Life Happened: All allotment, all the time

On Monday, Ma and I got up early and did some serious hard graft on the allotment. We used all of the compost that Christelle and Mike bought. img_4347Slug bait was sprinkled and the whole place was beginning to look like an allotment instead of a wasteland with some fruit on it.

After a good three or so hours, we called it a day and went home. After Ma went home, I picked up my new phone and after a detour to the plot to pin down the weed fabric, went home to sort myself out for the next three days at work.

Richard dropped off some tools that he and Sue had rescued from her mum’s house and I am now the proud owner of a hand mower and a soil sieve among other things. In a month, I’ve gone from no garden tools to a flat full and I’ve only actually bought a small fork because my friends are amazing.

On Tuesday, it rained for a bit and I wasn’t sad about this because I need the rain to soften the weedy bit of the allotment so I can dig it over. And yes I am obsessed with it, utterly obsessed.

Thursday was my last day in the office, thank goodness because our air conditioning is broken and it’s like working in hell its so hot. I stayed at Ma’s on Thursday night so the very hot office was good practice for Ma’s super heated flat!

Friday started with a little lie in and coffee and a pastry before a haircut. It’s nice to be able to see again! Then I got home, went to the library and met Kathy and her two imps. We caught up, ate pizza, tidied lego and it was absolutely what I needed from a Friday night!

Saturday was allotment volunteer day, we started at 10am and from that point until about 7pm, I didn’t stop. The tasks for the volunteer day were to tidy and get the site ready for the Open Day on 25th June, if you’re in the area, come along, there will be tours, you can have a wander and I’ll be manning the cake stall at some point in the afternoon, we like cake and are keen bakers so all the cake is good! Photo by Simon, I remain unphotographed…

Then Kathy took me to Homebase because she is marvellous and I bought compost and plants.

From there, I did food shopping, cooked dinner for Ma and I and mentally prepared myself for Sunday. We were on the allotment from 9:15-ish until about 1:45pm. We achieved loads, Sarah came to visit (and brought fizz!) but in addition to the work done on Monday, we made three new beds and mulched all around them and the old beds. We put in two roma tomato plants and some tiny marigold seedlings, an aubergine and a sweet pepper, and the other (smaller) courgette plants. We also planted sweet peas and sowed peas (and put up netting for them), sowed salad, spinach, rocket and nasturtiums. We dug up the french bean seedlings that did not survive the windy weather this week and sowed some others straight in the ground. Now we’ll see what survives the weather and the slugs this week.

Plans for this week are work, it’s my busy week at the office, sleep, and watering the plot, what are you up to?

Posted in How I Live | Leave a comment

Sunday Music: Ain’t It a Sin

This is getting a lot of play on 6Music and it’s great. So Charles Bradley  – Ain’t It a Sin

Posted in Music | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Little Goals – June 2016

How are we at June already? June is shaping up to be a nice quiet month. No major events planned, everyone else in the family is on holiday at some point in the month and the only thing I have in the diary is some babysitting. Of course on the other hand, it’s going to be prime growing season for the allotment so I might be totally preoccupied with that!

Home

Clean the windows. The every three months for the windows doesn’t really work until the windows are open all the time. They got done in February and haven’t needed it. Now they do.

Sort out clothes. Time to put away the winter clothes and send winter coats to the dry cleaners.DSCF4772

Finance

Have one week this month were I spend less than £10 on groceries. This is good for me and I’m thinking something in the £7.50 range. I also like doing this on the last week of the month to make sure that I’m using everything up an nothing is hanging around the fridge or freezer!

Stay on track. Keeping this here because I need to remind myself not to buy all the plants and garden stuff.img_4232-1

Body and Mind

70,000 steps a week. Walking is still the best exercise I can think of and provided my foot holds up, I need to do more of it.

Daily exercise. 20 squats, 2x 30 second planks, 10 sit ups, 10 press ups. A repeat month and I need to do it 30 times this month.

Yoga and Stretching. I need to do this everyday too.

Proper bedtimes. I love summer and the light nights so this is just a reminder that I need to go to bed at a reasonable time because I’m going to be awake before 5am because that’s when the sun comes up!img_4046

Posted in Goals | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Friday Links

Happy Friday!  It is an even more happy Friday for me because I’m not at work. This is my last day of planned leave until August so I’m going to make the most of it by having my haircut, doing chores and seeing friends so I can be on the allotment without guilt for the rest of the weekend!

Here are this week’s links…

How my job talking women out of having abortions made me pro-choice.

Because some women regret abortion, that doesn’t mean all women should have the choice taken from them.

Even though the vast majority of women who have abortions won’t regret them, there will always be some women who wish they didn’t end a pregnancy – that’s just the reality. But it’s better to regret a decision than never having the option to make it in the first place.

Regret is tricky. If I knew at 21, that I would be childless at 42, I would probably not had an abortion. At the time, I made the best choice I could with the information I had. Would I have wanted to be tied for the rest of my life to the person I got pregnant with. No, no and hell no. So overall, I don’t regret it. If we’d known Stef was going to die young, we’d have been more serious, earlier but then no Luc and Helene. We all do (or don’t) make decisions that with hindsight we’d change. Being an adult means that we own our choices not that we take those same choices away from others.

Addiction in Utah. The strongest prescribed painkillers I’ve ever taken have been co-codamol, which have codeine in it and are mild opiates. I took them for my foot, I don’t take them for migraines because after a discussion with my doctor, I decided that I’d rather not, the migraines are too frequent. Same with the sleeping pills, temazepam is great when I’m short on sleep and at the end of my tether but they are a short term extreme measure and I use them like that. We need to know what we can get from painkillers before they are prescribed. My view is that painkillers aren’t about giving us no pain, pain is good, it’s our bodies pointing out that something is wrong. This is why I didn’t use all of my painkillers after my foot surgery, I wasn’t expecting to have no pain at all in my foot, I used painkillers when the pain was unmanageable. Everyone’s has a different pain threshold but doctors do need to be upfront about this when prescribing or not painkillers. Pills and the doctors that prescribe them are aids to help you manage pain and health. You need to have a conversation with your doctor about what’s going on and they need to properly explain risks and consequences. I think that its a conversation we all need to be having about our role in our healthcare.

Obama shouldn’t apologise for Hiroshima, he should learn it’s lessons. I have a really British gut reaction to the calls for an apology for the bombing of Hiroshima and Dresden. Which is basically, no. I believe that the bombing were horrific and wrong but I also understand the context. At the time, the Japanese were refusing to surrender and killing Japanese civilians probably didn’t seem like that much of a issue in light of what the Japanese had done to civilians in China, Burma and elsewhere. Again it’s not right but it is an understandable human impulse. If an apology for Hiroshima would prompt the Japanese to examine their role in WWII and look at their war crimes, fair enough but I don’t think it would. What we should do is commit to not having, making or using nuclear weapons, that would be learning…

Landlords need to pass a fit and proper person test. This.

Poland is having a constitutional crisis of which I knew nothing.

Posted in Links | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Allotment Adventures: Finally growing more than weeds

I didn’t do everything I set out to do this weekend but there was progress

From this img_4330to thisimg_4347That’s herbs (rosemary, sage, marjoram and thyme), tomatoes, courgettes and french beans in.

img_4338img_4340img_4339The beans are not looking so great right now but we’ll see how they do, I just about have time to sow straight in the ground if these don’t work!

I did not weed the raspberries but I did make a decision about the unweeded part of the allotment. Turn it over, cover in weed cloth. That way I can clear at leisure without worrying about being a bad neighbour. The unweeded area is really hard to dig over but we’ve had some rain recently and that should help. So far this is all I’ve doneimg_4346The plan for next weekend is to get some more dug over and under cover, weed the raspberries and get some runner beans and peas in the ground. Maybe there will also be time (and energy) to get another bed going for salad and wildflowers.img_4345There is still lots of work to do but I’m feeling better about it. And I picked some flowers…img_4342

Posted in allotment | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What I’ve Read – May 2016

I really wanted to read this month, so I did! Here’s the list…

The Mane Event – Shelly Laurenston (library ebook)

The Beast in Him – Shelly Laurenston (library ebook)

The Mane Attraction – Shelly Laurenston (library ebook)

The Mane Squeeze – Shelly Laurenston (library ebook)

Beast Behaving Badly – Shelly Laurenston (library ebook)

Big Bad Beast – Shelly Laurenston (library ebook)

Wolf with Benefits – Shelly Laurenston (library ebook)

Bite Me – Shelly Laurenston (library ebook)

I’m going to take these all at once. This was a recommendation from a friend and from Smart Bitches. They were obviously entertaining enough to keep reading and are up there with Nalini Singh book crack, I’ve read all but one. They’re funny and get funnier as the series goes along, my favourite hero’s are the bears especially Bo, who likes a schedule and a list and things being tidy (he’s a fictional creation but I’m pretty sure that Laurenston has met my mother!) if I have one issue, its the female name calling, no one needs to call another woman a heifer but it lessened as the books went on so all good.

Only a Kiss – Mary Balogh – (library book)

Survivors club part 5, I love this series, I love that no-one gets cured, they each pair bring out the best in each other and commit to working through. Which is to me the most romantic thing you can do, not to expect perfect but to commit to working together.

Foxglove Summer – Ben Aaronvitch (library book)

I actually really enjoyed this. I liked that Peter was out of London because it absolutely echoed his emotional state, he was all at sea. It was a bit of a holding book but I think it was important because despite his cocky, know-all persona, he’s not always got the answer but he always tries. I think that’s the comparison, Peter is police because he’s good, Lesley was good because she was police and whether Peter could stand up to what Lesley experienced and still be good, I think this book was trying to show that he would. He sacrificed himself, ok he was hoping for rescue but he could have walked by didn’t. Lesley went to the ‘dark side’ now and she’ll try and keep Peter out of it because she cares about him, but seemingly all the other horrors that the Faceless Man will inflict on people that aren’t Peter, she’s ok with because it will eventually get her what she wants (her face back). You can also see Peter learning more and growing and thinking about the big picture. So I think the next book will be interesting.

Getting His Way – Erin Nichols (bought)

I love this series. this was interesting because both hero and heroine have unrealistic views of each other and learn to let that go. This was the book I read in the bath on a Friday night, all of it in one shot, which equates to 2 and half hours in the bath. My life is all rock and roll.

Keane’s Challenge – Iain Gale (library book)

The second Keane. Keane is a bit of a wonderboy, good at everything but slightly disturbed by how good he is at being a spy. I think it’s also quite good at showing what a new and innovative thing ‘exploring officers’ were. It’s been compared to Sharpe but Keane is Irish and doesn’t know who his father is, I always find this amusing Wellington was a snob, he liked to promote useful, intelligent sons of the aristocracy (look at his staff!) and while not above using good men, I can’t see that Keane would be so much trusted by Wellington. I am pleased that Keane isn’t one of the many heros of the 95th, if as many men served in the 95th as there have been books written about men serving in the 95th, well, the Peninsula would have been over run with British! That aside I enjoyed the book, Gale knows his stuff and sometimes it made me laugh out loud (Wellington’s opinion of the cavalry “No point sending them in. Once they’re off, they’re off, and we lose them. Good in the saddle, but damn uncontrollable fellows, every one of them” – couldn’t have summed up Wellington’s general opinion better if he tried!). I’m looking forward to the next one.

Much Ado About You – Eloisa James (bought)

This was one of my Barter Books purchases and look at cover, so very like my Georgette Heyer’s. I haven’t found an Eloisa James book that I’ve disliked and this is no exception.

The Countess – Lynsay Sands (library ebook)

This was a Smart Bitches recommend and I’ve had it on reserve since. It is completely crazysauce. There’s a lot going on and it all makes sense at the time but afterwards, you’re just sort of sitting there going “huh?” It was perfect travel reading, I read it on the train journey to France this month and completely bonkers. I could have done without Americanisms like ‘pants’ for trousers but this is not a book to be taken seriously except in one place. The heroine suffers from what we would deem coercive control something that if you’ve been listening to The Archers like what I have you will be familiar with. I really liked that the heroine didn’t just snap out of it once she was free of it but that it took her time and courage to trust that the romance wasn’t going to be like her marriage and that she was fine just as she was.

Controlled Burn – Shannon Stacey (library ebook)

I like Shannon Stacey books so when I saw that this was available I borrowed it to ‘take’ to Paris with me. I liked it but it felt rushed to me and ended all at once and I felt that there was more to know and see. However, another perfect train book.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransome Riggs (library book)

I’ve had this on a list of things I want to read for a long time. Then I saw the trailer for the film and thought I ought to get a move on and reserved it. God, I love the library. It’s not at all what I was expecting and I really liked it. I have the next two on order…

Posted in Books, Reading in 2016 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Food and Budget Update: 21/05 to 27/05/2016

Time to talk about food and budgets. My food week runs from Saturday until Friday. I went to Paris on the Friday and didn’t get back until late Sunday night, which is why this week appears quite short.

SHOPPING 

I deliberately didn’t do a big shop  I had Monday off work and went to Lidl then spent about £4.50 on carrots, and the basics for a chana masala (hey I like it and it’s useful!) I didn’t take a photo of the shopping so you’re just going to have to trust me!

COOKING AND EATING 

I was completely out of sorts on Monday and my stomach was a bit upset, probably from the excess of good food and wine all weekend. I had toast and eggs on Monday for ‘breakfast’ and cheese on toast for dinner.

Tuesday was a bit of a disaster, I bought a sandwich for lunch and resolved to do better for the rest of the week. For the rest of the week, I had eggs for breakfast and lentil, feta and chickpea salad for lunch.

Tuesday night dinner was the lentil, feta and chickpea salad. No photo because I am an airhead and forgot!

Wednesday night was pasta because it is the ultimate in ‘I’m not feeling creative and I don’t want cook but have to’ food. This was aubergine, onion and seeds

Thursday night I ate breakfast for dinner. Poached eggs on toast are currently my default setting..

Friday was pizza

LESSONS LEARNED

I am not good when I’m tired and grumpy and there’s not a proper plan! I know this and I was much more prepared for the week (which is this week).

Best thing I ate was the French set yogurt at the weekend. I love French supermarkets because of their yogurt aisles!

Posted in Cooking, Food, Money | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Life Happened: French hangover

Last week was much harder than it should have been. I had Monday off to go to the doctors and do things that didn’t get done because I was in Paris at the weekend, so off to a good start. I didn’t get nearly as much done as I probably should have.

I got to the doctors and I was early which is a miracle given the appointment was for 9am! I met Kathy for lunch, had a long phone call with my brother and another later on with Christelle and went to the allotment but I was tired and out of sorts so not much work got done.img_4315But look at the amazing poppies! Later on, I had to go back to the allotment to pick up the spare tomato plants that Ian (another allotment holder) had given meimg_4316Tuesday was back to work. I was up early all over the weekend but that 6am call on work days is soul destroying.

Although moaning about a 4 day work week is on something I’m allowing myself to do, I knew that I needed an bit of an energy boost to get through the week in a more positive frame of mind. So on Tuesday night, I came home and cooked dinner and made lunch for the next day. Knowing I was sorted allowed me to read until bedtime, with some short diversions for Round the Horne and Jonny who came round briefly to gift me with some courgette plants from his greenhouse. They are monsters…img_4318My week didn’t get any worse, in fact it was significantly meh. There was no reason for this, work was fine, home was fine, even with the living room looking like a greenhouse! I was fine. I was also stupidly tired, frazzled and generally out of sorts. By Thursday morning, I was pretty much resigned to getting through the week feeling that I had gotten out of the wrong side of bed and I just needed to get the hell over it.

On Friday, I had an appointment with the physio, my left ankle has been very sore for a couple of months, I think it’s probably the readjustment of all the bits of my foot since the osteotomy last year but has been going on for long enough and is painful enough that it was worth getting it checked out.

Then it was the weekend and I did weekend things! Allotment, housework, dinner at Mike and Christelles, garden centre, Ma came for dinner.

Today is a bank holiday, so more allotment and hopefully a better week at work!

Posted in How I Live | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

2016 Goal Recap – May

We are almost at the end of May and it’s time to talk about it.

How did May go? Quickly, it was a very busy month. I took on the allotment, went to Paris and was more active generally and a lot more sociable, I saw and talked to people who I wasn’t related to every weekend in May, which is a level of social butterflying I’m not sure that my introvert soul could cope with every month but it felt good.

Money felt like less and more of a problem. I had a good grip on where it was and how much, I just didn’t feel like there was that much of it but this is a problem I have generally, there is always lots of things to buy and never enough money to buy them all!

Other than that I’m feeling pretty good. I’m going to go through the annual goals and the May Little goals because it’s time to look at the annual ones rather than just to say ‘I feel on track’ but I do feel on track, I feel more positive about life generally and more in control and more happy than I have in a while, summer making a difference and good things happening.

HOME

  • Decoration. In 2016, I need to paint the bathroom, bedroom and living room again. I’d like to tackle the bathroom before June but the other rooms will have to wait until I have full use of my foot again! I haven’t done any of this, I think this is going to have to wait until after the summer because right now, the allotment is where most of my time and money will go…
  • De-clutter. I want to have another clear out of the cupboard of doom and have a serious look at what’s in the kitchen. Kitchen was done in January and the cupboard of doom is more tidy than I thought my current plan is do this when I have a week off in August, because one of things I really need to do is sort out some more suitable storage for things like the spare duvets etc.
  • Deep cleaning. I will assign a weekend every three months to deep clean the flat. In this weekend I will scrub the floors, clean the oven and windows and all that stuff I’m not good at remembering to do! This is going well, the flat is tidy and at time of writing I have a clean oven, defrosted fridge, clean windows and floors!

Little Goals – Home

Defrost the freezer. Done, it killed the hairdryer, look I had a two hour window over a very busy weekend. Fortunately, I had a spare hairdryer because I got two for my 39th birthday!

Re-grout the bathroom tiles. I did this a couple of years ago and it’s just beginning to mold and look tired. Time to re-do them. Haven’t got around to that but they’ve had a bloody good scrub and look much better.

DSCF5044FINANCE

  • Tracking. I’ve been using a spreadsheet, that Ma (the queen of the spreadsheets!) helped me set up. It tracks what goes in and out of my bank account and what’s left. It also helps me plan for the year. In 2016, I will be consistent about using it. I’m totally on the tracking thing. It really works and I really like the weekly text from my bank which helps keep me there!
  • Food Budget. This one is already in play, in 2016 I will set a food budget of £15 a week and I will record my spending and eating on this blog each Tuesday. Any money I don’t spend each week will go into the change jar, which is sealed and won’t be opened until 1st December 2016. I’ve gone over the budget a couple of times, but this has been brilliant for me, the weekly updates are helpful in keeping me on track and I’ve become more mindful of being creative with what I have in the house.
  • Overdraft. I have one and I want it gone, so I will pay it off in 2016. I’m halfway there. This is about to get tricky as my rent goes up in June and I’m £40 less well off each month. I’ve written about this a lot on and off but I gained £10 a month because of changes to tax but am losing £50 a month to a rent increase. Just to know that the rent increase is low and I am eternally grateful to my landlord for being so reasonable but we are in a housing crisis and this is how they pan out.
  • Credit Cards. I won’t use them in 2016. I reserve the right to use them in an emergency but I can’t plan for those… Less success with this target, they have been used, it was sort of a family emergency and I’m not saying anymore than that!

Little Goals

  • Have one week this month were I only spend £10 on groceries. I think a week of ‘less’ is good for making sure that I don’t have too much food in the house. That was this week and I’m thinking that the last week before payday might always be a minimal spend week because it encourages me to use things up and be creative.
  • Stay on track. I’ll have to pay for the allotment this month and the temptation to buy all the gardening things is immense! So I need not to. This is for financial as well as mental health reasons. Progress on the allotment needs to be slow and steady so I stick at it. So I have to practice patience as well as fiscal prudence! I did it, it wasn’t fun but I did it.

IMG_3249BODY AND MIND

  •  Walking. Walking more was a game changer for me in 2015 and I want to get back to that, obviously that will depend on how my foot recovery goes. So I need to have small, long term goals for this, a) by the end of March 2016, I would like to be walking either to work from Paddington Station OR from work to Paddington Station, that’s about 35 minutes a day. b) by the end of June 2016 I would like to be walking both ways and getting my 10,000 steps a day. I’ve not been walking to or from the station to the office. The good news is that I’m doing about 70,000 steps a week, so am hitting an average of 10,000 a day. I’m not fulfilling the exact target but I’m in the ballpark and happy with this.
  • Body Balance. I love doing this when I do and my work gym membership resumes in July. So I’d like to go to one class a week in July and August and then resume 2 classes a week from September. This isn’t going to happen. I don’t think my foot is at all up to it and the money for gym membership is for this year going to be used on the allotment. That’s how it goes but I’m shelving Balance and will look at it again in 2017.
  • Yoga. The evening routine is good for me so by the end of February, I want to be doing this at least twice a week. I am doing this at least once a week, with the decision not to resume other classes, I need to get into this more at home and it will be a little goal for June.
  • Volunteering. I want to start attending the volunteer allotment days in June and this year use the two CSR days work gives me. I’m sure that my Mum can find a use for me either at the foodbank or the homeless project! I’m a little bit ahead of myself, I went back at for the May session at the allotments and will continue through the year. Ma reckons that I will be needed at the food bank during or just after harvest festival because that’s when they get deluged so I’m holding off until then. 
  • Books. The 12 book target was good but restrictive last year, I’m going to give myself a bit more leeway and have 24 books this year. I’ve bought 8 books so far this year, I’m feeling good about that.
  • Work Uniform. This year I want to have a work uniform, but not use it as an excuse for buying more stuff. I need to wear office clothes 4 days a week so I will create 6 outfits for work make sure that 4 of them are clean and ready to go for Monday morning. This was a genius idea, it makes life much easier and as the only new clothing or footwear I’ve bought this year has been a new pair of jeans, I feel it’s helping me make the best of the clothes I have.

Little Goals

  • Three times a week walk from the station to the office. Need to redo this one for this month. Nope this didn’t really happen, due a sore foot.
  • 7,000 steps a day every day and 10,000 steps 4 days a week. I don’t think that I’m up for 10,000 steps every day but I need to push this a bit and see how much I can do! Done and done. I’ve done an average of 7,000 steps a week which is more than the goal and that was with a couple of days knocked out cause of migraine or not leaving the house (working from home), so I’m feeling really good about this.
  • Daily exercise. 20 squats, 2x 30 second planks, 10 sit ups, 10 press ups. I managed four days a week average and I was at the allotment digging a lot! Again not brilliant but pretty good.
  • A dry (ish) month. I had a lovely holiday and although we were more restrained with food and alcohol, we had daily gin and daily wine. I feel that my liver needs a rest, so I will limit my drinking!  I had totally dry work weeks and limited myself to within my units even when I had two gin and tonics after a hard day on the allotment! This was good, the test comes tonight when I’m at dinner at Mike and Christelle’s. Mike is the wine terrorist, wine just sneaks into your glass when you least expect it!

 

Posted in Goals | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Friday Links

Happy Friday! This Friday involves less traveling to the Continent and more physio but life can’t be all exciting glamour sometimes you have to go to physio and do the laundry!

Town halls aren’t to blame for homelessness.

Austerity is about selling of public assets

The power of saying thank you

An adopter and foster carer on family ties and doing the right thing. I’ve always argued that we let children down when we don’t tell them the truth. The detail of that changes but the essential fact is that children in care whether they end up adopted or not, need to know the truth of what happened to them and of why they were taken away from their birth families. We also need to admit that it’s not ideal. In a perfect world there would be no need for adoption but we don’t live in a perfect world and we need to be honest about that.

Brexit and lessons from the Duke of Wellington. Some of the comments on this are hilarious.

Men who live as dogs. I tend to take the view that people should be allowed to do what they like if it doesn’t harm people but I’m perplexed…

Mount Vernon new exhibit on Washington and slavery. Good. Mount Vernon is interesting but the slave quarters stayed with me, I couldn’t and still can’t get my head around them. I know that Britain’s history of slavery is not straightforward either but I think the ability to say ‘this person did great things but also did objectionable things’ is important.

Posted in Links | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment