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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 08:36pm on 05/10/2014 under
I had a tooth out on Monday. Not fun, but could have been worse and I've been eating mainly soft things very slowly and carefully since, lest I upset the healing gum.

This might go some way to explain why I've been somewhat lacking in arsedness this week - I still haven't got round to posting my holiday pictures yet, although I have been working on them the last few days.

I've posted some of them on Facebook, because while FB has many faults, it does make it very easy to post pictures, unlike LJ which is rather more work.

The holiday was pleasant enough, but the weather could have been better - can't really complain though, as we've always been exceptionally lucky with the weather on Mull

New business bank account is now open, so we can soon tell Santander to stick theirs in that place over near Slice.

May holiday has been booked for next year at Grasspoint cottage, where we had last year's september holiday, and very nice it was too.

I did attempt some digging towards the end of the week, but the ground was so hard that I didn't achieve as much as I wanted to. Rain over the weekend may help with that.
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 10:42am on 12/05/2014 under
 Found a cricket ball in the back garden yesterday for the first time ever. Given that our garden backs directly on to the cricket field and we've lived here for more than eight years, I reckon that's not bad going....
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 08:28pm on 24/03/2014 under
 I seem to have lapsed into non-posting mode again before today. Bah.
 
A brief summary of the last week or so :-
 
- Gloria is mended and now tells me how many miles I can drive on the contents of the fuel tank once more.
 
- Stapleford (where Gloria went to be mended) is Not Terribly Exciting.
 
- But there is a nice pub which sells 99p coffee with endless refills until 2pm, which was jolly handy. And because it was so useful, I bought lunch there too, so they win.
 
- I now have a new wheelbarrow with a solid tyre. This was not as easily achieved as it sounds.
 
- Homebase (where I purchased the wheelbarrow) had not a single bag of peat-free compost to their name. For shame!
 
- Mavericks (latest Mac OSX version) has broken several of the plug-ins on the web-authoring tool I use. I am Not Impressed.
 
- In consequence, I have bought a new plug-in for the shop aspect of the site, which seems to have some functions that the old one didn’t, which is useful. I am still Not Impressed with the initial breakage however.
 
- I have pre-ordered Diablo III - Reaper of Souls, which launches tomorrow. However, even if my copy arrives in time, I very much doubt it’s worth even <i>attempting</i> to play on launch day…. (Yet another reason I wish D3 wasn’t online only).
 
-We’re off to Tenby at the weekend to lend someone a trike. Seaside!
 
 
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 12:30pm on 16/01/2014 under
Unsurprisingly, scanning the family photos has led me to remember Stuff and some of it I'm writing down in the form of general burbling, mostly in case I forget, but who knows, somebody might find it vaguely interesting too...

Today's burbling is about my childhood home in Sidcup.

The house I grew up in would seem a bit odd today and even when I was a teenager it was unusual.

It had no bathroom.

It did have a bath though - a fully plumbed in one, not a tin bath in front of the fire.

It lived in the kitchen, and when not in use was coved with a hand-made wooden "bath-top" covered in lino, which was used as a kitchen work surface - the only kitchen work surface in fact.

Baths thus tended to be once a week affairs, usually on a Sunday night - I remember listening to the top twenty on Radio 1 on bathnights - and the rest of the time a wash with a flannel in front of the living room fire had to suffice.

What about the toilet? Well that was a small room which was part of the house, but accessed by going out the back door and past the living room window. So when I was small, going to the toilet was referred to as "going round the corner" and not much fun as there tended to be a fair few spiders lurking therein.

But having never known anything else, it didn't seem strange to me when I was small - it was home.

The front door was painted orange, which was unusual, but it was bright and pretty and I liked it a lot. In fact, I've just had a lightbulb moment - I've always liked the colour orange, without ever thinking about it - but obviously in some subconscious way it means "home" to me. D'oh!

Over the front door was a sign saying "Yer Tis". None of my schoolmates understood this, which baffled me - it was clear as day to me that it meant "Here it is" in my Mum's Devonshire accent.

The front garden was surrounded by a privet hedge and had a bit of lawn and a number of hydrangea bushes. These had both pink and blue flowers - I don't know if they were being fed something to bring this about or if we just had weird soil :) Google maps tells me this has all gone now - the current owners have concreted the garden and use it to park their cars.

But the back garden was where all the real gardening happened - there was a rockery along the right hand side, and then, divided by a fence, the vegetable plots where grandad and later Dad grew leeks and runner beans and other veg to help feed us and eke out the budget.

And in the flower bed below the old apple tree, just in front of the fence, I had "my" little bit of garden. I don't think I ever grew anything of note there, but it was a nice feeling to have a bit of ground that was "mine". Oddly, I didn't have any interest in gardening between leaving that house and meeting Rob. But I think the allotment makes up for it now :)

At the very bottom of the garden was the garage, a mystical place filled with the smell of motor-oil and an assortment of mysterious artefacts of unknown purpose, with wooden handles smoothed from years of use. The car (whichever car we had at the time) lived in there too - unlike most modern "garages" there was room for one in there - and not the tiny modern cars either, but big seventies monsters like the Vauxhall Victor that Dad kept for nearly a decade because it was so reliable.

Just before the garage on the left and side of garden path was an old Nissen hut where Dad kept his little red and white moped.

Also in the garden was a "meat safe" - a hole in the ground with a lid, suspended from which was a tray. The idea was that the meat would be put in the tray to keep cool in the summer. I don't think it was used much, but it was fascinating to me as a child - I think I imagined it was some sort of hiding place for pirates treasure or something like that :)

I made the mistake of looking up the house on Zoopla and except the garage, all that's gone now. My mature self knows that this is what happens when houses are sold. But my inner ten year old is screaming in rage and anguish at what these heedless, vandalous Philistines have done to her home....

Even my more mature self thinks it's an indictment of the subsequent owners that the low wire fence between our garden and next door's, over which my mum used to chat with the neighbours, has been replaced with a six foot larchlap fence, through which you can't even see the neighbours, much less converse with them.
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 09:16am on 22/03/2013 under
Rob's Mum and Dad gave us these splendid rotating ants for Christmas - and now they look like they're having Christmas all over again...

Mood:: 'amused' amused
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 07:33pm on 26/04/2012 under ,
White, milk or dark chocolate? Yes please! :) Dark would be first choice, but I like all of them - but Hershey's can keep their Kisses, thank you.

Perfect tattoo? One on someone else :) I don't enjoy pain, and I hate needles, so a tattoo on me is not going to happen.

Did you grow up in a small town or big city? Depends how you look at it really. It was a remote suburb of London, which had a postal address in Kent, but from where you could get to Central London without ever seeing a field…..

Pirates or Ninjas? Pirate Ninjas!

Cut for Burbling )
Mood:: 'amused' amused
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 08:36pm on 13/04/2012 under , ,
Yesterday poor postie had to bring us ALL the parcels :) There were two packages of plug plants - six yellow Osteospermums and five blue Sennetti. They've been potted up and are hopefully now wiggling their toesies in the nice fresh compost and comtemplating growing big and strong.

Also a new satnav as it was on special at Amazon and has some snazzy new features that the old one doesn't - like telling me which lane to be in when there's a choice, for instance. This one is also to be fitted with Brian Blessed's voice - not just as a gimmick, I can actually hear him more clearly than "Jane" and besides, I find him oddly reassuring. Yes, I'm weird, but you knew that anyway :)

Today I managed to get some time on the allotment between rain showers and among other things opened up my compost heap which has been maturing for over a year now. The following pictures will be of limited interest to those of a non-gardening persuasion and possibly even to those who do like to garden :)

Compost and more flying things. )
Mood:: 'amused' amused
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 07:58pm on 10/04/2012 under , , ,


 I seem to have slipped into posting nothing but book reviews and photos again. Bah!
 
This weekend we pootled down to see my Mum - we seem to have picked the right two days of the Easter weekend to travel as the whole journey was relatively painless. Mum has a painful knee and a sore leg at the moment as well as her ongoing COPD, but she's still trying to keep moving about as much as possible to avoid more blood clots. 
 
She seemed really pleased to see us and was showing off the new brick wall with integral brick planters which my sister's partner has recently built for her
 
Rob was planning a long ride on Monday but it rained like a rainy thing all day. Fortunately, his firm gave everybody Tuesday off as well, so he went out today instead.
 
When not at work or out riding, he's having fun watching the birds on the feeders - he's been buying live mealworms for the robin, who has quickly learned that human going outside = more mealworms in the feeder and tends to appear rapidly once Rob's back indoors.  The blackbirds enjoy mealworms too, but don't seem to like the special robin feeder, so i've been putting some dried ones for them on the flat tray section of the feeding station. today the female was gathering great clumps of them in her beak and flying away with them, so I think there may be baby blackbirds being fed nearby :)
 
The goldfinches are regular visitors, seeming to enjoy both the niger seeds and the sunflower seeds and today a couple of long-tailed tits popped in for a desultory peck at the fatballs.

Seedlings have begun appearing at the allotment - lollo rosso, carrots and brussel sprouts so far, No sign of the rudbeckias or asparagus, but it's early days yet
Mood:: 'lazy' lazy
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 08:40pm on 14/10/2009 under
I was amused today at the sight of some small pumpkin/squash type things in Sainsbogs, which were labelled "Munchkins" :-)

Gave me a good giggle .
Mood:: 'amused' amused
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posted by [personal profile] cat63 at 09:43am on 04/08/2009 under
Just had the letter through to say it's time I had another smear test (oh joy!) and was rather amused to find it was from someone called Mary Whitehouse :-)
Mood:: 'amused' amused

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