Posts (page 2)

at which point in your day would you have preferred to have noticed the mould in the loaf of bread?

Before you had your scrambled eggs on toast for lunch? 

Or a couple of hours later. 

Last night I dreamed that Kate Evans and I had invented a new form of exercise that was beautifully simple, fantastically effective and quickly became the absolute must-do exercise of the beautiful people and finally it trickled down to the sort of people who have to write their own blogs.   What was particularly fabulous about this exercise was that it seemed to allow people to defy any sort of age and fashion rule and 'mutton' had been banished to the hinterland of  life.  The reason I say this is because Kate and I were running around in lycra mini skirts (to be fair, we were very, very thin) but whilst I can't speak for the advisability of Kate wearing a lycra mini skirt, I can tell you that me wearing a lycra mini skirt, no matter how slim I was,  would just allow young people to snigger.

Anyway, the major problem is that I can't sodding well remember what this exercise was that we invented so we're doomed before we start.  But I do know that further on in this dream I ended up running a large bill up on Kate's mobile phone because I needed to check my answer phone.  There's no fairy tale ending to this where I woke up and found a lycra mini skirt at the end of my bed - in fact that would be more of a nightmare I think. 

It matters not because I am just disgruntled at the moment and can't even summon up the enthusiasm for a proper bad mood or be in a temper.  If I were 30 years younger I'd be putting Leonard Cohen on the record player and whining that it's not fair.  I'd probably write a poem into my lockable five-year-diary too.  Something about there being no point in anyfink.

I really can't be arsed to do anything much - well, anything, really.  I have three hours to kill before I have to appear at some poxy school to look at the library which has taught me that in future I need to clarify clocks and time and that just because the words 'open' and 'day' are used together doesn't actually mean that it's in the day time.  So, I'm going to be spending 2 hours of my Friday evening going 'mm, sehr interessant, sehr interessant' while wondering how soon I can shove off.

And the woman in the queue at the supermarket needs to learn quite a lot about personal space.

My background project has been the garden but it's now become the hot new climber in porkette's project list.  We live in a rented house, it has always been a rented house and no one has ever done anything to this garden other than basic maintenance.  The landlord has planted some pretty dull foliage to screen our garden from the neighbours and there is also a rambling rose around our terrace.  Apart from that nothing much other than a scraggy lawn.  At the front of the house we have a lawn composed of moss and a couple of flower beds which contain a rhododendron and some rather scruffy Heathers.  The soil is clay and has poor drainage.  If this wasn't enough the back of the house is on quite a steep slope so the whole garden tilts - mowing the lawn is a brilliant workout. 

Last year I started relatively quietly by starting to dig over a sunny corner of the garden and plant some sweetpeas to trail over the fence.  I dug in dung pellets and many liters of compost to a piece of ground measuring about  6 feet by 2 feet - it took a long time to sift the soil and get rid of the stones but I did get some pretty good sweetpeas - grown from seed by me.  I stuck some seeds straight into the soil and then chipped a few others so that I'd have a chance of something coming through.  I've had to learn the weather here too because things stay colder for longer and we also have harder winter temperatures than in the UK.  What may be hardy in the UK isn't here.

My neighbours noticed my efforts and I got some compliments for the sweetpeas.  During autumn I planted some daffodils, narcissi and a few other bulbs that I can't remember the names of.  I've decided that anything I buy has to be perennial unless I plant it from seed because I don't want to spend a lot of money on the garden - I've got time but not huge amounts of cash.  So far this year I've got sweetpeas and nasturtiums from seed.  I've got courgettes from seed and have swapped 2 courgette plants for 2 tomato plants.  I've planted mint and rocket in tubs and they've both germinated and now I need to see if they'll survive to adulthood.

I'm spending about 5 or 6 Euros a week on the garden and to date have bought some Iris, Phlox, Trailing Hearts and Aubretia.  My neighbour has divided one of her Aubretia plants for me and I've got that started to try and disguise some spectacularly nasty stone troughs.  Perhaps in about 3 years it will have started to tumble in a way that cover unsightliness.  Several neighbours have noticed what I'm doing and I've been offered cuttings and divisions of plants from their gardens.  I think that mainly they're pleased that this garden is finally being cultivated.  I have been promised grape hyacinths, lady's mantle and peonies.  

I'm going to start photographing the garden - at the moment it still looks like a wasteland and although there will be pretty pockets later this year, I don't expect to have anything like a whole pretty garden.  This is very much my long term plan.  Gardens grow and develop - they don't appear overnight.

Recently someone asked me if I didn't think it was a bit of a waste to be spending time and money on something that didn't belong to me and I didn't agree.  I'm going to get the pleasure of doing the work - I do enjoy getting my hands dirty despite the scratches and the fact that I'm never going to make it as a hand model.  I'm building something that will belong to more than me.  I like the idea that in 10, 12 years or so when we leave here to go back to England (or wherever we go) that someone will tell the people who live here after us that there was an English woman who lived here and she made a garden from very little.  I'm more spurred on with this because of a recent death in our family.  Although N knew he had very little time left to live he set his flower seeds into the propagator early in the year and in the last few weeks of his life he transferred his seedlings to larger pots. In so many ways it was painful to watch how slowly he was doing it, how much his hands shook but it was what he wanted to leave for us. Despite knowing that he would never see these flowers bloom this didn't deter him from stoically planting and noting what was what in his notebook.  Later this year, I'll collect some seeds from these plants of his and I'll set them on in this garden next year and so it will continue. 

My plan to copy as many people on the internet as possible has gained momentum with Gamba blogging about Gyrotonics and today I had my free trial.  it was fantastic; I hadn't believed I'd get a whole session and had only expected to get a bit of explanation and try a couple of moves but I got the full 55 minutes.  Part of what it so great is that it's one-to-one but the exercises were fun.  For the first time ever in any exercise class I didn't have one eye on the clock.  Sadly she's away for the next couple of weeks but I've signed up to see her in 2 weeks and then for a few weeks after that.

Right now, who else has done something that I can copy?

What volunteer activities do you help out with in your community?
Submitted by Emu with a Clue.

I make sure people are fed by working for an organisation in our town that collects food from supermarkets, bakeries and school kitchens and then distributes it to people who are in need.  It's a great big nationwide organisation which survives through supermarkets being prepared to donate food that is going out of date rather than throwing it away.  We also survive through the generosity of local garages providing vehicles at cost and doing all our servicing for free.  There are only 2 paid members of staff - the rest of us are unpaid.

Many of our customers are refugees or they're people who have moved out of the eastern countries since the break up of the Soviet Union.  There is a lot of bureaucracy surrounding what we do but I try and cut through it as much as possible and will never refuse someone food even if they haven't got the correct piece of paper.  There are a couple of Russian guys who call me Lady Madonna - from the Beatles song rather than in homage to Madge - and each week they serenade me which is one of the things that makes sorting through slimy lettuce worthwhile.  Last week, an old man kissed my hand because I gave him a bar of chocolate.  

If I'm honest, I probably get at least as much from working for this organisation as I give.  It's not selfless.

shoes blah blah blah, who cares?  What they really meant was: Porkette, have you a story that you wish to relate to the internet about shoes?  And indeed I do.

Many years ago I managed to fool an interview panel into giving me a job that involved some sort of responsibility and part of this meant that I had to attend the direst, most boring monthly management meeting which mostly revolved around keeping awake long enough to make sure that when the budget was being divied up you had your begging bowl stretched out in front of you.  There was an element of 'singing for your supper' in that you were expected to come up with highlights from the previous month and glamourise how you were saving the organisation huge amounts of money. 

My department was seen as being nothing more than a sponge that sucked most of the other departments resources and didn't actually bring any money into the organisation.  Actually, when I say it was seen as that, that is exactly what it did do, but that's not the point.  The monthly management meeting was fundamentally an opportunity for the rest of the university to harrumph loudly about what we cost and how there would probably be at least three Nobel prize winners every week if the other departments weren't subsidising us.  This was my first meeting and I'd spent hours on my presentation and imagined all the various questions I'd be asked to justify my existence and was pretty confident that I was going to change attitudes regarding what we did.  Which is why after a silence that went on for about 3 weeks I realised that I was expected to say something so I told them all that I'd just noticed that Carol and I were wearing the same shoes. 

You'd think that this was really embarrassing for me but it wasn't because the person who ended up looking even more stupid than me was the guy who was chairing it and told us all that he'd already noticed that.  Then he realised that that wasn't what he was expected to say.

I am supposed to be responsible for this today.  Just look at that face and decide who is in charge.  I think I'm too old for puppies.

Despite having been pretty busy these last few weeks I've still managed to fit in some stalking time around belly
but decided not to do the tooth or back thing but did the feeding and illness thing.  Where Belly and I differ is that I haven't weighed myself but I have bought some new clothes.  I didn't buy as many new clothes as I would have liked partly because of my bank manager having some rather conservative notions about how much money one should have in their bank account before going off on a spend.  The other reason that I didn't buy as many new clothes as I would have liked is because a lot of size 12s are too big but the size 10 is just a bit tight.  This is from the person who struggled to get into anything in size 14 at Xmas.  I am much slimmer and I am wearing a pair of rather fetching raspberry pink linen trousers in a size 10 - incidentally, that is a real size 10 rather than the pretend size 10s that some shops try to fool you with.  Had I worn raspberry pink linen trousers in the past it would have been for a bet or in order to illustrate some article in a journal of psychology about the madness of the menopause or some such thing. My belly seems to have gone.

The best, and most entertaining comments came from my lovely niece who may need some development in the tact department but she meant well:

Niece:  Auntie Pork, you've lost LOADS of weight haven't you?

Niece's Mum: I don't think LOADS dear.

Niece: Oh yeah, Mum - she's lost LOADS - she was really fat before.