Monday Miscellany

Posted on March 26, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

Well folks, it’s a new week! Last week was pretty good, I had a wobble on Saturday but allowed myself a bit of time to be sad and then pulled myself together! Which was good because Ma and I had allotment plans and I wanted to sort myself out for this week. Which I’m happy to report I did.

We’re nearly at the end of Lent and it’s been a really good Lent for me, I’ve spend some time thinking about my life and the thing that has been resonating for me and that I’ve kept coming back to is that ‘God has other work for me to do’. I’ve made no secret that being single and childless and nearly 45 is not how I expected my life to go. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love my life right now, I’m very lucky and although it’s hard sometimes, it’s not awful all the time. It’s been really interesting how over the course of the Grace Lent’s Whatsapp group, so many women have found fertility and carrying and being single and Mother’s Day tricky. The difficulty of not following the conventional marriage and children path even though most of us didn’t chose the paths we found ourselves on. This has kept popping up for me over Lent in other spaces. Friends who can’t have children, or are struggling with parenting. I didn’t get the wish of my heart, which seems odd because I’m really good with children! But my lack of them means that I get to spend more time with other people’s children and this little one, seen trying (I think) to feed a lamb!

Ok serious stuff asides, this week is busy, I have a short work week this week, an appointment with Ma for clothes shopping (I loathe clothes shopping and really try to avoid it but most of my summer clothes and sandals died last summer so it’s time to re-up my wardrobe!), more allotmenting and more family time, we are going up to babysit and to celebrate Laura’s birthday which is over the weekend!

Next week is full of good things, I just need to get over myself so I can enjoy it! Given that my aims for this week are all about getting enough sleep and looking after my space. I also want to spend some time reading and get some bedtime yoga in this week.

What’s everyone else up to?

 

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Friday Links

Posted on March 23, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday!

 

In case you missed them, this week’s posts miscellany, Cold Cures (well not exactly cures but coping with and getting rid of colds), this week’s allotment update was all about how it’s still winter even though it’s technically spring, and yesterday

Homelessness minister doesn’t know why homelessness is rising but is sure it’s nothing to do with cuts and universal credit. Really, either this woman is very, very stupid or she’s a liar. Neither is good.

If you’re homelessness minister, maybe you should know something about it Neil Coyle says it better.

This doesn’t help. UK surge in housing costs for poorest ‘worst in western Europe’

Let’s move to Spalding. This is were my grandma grew up, I can’t believe that they mentioned pork pies but not haslet!

Julie Washington’s Quest to Get Schools to Respect African-American English This is interesting.

‘Women are having different fantasies’: romantic fiction in the age of Trump. Also interesting…

The rise of the alpha single. I’m not sad and lonely, I’m on the bleeding edge of a trend! But this was good, this in particular

If my thesis on single life is sounding idealistic to you, let me concede that it isn’t a perfect riot of martinis, sex parties and sleeping in starfish position. There are wobbles, even if like me you have no children to worry about. This Valentine’s Day I came back to my desk after lunch to find that a well-meaning publicist had delivered a bunch of heart-shaped helium balloons. I sat there all afternoon with what felt like a bleakly ironic neon sign hanging over my head: “No romance here,” it blinked in my mind’s eye. “Hasn’t received a real Valentine’s gift since 1993.”

When I’m tired, when I’m ill, when I’m not invited to a dinner party because I don’t come in a pair – these are moments when I feel sorry for myself, and miss the safety net of having someone who loves me and will put their arms around me. But listen – it’s still worth it. When I stack the good moments and the bad on the metaphorical weighing scales, I still understand that this is a happier situation overall than a mediocre relationship.

 

 

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Allotment Adventures: Too cold for any adventures

Posted on March 21, 2018 by nicdempsey

Nothing got done this weekend, because it was snowing. I’m so over winter.

This time last year, I had planted potatoes, the raspberries had leaves on themThe rhubarb also had leaves…

This weekend it was -1C. Global warming doesn’t mean everything is going to be hotter, it means the climate will be unstable.

I also had a cold so stayed indoors. Ma and I  sowed some tomatoes, sweet peas and leeks. I feel so behind but given the weather that might be fine…

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Cold Cures

Posted on March 20, 2018 by nicdempsey

I feel that I get more than my fair share of colds but apparently the average adult gets two to four a year and it’s been two and half months since I had the last one. Mind you that lasted nearly four weeks but then everyone seemed to have that cold and everyone was one for about a month, so I don’t think I’m special.

Last Thursday, I woke up at 4.30 in the morning and I was slightly bunged up and I had a tickle in the back of my throat and I knew this was going to be a cold. I’ve been really careful and I’ve been taking elderberry syrup and all my vitamins but I spent the weekend before with Ma, who has a cold and the boys, who are germ magnets, I commute on the train every morning, which is not known for it’s germ free environment and I’d been at the doctor’s on Wed afternoon. So somewhere in all that I’d picked something up and I think I must have subconsciously been aware I was incubating something because I’d spent the weekday evenings, sorting my life out. Over the weekend the mystery was solved, it was the nephews, O had ‘manflu’ and Lu and Ben both had colds.

Cassie had just rounded up her ‘how to cope with colds’ series with a list of her favourite cold and flu remedies, which got me thinking about what I do when I have a cold or infection. Because it’s pretty much the same every time and waking up on Thursday morning, I started to go through it.

Ginger, Lemon and Honey Soother and lots of water.

I make a big batch of this for the fridge at home and to take into work with me, I use a lot more ginger in this than I used to, because last time I was ill, ginger seemed to be the only thing that helped the coughing, I also eat the ginger (it is extreme but it helps!). I drink this all through the day and for every cup of it I manage I also drink a glass of water. Fluids are important and I make sure I have lots of them!

Ginger Shots

I continue the ginger theme with ginger shots from Pret but I also can get them from Sainsburys. I find they help and it might just be the juice element adding to my Vitamin C intake but at this point, I don’t care.

Elderberry Syrup

I’m not sure whether this is having any effect but I have it so I increase the amount to tablespoon every two to three hours through the day.

Sleep

When I’m ill, I sleep. Some small children get wired when they are ill, I was never one of them. When I’m sick, my body wants to sleep, that’s easier said than done because I need to work and it’s hard to sleep if you’re coughing and bunged up.  I do get all the rest I can and have been known to come home, take my make up off and go straight to bed. 

Cold and Flu Medicine

I’m happy to try all the ‘natural’ remedies in the world if they help but at the same time God gave us the ability to science the hell out of things and so I’m more than happy to use cold and flu medicine if I need to. Generally, if it’s a mild cold, I don’t need to take anything during the day but I do take Night Nurse to ensure that I get a relatively good nights sleep.

VapoRub, Olbas Oil and Tiger Balm

When I have a cold, I smell like all of the above. I use the Olbas Oil through the day and smother my neck, chest and back in VapoRub before bed time. I also put tiger balm or VapoRub on the soles of my feet and cover with bedsocks before bedtime.

 

Tidy and organised

Ok, so being caught up on household chores and having an empty laundry basket or tidy kitchen don’t make me feel physically better, however, knowing that they are done or only need minimal work from me relives my mental load and allows me to relax and get on with getting well. Also having to wrestle through a mess or a load of laundry post cold doesn’t help with recovery. Added to that, although I would love to go to bed at the first sign of a sniffle and stay there until it was gone that doesn’t pay the rent so I have to do the 9 to 5 and when I’m ill, I need everything to be as easy as possible.

That looks slightly different each time but last week, it looked like doing a food shop on Thursday night and making batch of chilli, a batch of onion soup and a batch of boiled chicken.  They are all freezable and are easy to eat and heat and relatively  good for me. While I had the energy, I changed the bed and the towels (because those things always make me feel better and got the dirty ones washed (once they dry it takes five minutes to put them away).

Food as Medicine

I’m not super strict about it but I limit alcohol, additional sugar and dairy and try to eat healthily. Last week, I tried this smoothie to have for breakfast and it was great on my sore throat and the meals I cooked were easy to eat and relatively good for me.

Posted in Sick | 2 Comments

Monday Miscellany

Posted on March 19, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

This weekend there was more snow, winter needs to end soon. I have a cold and didn’t leave the house all weekend.

This morning I am going to attempt to get to work, both my usual train routes have issues, some days would be better spend indoors but I need to work or I don’t get paid!

In other news, my brother called at the weekend to ask how to make Yorkshire puddings and sent me a photo! Proud sister moment right there!

But as they all have a cold, I think I’ve identified the source of mine…

We didn’t make it to the allotment this weekend but instead sowed some seed, although I’m worried that the downturn in temperature may have done for them. Fingers crossed!

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Friday Links

Posted on March 16, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday! I seem to have a cold, I’m taking extra elderberry syrup, drinking lots of ginger with lemon and honey and ginger shots, taking extra vitamin C (it’s supposed to help shorten the length of a cold) and as much sleep as I can manage! Hopefully, I can stave of the worst of it.

This week from me, there was miscellany, a post about what the boys and I did for Mother’s Day for mummy and grandma, a brief post about the plot and a snapshot of what I’ve been eating recently.

Here are this week’s links from elsewhere…

Should we avoid Mother’s Day because it’s hard? This is something I was thinking about on Monday and is worth reading.

Childhood misconceptions Funny

Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don’t stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review

Delusions of stadium grandeur haunt West Ham and club’s owners I’m not all that keen on West Ham, but no fan deserves this!

Austerity really has hit poor people hardest – the figures prove it

If we truly cared about poor people, low-wage Britain wouldn’t exist

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Food Lately

Posted on March 15, 2018 by nicdempsey

Spring is on it’s way, it’s lighter in the morning and I’m feeling it in an uptick of energy, which means that I’m cooking a bit more than usual. Most of my cooking right now seems to be about using up the freezer, I’m keen to clear it out in preparation for the summer produce glut I’m hoping for.

Chicken and roasted vegetables, (onions, tomatoes, garlic and my last butternut squash from last season)

Leftover vegetables were used in a pasta dish and a puff pastry tart that I didn’t photograph.

Plum cake to use up the plums also in the freezer

Overnight oat breakfast pots with rhubarb compote.

Today I realised that I might be coming down with cold, so I’ll make a batch of boiled chicken as that is easy in the slow cooker and comforting and makes loads. The ultimate food for when you’re under the weather and for the cold snap we’re predicted at the weekend!

What are you eating right now?

 

 

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Allotment Adventures: Signs of Spring

Posted on March 14, 2018 by nicdempsey

I was away last weekend so there wasn’t a lot of allotmenting happening. On Friday morning, I went up to refill the bird feeders and collect the raspberry canes I’d dug up for my sister in law. I also saw a couple of people and had a chat and found out that my allotment neighbour was responsible for the mystery roll of edging left on my plot!

The plot is in pretty much the same state it was in last week, minus the snow.The broad beans look ok, although there are some gaps! As we haven’t planted anything else out and the cavolo nero and chard aren’t up to much, it’s all pretty much as it was.

The rhubarb is starting to push through and the chives and tarragon I planted last year seemed to have survived the winter and are pushing up.It doesn’t look like much but it makes me happy. I was comparing this time last year to now and everything is further behind this year thanks to the beast from the east. Every year is different, although every year Ma tells me to remember that we might not have a good year this time but every year I feel that, eventually, we do alright!

Also so far this year, I haven’t sowed a seed, witness my restraint! That all changes this weekend. The work list for April looks like this.

  • bonfire
  • paint the shed
  • start sowing seeds indoors (leeks, tomatoes, cucumbers, cucamelons, peppers, kale, chard, cauliflowers)
  • start sowing seeds outdoors (beetroot, carrots, radishes, peas, salad, herbs)
  • plant out potatoes
  • buy compost and fill remaining beds
  • plant out mint

What that actually looks like for this weekend!

Outside

  • Sow wildflowers
  • Sow peas and sweet peas
  • dig over top of plot where the squash are going
  • dig over area were sweet corn is going
  • plant out gypsophila
  • plant out two bags of potatoes
  • set up cloche
  • sort out mint

Inside

  • sow tomatoes
  • sow peppers
  • sow leeks
  • sow some cucumbers and cucamelons

I’m going to wait and sow the summer squash in April along with the basil and more cucumbers, although I love the idea of planting the potatoes on St Patrick’s Day, I’m not sure about the weather, the BBC tells me that the forecast for the weekend is light snow, which means that there will be no sowing of anything and the sweet peas will be sown indoors, assuming the weather is fine, my current working plan is to do 2 this weekend and the rest over Easter weekend.

 

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Crafting with the nephews

Posted on March 13, 2018 by nicdempsey

So a weekend with the boys. Activities for them are tricky because one is 8 (going on 15) and the other is 2 and a half (and into everything except having dirty hands!). I make them sound awful but actually they are lovely but it’s difficult to find one thing that they both can do.

Last weekend was Mothers Day and I wanted to do something with them for Laura, we could have cooked something and that would have worked with O, but it’s not something they can do together. Also other than food, often Mother’s Day crafts are rubbish and there is no point to the tat that poor mums get given on Mother’s Day.

So if we were going to do something it had to be quick-ish to deal with attention spans, easy for a toddler and interesting for an 8 year old and had to result in something useful!

Fortunately for me, Laura has a garden and she and O did some growing of things last year. Here come the flowerpots. I bought the pots from Wilko, primed them with a spray primer and then encouraged O to hand print them. I did try with J but he really doesn’t like having yucky hands and just wiped his hands on the pot rather than printing. O wrote the names of the herbs on some of the pots and I did the others.

Once they had dried, Oli and I lined the pots with coffee filters and then filled them with compost and sowed the right seeds for the pots and put them on the windowsill covered with a clear bag. Grandma got the same set of pots and all the stuff she needed to sow them when she got home!

Like us, and the weekend, it was a little haphazard but it was fun and filled an hour. There are lots of options for this. You could use herbs from the supermarket and pot them up, paint in all sorts of ways, depending the age of the children, it can be more or less complicated.

 

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Monday Miscellany

Posted on March 12, 2018 by nicdempsey

The week begins again…

The good news is that I had just over six hours sleep last night, I usually get four to five hours, so six feels amazing! The bad is that I’m starting the week behind because I wasn’t home this weekend but it was in a good cause and the boys were mostly delightful, J is the most straightforward toddler going, he was heartbroken on Friday night bedtime but happy otherwise and Oli is a fairly typical football obsessed 8 year old.Family time was good but I missed Friday at work so it feels like I’m going to spend all week catching up at home and at work…

Sunday was Mother’s Day and I do want to speak about it a bit. It can be a complicated day for some people, it’s not for me because I have a great mother and I know lots of good mothers. Although not having children is sometimes painful for me (and there is an irony that I spent this weekend looking after someone else’s children) but not everything has to be put aside because of my pain. I think that we need to give ourselves space to see and celebrate joy even, maybe especially, when it’s painful personally. I’ve seen a lot of posts and comments from people who don’t or didn’t have great relationships with their mothers or weren’t mothered well. I do understand because I don’t really do Father’s Day, my Dad wasn’t a particularly good father AND he’s been dead for years. This doesn’t mean that people who have/had good Dad’s shouldn’t celebrate them and that I can’t be happy for them, even though sometimes that can be painful for me. I’m disturbed by the trend towards thinking that because we can’t celebrate something, no one should. Yes, we need to be mindful that we don’t cause pain but we also need to understand that no one sets out to cause pain. We all need to work to being inclusive and thoughtful and thicker skinned.

In other news, I had a whiskey related injury this weekend, in a supermarket and I wasn’t drinking. I picked up a bottle of whiskey, which knocked another off the shelf, hit me in the leg as I was trying to stop it falling and then fell to the floor. Whiskey everywhere and an embarrassed and bruised Nic!

My goal this week is to find some balance, I’ve been feeling that work is all consuming. Which I think is because it’s still a temporary job. I took it on as a temp to perm role but three months in, it shows no sign of permanency and so it feels precarious. This is having an impact on me, in that I’m a bit more worried generally, it’s a constant, low level stress and I’m sure that my recent issues with my back are connected to this. So I need to make sure that I’m playing attention to the other parts of my life. We’ll see how that goes.

 

 

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