and candles I wrapped in some Christmas tissue and slipped the cards into a cellophane wrapper.

A picture of the contents was placed in the bag so everyone could see what was included.

I called them ‘A little bag of Christmas’ and I am told had I done more they could have sold more.

Must go now, my evening meal awaits and I won’t be asking for a Weetabix instead!

Hope you all have a lovely week…thank you for reading…I will be back soon. x

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dear diary ~ a moment….ous week

Not only was it Remembrance Day yesterday but it has been a week filled with both sad and happy moments.

Last Tuesday my friend K could not come shopping with us as she was expecting a visit from her daughter. I was a bit disappointed as we look forward to her company but we agreed to catch up later in the week for a chat. We almost overstayed our welcome in Sainsbury’s carpark as you only get two hours and I was having a good browse in all the various sections including the clothes and looking out for any Nectar bargains. It was mid afternoon when we got back home and we had just eaten our lunch and put all the shopping away when a little after 4pm we had a phone call from K’s daughter to say she had been rushed into hospital. K was diagnosed with a terminal illness in October of last year and we all knew her time was limited, but somehow she managed to keep going and always keep smiling.

We went up to the hospital to see her straight away and then visited a couple of times through the week but she was mostly asleep or very drowsy, then on the Thursday teatime when we bobbed in to see her after my audiology appointment, she was raised up in her bed enjoying a cup of tea. We had a lovely little chat for a short time and then came away so as not to tire her out. I didn’t know then but this would be the last time we would have together… and I will cherish those moments. On the Friday morning K became unresponsive and eventually slipped away peacefully on Monday.

Although we had an age gap of almost 20 years, K was a dear and special friend who I met almost by accident when I gave a lift one freezing winter’s morning many years ago to her neighbour Bernard. It is a story I have told before on my blog. Bernard became my Tuesday and Thursday morning companion as I drove into work until he became ill and was taken into hospital. That evening I had a call from K his neighbour saying Bernard was asking that I should go and visit him and had passed my phone number to her. We alternated our visits as his family lived away and each evening K and I would speak on the phone to report on progress. After 2 weeks Bernard passed away but K and I continued to phone each other and eventually met at Bernard’s funeral. Our relationship continued and blossomed and we found we liked the same things especially the area of Scotland where our cottage was located. K and her partner often came on holiday to the area around Stranraer and we would meet up if we were at the cottage at the same time.

When I see the poppies now I will always remember our last moments together but I know our Tuesday shopping day will never feel quite the same without the cup of tea and a chat we had afterwards when we took her back home.

The weekend was another busy one for us.

On the Saturday we were determined to fit something in for ourselves and we chose the Sheffield Print Fair at the Millenium Gallery. As I was born in Sheffield near the Wednesday ground I love to go back and now the city centre is vibrant once again after the loss of Debenhams and John Lewis and a certain amount of regeneration and rebuilding has been occurring over the last few years. The planners I think are doing a good job, preserving some of the old historic buildings amongst the new and providing plenty of lush planting and seating around to soften the harshness of these concrete cities.

The print fair was packed and we thoroughly enjoyed browsing the stalls of some very talented young (and older) print designers. There was every kind of printing method on show but I am always drawn to the linocuts and silk screen prints rather than the polished digital artwork.

Afterwards, we had a mooch around the centre. It has been a while since we were last there and a lot of the demolition sites are now showing off the new and restored buildings. It is something I like about Sheffield that they try to keep and cherish old buildings and they sit side by side with the new.

This block housed an old fashioned jeweller in the corner shop; in the upstairs windows you could see them at work with the machinery on old wooden benches. The end of the run was obviously past restoration but they have added a new section to compliment the terrace.

They also flaunt madly the fact that the city grew on steel manufacturing and many of the structures around the centre are made of it. Because of the steel industry Sheffield was hit hard in the blitz and most of the town centre was demolished by bombs and needed a complete rebuild. Nearly everyone had a relative affected by the blitz in one way or another. My grandma had her windows blown out a few times, but was luckier than the people in the next street along whose house had a direct hit.

It is a leafy city as well – had I had the time I would have been picking up some of these leaves to press.

We walked down the Moor to Atkinsons, the family run department store, where this plaque is permanently displayed in the entrance. They are doing well to survive in this retail climate and it is such a comforting department store as it hardly ever changes, just a little updating every so often; enough to keep up with the trends but not huge changes and revamps like John Lewis.

On Sunday it was Sweetie’s 7th birthday – oh the joy and excitement of being seven. We travelled up to north Yorkshire to help at her pottery painting party that she had with a few friends and afterwards she had a second family party at her home and a mammoth present opening session.

This meant two cakes, though at the friends party we just gave out a cupcake each (far less mess than cake cutting).

She struggled at times to read some of the messages in her friends cards!

….but was overjoyed at the presents….

….and she declared the day her best birthday so far.

Meanwhile, this week I was set the task (I don’t even remember volunteering for this) of organising a celebration for my mum when she turns 100 in January. It will be a small group of us as she has outlived many of the family members. We have decided on a private dining space in a local restaurant and will probably opt for the Sunday lunch. Their menu is quite extensive and they even have fish and chips (which I think mum might like) and luckily for us a nut roast. I think there will be something for everyone’s tastes. I just hope the weather is not against us and that no-one falls ill with colds or Covid, especially not my mum! It would be so annoying to wait a hundred years for this special day and then not be able to celebrate it.

I am making sure our vitamin C quota is kept high in the hope the dreaded lurgy in one form or another passes us by and it is a delight to go into my pantry at the moment, the colours are a wonderful sight.

I have bought all the ingredients now for my usual favourite ‘organic’ Christmas cake recipe and managed to get a smaller pack of white icing from Hobbycraft as I only ever cover the top. I am all set to make it the Sunday after next if I remember to soak the fruit on the Friday.

I have also sorted the Christmas Eve Santa pyjamas for the 4 grandchildren, red tartan for the girls and white for the boys, their mum’s choice. I nearly ended up with all the colours in all the sizes and stripped Sainsbury’s bare. Now the respective mum’s have decided on the right sizes I can return the surplus and Sainsbury’s can re-stock!

I also have my eye on these.

I don’t think I have anymore tales to tell of the last week. This week I need to finish the mountain of ironing that has accumulated and sketch out some ideas for the linocutting workshop DH and I are booked onto on the 19th November, only a week away.

After finishing my last 3 tasks I didn’t have chance last week with the hospital visits to do more but I have more or less decided on the next three.

  • Plant the bulbs and small mixed shrub selection I bought a while ago in pots or the garden.
  • Drop off the items we have for the auction at the Crisis charity coffee morning at church.
  • Trim the berberis

Have a great week and thank you for all your comments…so sorry I never got to answer some of them – normal service might resume soon.

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dear diary ~ November…really….so soon?

I was just enjoying October too.

In October I felt like I had ample time to prepare for the upcoming event, which I think is OK to mention by name now and unlikely to offend.

I have one month to get a grip…. get organised, get baking, making, crafting…..go shopping and go shopping again for the items I dithered over, forgot or just couldn’t find.

I plan (in my mind at least) to get everything done in November so we have a calm, ordered December. I already know it won’t be – I don’t even know what we are doing or where we will be going this Christmas. Most of our family plans have to revolve around mum. In the years since her mobility is almost zero she has Christmas at my sister’s house (as she lives the closest to her) and most years the wider family of about eleven join her, but this makes it a big catering problem for her if we all descend.

With many of the family moving house or still to move or still to sort boxes from moving I am not sure what the Christmas arrangements might be. So until we know more I will turn my attentions to the things I want to make.

I have made a start. I bought a few crafting bits and pieces from Boyes at the weekend that I will might (possibly) turn into something for the Crisis charity craft stall in 3 weeks time. I picked up this printed card for free out of their cardboard packaging recycle bin. It seemed too good to throw out, though the shelf stacker did think me odd asking if I could take it! I am sure it will be useful for something.

Now Halloween is out of the way I can really concentrate on all the ideas I have had for making cards and gifts for Christmas, though the extent of my ideas will be more than I have time to make them.

Trick or Treat night went down well – I made some little treat bags to hand out to the early birds and thankfully we had just handed out the last of them before we had to rush off to see the murder mystery play I had booked for at a local village hall – A Prescription for Murder. The play was excellent and we were kept guessing all the way through to the end. Of course we knew there would be a twist but you never quite know what.

The pumpkins and lanterns are all put away now for next year and everywhere the poppies are appearing. We were in Yarm on Saturday seeing my mum and the local knitters have excelled with lamposts and bollards covered in wonderful red poppies.

It was a beautiful dry autumn day and the sun shone (an added bonus) and always helpful when we have to push mum in the wheelchair to the park. She had her usual sandwich, chocolate muffin and cappuccino…her appetite is good for her age, she can eat more than I do. On each visit we try and solve a problem for her, the bedside lamp needed replacing recently, then the control for the electric blanket and this time it was the ‘glow’ bulbs in the electric fire that had gone. She was adamant that the fire was not on because there was no glow and I could not persuade her otherwise. Thankfully, we were able to get replacement bulbs in Yarm and fitted them for her before we left. I wonder what will need sorting next time!

This all may be a bit of a waffle tonight, it has been a full on few days with a few late nights, (tonight being one of them) when I almost turn into a pumpkin myself.

Back soon, have a good week and thank you for all your comments on the previous posts- I love to have a little chat with you. x