Flick's Writing

I ent ded

2020-04-05T10:38:11Z

I've had a couple of tellings off for the lack of updates: sorry chaps.

We're fine, life is going on much as usual for us, other than a bit more use of the farm shop and a bit less supermarket delivery. I would quite like some self-raising flour, though. We've been doing lots of gardening now that it's dried out and warmed up, and I've been inspired to stick some spuds in the mix this year: if nothing else, we're unlikely to be driving around nearby farms buying new potatoes fresh out of the ground, this year.

The horses are doing well, although Benny's a bit unfit after the horribly wet autumn and winter (and, just when the weather has improved, the BHS is advising against hacking, which makes sense). Bob had a little lump removed from his leg at the start of the year; it was cancer, but incredibly low-grade and it's not spread anywhere. Unfortunately, the wound got infected, so he's had a much slower recovery than he should have done, but he's almost back to normal now. The ducks are pottering happily, laying an egg or two a day, and I've been trying to decide if I want to get some more eggs for ZuZu to hatch, and if so what breed.

The bluebells are coming into flower and the anemones are looking lovely. There's a pair of jackdaws building a nest in our disused chimney, which we've not had for the last couple of years. The seagulls seem to be flocking inland, which is presumably a reflection on the lack of chips to steal at the seaside. The wild garlic is going over now, but I have several tubs of pesto in the freezer.

We had our drive re-done, the work was finished just in time. Hopefully this will be the end of the winter mud bath at the end of it. The delivery drivers all look pleased about it. Frequent visitors beware: there is now a step down from the drive to the garden path!

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Autumn

2019-09-07T10:51:46Z

All of a sudden, it seems to be autumn. The trees are turning, the foliage on the squash is starting to die back, the polytunnel needs to be closed at night, I've put away my linen trousers, and Bob and I are curled up on the sofa under a quilt.

I've got lots of autumn jobs that I need to start doing, but probably not today. Yesterday, I had a stomach/abdominal ache that got steadily worse until Mike put me in the car to take me to Minor Injuries, at which point it started getting better. The nurse thinks it's just a bad stomach bug, but I'm still sore enough this morning that my "I'll see if I'm up to riding" experiment lasted about three steps before I got back off and handed Benny over to Mike.

On the plus side, yesterday we also (finally) had the new shutters fitted in out bedroom. They look good, and do indeed make it lovely and dark in there (and it's nice to have finally finished decorating!). I'm a bit concerned that we woke up to middle-of-winter levels of condensation on the insides of the windows this morning, though. Today was fine, because I could just open the shutters and windows to dry things out, but that's not really going to be practical when it gets properly cold. We'll see what happens.

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Where did the second half of July go?

2019-08-01T19:57:37Z

It disappeared into a pit of Too Bloody Hot, mostly. My feeble English self is not very good at 34C, and there was a lot of lying on the sofa whimpering quietly.

On the plus side, the garden appreciated it (and the two days of heavy rain that came when it broke). On the minus side, so did the weeds in the garden, and I lost a week of gardening at just the wrong time of the year. I did manage a very little gardening, and found a 'nest' of snails under a shrub in the back garden, which the ducks were very pleased about.

The tomatoes, in particular, have finally got over the bloody awful June, and the cherry varieties are finally producing:

The yellow ones are a new-to-us variety called Millefleur, and they live up to the name. The trusses are enormous, and covered in dozens of tiny yellow tomatoes.

(Speaking of tomatoes: I was talking to someone who was of the opinion that bush tomatoes are doing much better than vine with the weather we've had this summer. As it turns out, I've only got vine this year: anyone growing both?)

We also picked our first home-grown sweet cherries this year, which was very exciting:

In a change from recent years, GB also decided to dress appropriately for the weather, and actually finished shedding last year's winter coat before starting to grow this year's. Not bad for mid-30s:

We have a new bedroom carpet, and Bob has a matching new bed, and the bedroom is now done until the shutters arrive (hopefully, shortly after Worldcon).

There was, I'm sure, other stuff in there as well. We had some visitors, and have more imminently. We went to a lovely BBQ, and have another one imminently.

It's Worldcon soon, and there has been a certain amount of getting ready for that. Fortunately, there's another week and a bit to go, so maybe I'll manage to get something done in the garden....

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Still busy; fewer eggs

2019-07-15T14:53:07Z

As anticipated, the weekend before last involved hay being delivered. This is half of it, all now safely stacked in the barn:

The village fete was significantly better than the previous year, in as much as we stayed for a good half hour and had lunch, but then we're not really the target market.

We've had a wee bit of Bob trouble, including a couple of trips to the vet. He was chewing one of his feet, so we took him in after a few days but the vet couldn't see anything wrong. A few days after that he was chewing again and when I went to stop him I noticed a raw and slightly oozy bit, so we took him back to the vet and we're now cleaning it and putting cream on it, plus the Cone of Shame has come out of the cupboard. We're unsure whether he cut it and then stopped it healing properly by chewing or had a splinter or similar, which industrious chewing managed to force out of the skin, but either way it's healing nicely and we can hopefully put the Cone away again soon.

In between everything else, we've finally finished painting the bedroom, at least until we have the shutters installed. We went carpet shopping this morning, so that should be done in a week or two as well. Hopefully we'll be able to get on with the neglected garden jobs, now.

The ducks are mostly having a bit of a rest after their epic couple of weeks, but we're still getting a couple of eggs a day. The direct sown beans are coming up and not getting instantly eaten, so I'm moderately hopeful that we'll get some sort of harvest from them, but it would be good if it could warm up a little (it's only 16C and cloudy today) and/or rain a bit (we've not had more than half a mm since the middle of last month). Last year, I started picking tomatoes on the 17th July, but then last summer was very strange all around.

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Cossacks!

2019-07-05T19:34:48Z

We went to the Kent County Show today. It was a bit warm, but we had a nice time, with ducks and chickens and dogs and horses and flowers generally being my favourite bits.

We saw the ferret racing, too:

It looked very much like red was going to win, as his nose poked out of the end of the tube, but then he turned around and went back again, so it was blue who was first out in the end. Yellow and green decided that it was too hot, and stayed in their boxes.

Exciting as that was, the highlight was seeing the International Dzhigitovka Show. There was some excellent trick riding on display, most of which I didn't get pictures of because I was too busy watching:

(I do, however, feel honour-bound to add that the actual riding wasn't as impressive as the Met Police display team, who I've seen a couple of times now.)

Seeing all the beautiful sweetpeas in the flower tent made me feel quite despondent about the pitiful state of mine this year, but back at home I was cheered when I went to tie them in and found a flower on one of them, so hopefully they will get going properly soon. I think I might start over-wintering them again, because they do get going much earlier that way.

This week, in between things like visits from the plumber, Little Quilt Club and Mike going into the office for the day, we've finally started painting our bedroom. The ceiling and three walls are done, so it shouldn't take too much longer to finish it off. Except that we're expecting our hay to be delivered over the weekend, and it's the village fete tomorrow, and the boys' rugs are being collected for cleaning on Sunday, so we need to sort them out, and....

Also this week, I have given away four boxes of eggs, and made two four-egg cakes. We have quite a lot of eggs. The ducklings are twelve weeks old, now, and still gradually getting their adult colouration through.

I've planted out the second-try french beans that Mike started a month or so ago, when it became apparent how destroyed the first lot were getting. I've also, more in hope than expectation, direct sown some more beans and peas. They'll probably get eaten as soon as they pop up, but we might be lucky. If only we had some sort of large carnivore that could keep the rabbits out of the veg bed.... Maybe we need to rabbit-proof that bit of the garden.

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Starting to harvest

2019-06-28T19:12:45Z

It's not terribly impressive. A couple of weeks ago, we had similarly-sized crops of broad beans and mange tout, and that's probably it for the broad beans. The peas and french beans have just been destroyed (slugs, bunnies, maybe pigeons too; we netted off all the legumes this year, to keep the muscovies from the peas, but I think we need to re-think that next year to get better slug control), the runner beans are spindly but at least alive.

We have had a couple of courgettes, though, and the courgette and squash plants are just starting to attempt world domination. Lots of green tomatoes in the polytunnel, too, so that's good (and needed: Mike -- whisper it -- used a jar of shop bought passata this week).

More encouragingly, the ducks are continuing to do their job, and we're getting three or four eggs a day (Zu Zu, having laid enough for a clutch, is having a rest while she tries to figure out what happened to it). Our riding instructor has a B&B; when we give her eggs, she always makes a point that they're not going to be for the B&B guests, but we're hatching a plot (ho ho) to possibly sell her eggs for the B&B once the ducklings come into lay.

Speaking of the ducklings:

Middle Duckling has developed a distinct brown patch above her beak, and both she and Pale Duckling seem to be coming through with cream feathers on their bodies (as well as the patch of whatever she was sleeping in: this is a pre-morning bath picture).

Although there are only four baby swallows in this picture, we counted seven (five babies and the parents) flying around this evening as we were putting the boys to bed:

The boys are doing well, although when I rode Benny yesterday and today he was being a bit of an idiot about the wind. It has been very windy here, although nice and sunny with it (except on Wednesday, when we had inexplicable fog for much of the morning). Tomorrow is supposed to be horribly hot, although not as bad as it is on the continent.

Still, the vet came out to give them their 'flu jabs the other day, and to give GB a quick check-up: all good, and she was particularly impressed to hear that he'd managed to rear the day before, but then so were we.

Bob, sadly, has discovered the delights of badger poo. On the plus side, he's an awful lot easier to bathe than Jodie was.

Mike's been busy doing prep work for decorating the bedroom. This seems to involve a lot of trips to B&Q, as well as putting lots of polyfiller on the walls for me to then sand off. I'm sure it makes sense really!

Annoyingly, when we moved one of the chests of drawers I found this:

Some spot checking in the rest of the room, and the other bedrooms, suggests that we've found it before the moths really got established. We were planning to replace the carpet as well at some point, but that's now more of a priority than it was and in the mean time we'll have to keep pulling the chest of drawers out to vacuum underneath. I need to pull all the clothes out and check them, but it's mostly my riding and pilates stuff in there: mostly synthetic fibres, so I'm not too worried.

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Time, and swallows, flying

2019-06-23T18:57:07Z

I was slightly worried when the swallows were missing from their nest this morning. I needn't have been, though, as pretty soon we saw them wobble-flying around the stable. There are five of them, and we've got high hopes that there will be a second clutch again this year. They only hatched on the 12th, so I'm quite impressed. The little owl is less impressed: it's been hanging around, and the adult swallows keep resolutely chasing it away from the babies.

We went to see the orchid meadow again today. The Common Spotted and Fragrant orchids are in full flower, and the Pyramidals are just starting to come out. It seems to be being a good year for them:

Our own personal orchid meadow continues to get more crowded: we're up to about a dozen bee orchids, and four or five patches of pyramidals, although it's still not a patch on the one in the photo.

After some delays yesterday, notably when I managed to sew the binding on back-to-front, I finished a new quilt this afternoon. Just a simple one, before I dive into the big project that I'm doing next.

It's almost certainly going to Project Linus, unless someone wants to bagsy it.

This morning, we cleaned the conservatory (just in time for it being too hot to sit out there). It's now looking lovely, but it'll only be a couple of weeks before it's full of dead insects again.

We've also been plotting redecorating our bedroom, which is now a priority as it makes sense to do it before the new shutters arrive in mid-August.

The horse flies have been out for over a week and I still don't have any bites. Very suspicious.

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New things

2019-04-05T19:04:37Z

My Grandad, who in his younger days was often to be found with a paint brush in his hand*, left me a bit of money, so I decided that we'd (pay some people to) do some decorating in his memory.

* From my uncle's funeral speech: Grandad, a draftsman, was off work once with an eye problem that meant he couldn't do close-work. The Big Boss wanted to consult with him about something, and another colleague had once been to their house so offered to show the Big Boss how to find it. They travelled in separate cars, and the colleague parked slightly closer to the house than the Big Boss. He got to the house only to see, through the window, Grandad up a ladder painting the ceiling. Furious gesticulation occurred, and when Big Boss knocked on the door he was greeted by Grandma, hair in curlers, wearing Grandad's paint-spattered coverall and holding a paintbrush (possibly for the first and last time in her life), while Grandad lay on the sofa looking stricken.

I've never been terribly keen on the (old, and so both worn and inherently less good than modern) laminate floor in there, so we've had a new floor and then the walls painted. (By the same people who did the living room, as they both did good jobs.)

(We kept the old curtains, because they're fine and that many curtains is expensive even if I make them myself. We were going to have them dry-cleaned, but the chap came to do them today and looked dubious, which turned out to be the right reaction after he did a patch test and they discoloured; he also advised against water, so steam cleaning is out. So I guess we'll just give them a good vacuuming.)

Anyway, new dining room is new:

A month or so after we moved here, we signed up to a local veg box scheme. It was a particularly local one, as everything (except mushrooms and sweet potatoes) came from within ten miles of their farm; it's a lot easier to do that in Kent than in many places, especially if the UK's largest greenhouse is within those ten miles. A couple of weeks ago, we had an email saying that they were going to close down: parents wanted to retire, and keeping it and the other businesses going would have involved hiring a manager, at which point it wouldn't pay. I suspect that last summer had something to do with it as well: the effects are still very clear, with shortages of some veg and incredibly tiny onions for the last month or so.

They sold their customer list to a larger and slightly-less-local company (that uses many of the same suppliers), and this week was the first delivery from them. It was supposed to happen yesterday, but this morning the rather apologetic owner arrived, explaining that he followed the road sign (and a half-remembered instruction from Old Veg Box Guy) rather than his sat nav and turned the wrong way at the end of our road. Hopefully that will be a one-off thing, because so far we're pretty impressed: we're allowed four do-not-wants (bye bye beetroot, and probably also courgettes because we generate plenty of those by ourselves when they're in season), and we're not guaranteed carrots every week. We're also not guaranteed onions, which is a slight problem as we get through a lot. The kale we got this week is nicer-looking than we've been used to, as well. Hopefully it'll continue to be good once they're no longer trying to woo us!

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Shiny clean

2018-08-11T17:29:41Z

This morning, the window cleaning chaps came to clean all the guttering and window frames, as well as the windows.

After they'd done part of the outside of the conservatory, I said "Yeah, do the inside as well", and given that that meant I was moving the furniture, I've done a proper clean in there as well. They also did the inside of the porch, and it's now looking fab and clean.

I wish I'd taken a 'before' photo of the conservatory, I hadn't really realised how grimy it had got.

Of course, when they'd done all that it became obvious how dirty the insides of all the glass doors were, so then I went around and cleaned all of those.

And now I'm knackered and my hands are sore from wringing out cloths.... Still, it's something knocked off my to-do list for next week, although I have no doubt that the conservatory will be full of dead flies again by next weekend.

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It's positively tropical....

2018-03-03T14:59:08Z

Well, temperate anyway. We've not got the fire lit!

It's been above freezing all day here, and we even had a bit of sun this morning (after the mist had cleared), although it's clouded over again now.

The snow is mostly gone from around the house, although fortunately it's not due to freeze again tonight as there are a few slush patches.

The boys even got to go in the field, albeit with plenty of hay to keep them going, after Mike went out there with a lump hammer to break the ice on the troughs:

(GB does like rolling in snow, the daft old bugger. The field's almost entirely snow-free, now.)

The ducks are *much* happier, and are having a nice rootle around in the stableyard rather than sitting, shivering, in their pond and trying to avoid the icebergs.

The outside pipes have defrosted, which is good, but not-entirely-surprisingly the last bit of copper piping has burst. On the plus side, the outside piping will be entirely plastic after we get it repaired, but I suspect that that will take a few days as there are people with rather more urgent plumbing problems even if it weren't the weekend. We got by this morning with duct tape, and I plan to have a go at sticking a g-clamp on it as well to try and get the hole better covered.

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Things not happening (bad and good)

2018-01-18T20:07:49Z

We still haven't got a new food waste bin. Mike chased them last week and they said 'oops, it's showing as a closed job on our system, we'll get one out to you', and then again today when they said 'we've just run out, we'll have more the second week of February'. Sigh.

I'm still wrangling with Parcelmonkey about two of the Christmas parcels, and have concluded they they're a great service as long as nothing goes wrong but will then do anything to avoid paying out on insurance. The one that just vanished (and was marked as having been signed for by 'destroyed') they're still trying to get a response from the courier about, and won't open a claim until they do (so, never then). The one that arrived soaked with water and smashed they have, so far, told me that the photo of some of the contents 1) shows no damage, 2) only shows one damaged item, a glass jar of jam and they don't cover food (fair enough, in the T&Cs), 3) does actually show damage to non-food but it's where the (bright purple) jam has caused (colourless, water) damage to a book. Then they asked me to send a photo of the paper that the book had been wrapped in. Then they said they'd pay for the book but nothing else. I pointed out the value of the other non-food items, the packaging, and the shipping cost. They said they'd pay for the book and nothing else. I am here eliding the several-week-long gaps where they completely ignore my messages. I suspect that I'll be Writing Them A Letter shortly.

Jo hasn't thrown up since we took her to the vet, which is marvellous news. She has, however, got very stiff where she's been off her (potentially tummy-upsetting) metacam. I spoke to the nurse yesterday and got the ok to start her back on it, so she had a half dose last night and a normal one this morning. She seems fine (if still a bit hobbly), although I can hear her tummy making slightly worrying noises as I type. Actually, that might be snoring. Not sure....

Much to our surprise, neither our phones nor our power went out overnight / this morning, although the people down the road were without power for much of the day. We don't seem to have taken any damage, which is good, and even managed an hour in the garden this afternoon: out of the wind, it's been quite nice in the sun.

Oh, buggerit. They've just announced a bird 'flu prevention order. Here we go again.... Better hope that we don't have to keep the boys in the stableyard as much as we have been doing recently, because the ducks will have to stay in there for the duration.

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Life in the country....

2017-12-28T13:57:00Z

(Or indeed the inner city, I suppose!)

Our food waste bin has had a hole in it for, oh, about six months. It was almost certainly caused by the bin men, who have the really bloody irritating habit of picking it up by the locking mechanism, which is detachable, rather than the actual bloody handle, which isn't. When they swing it around exuberantly, the locking mechanism, um, detaches, and the bin goes flying. This isn't the first one that they've broken, and it's presumably not just us that it happens to: the first time we happened, a year or so ago, they just sent a new one out when we complained. This time, they said that they'd check the records and see if the crew had reported that they'd broken it the previous week.

(1, we're crap and it had already been broken for a few weeks; 2) are the crew really likely to carefully make a note each time they break one? 3) if they *are*, why the buggery aren't you just sending new ones out automatically when they do so...? In fact, why not just have a little stack of them in the bin lorry so that they can just leave a new one?)

About three weeks ago, probably-a-rat discovered the hole and went diving in, resulting in a few days of finding egg shells and bits of orange peel scattered on the floor near the bins. I moved the food bin to on top of the main bin, which worked for, oh, at least 24 hours. I told Mike to just pay for a new bloody bin, which he did and was told it would be with us in a few days, or possibly after New Year.

Given the messed up bin collection schedule around Christmas / New Year, I didn't really want to put the remains of the Christmas duck (which has, since Christmas, been in the fridge and then the stock pot) out for ratty, so I did what I've been avoiding (because stinky) and brought it into the porch. The hole's in the bottom of the bin, so I prudently stood it in a spare washing up bowl.

Several hours later, I went out into the porch and discovered that the spare washing up bowl had a crack in the bottom. Sigh. Fortunately, I had another spare washing up bowl*, which appears to be leak free.

* We have an old butcher's sink, which doesn't take most large washing up bowls but looks comically empty with most small ones. It took us a little while to realise that this meant we could only buy washing up bowls from John Lewis. Of course.

Yesterday, it rained most of the night and snowed most of the day: the boys stayed in. Last night, it froze, hard, which on the plus side meant that the mud in the field froze but on the minus side also meant that the road was icy and the school like concrete: the boys were able to go out for the morning (it's melting a bit now, and anyway Mike's gone to see Star Wars and I don't want to have to manage both of them on the road if it's still icy, so we brought them in early), but I couldn't ride. Tomorrow, it's going to rain again. I'm hopeful that I might manage to find a gap in the rain some time in the afternoon, when it's supposed to be showery rather than constant. Ok, that last bit maybe isn't such and inner city problem.

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Some less whingy things

2017-08-25T18:59:57Z

- A few days ago, I went into the pantry to see if we had a spare bag of self-raising flour. There was a bag of flour, so I picked it up to see what it was (strong bread, as it happens) and noticed that the corner had been chewed away. Nothing else seemed to have been nibbled, and a trap overnight produced one of the lovely, sleek, glossy mice with which we are blessed (no more since). When we moved in, it was Policy not to put nibblable things into that store room, and I may need to go back and have a rearrange!

- Yesterday, the outdoor plumber came to try and find the leak in our water pipe. The blokes from the water company, having dug a hole by the meter, said it was about eight metres away by the house. Several holes later, and having come back this morning, he found and fixed the leak. It was, oh, at least a foot from the meter and he couldn't quite understand how the water company guys hadn't found it....

- It turns out that dahlias make nice cut flowers and last reasonably well, which is good: the garden's a bit poor for cutting flowers at this time of year, other than the glads.

- About a week ago, I bought (on Amazon) Mike a fairly niche book (heard about it on R4). Yesterday (ditto), I bought the new ~~KLF~~ JAMs book, 2023. This evening, while looking for present ideas for Mike, I went back to the page for the first book to look at the 'people who bought this book also bought' section and found 2023 on the first page of suggestions. Apparently they're *both* pretty niche books....

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Unexpectedly good bin collections

2017-04-21T14:07:48Z

Today is our bin day, which is often a bit of a guessing game: given that they have to go a mile out of their way to just do us, we're usually the first to be skipped if there's a problem.

Today was also double bin day -- green waste/food and recycling -- so twice the chance of one of them not turning up.

Happily, I was able to bring in a full set of empty bins after walking Jo, so I was quite surprised to just see a bin lorry go past. I popped outside while it was turning around, and the driver pulled up at the end of the drive.

It turns out that the scheduled lorry had had a problem, so he'd come out and found that they hadn't done half the bins on the way here, so he'd come down to do ours (on his own: the rest of his crew didn't want to do overtime and had already gone home) and was quite shocked that we'd been done.

Maybe all the complaints that we make are sinking in!

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Mmm, Zelda

2017-04-02T21:57:52Z

On Friday, the nice young men from the tree surgeon came to visit. They took out the last few leylandii (we are free! Free!), and the variegated conifer by the front gate, which was getting a bit too big and squashing the ornamental cherries (we now have a much better view of the road, as an added bonus).

They also took the top off the beech hedge along the side of the house, so now it's hopefully at a height we can keep better in check. (Unlike all the letlandii, the beech is actually useful, acting as a windbreak.) Unfortunately, doing that involved standing on the roof of the very dilapidated shed, at least until one of them put a foot wrong and did the comedy disappearing from sight thing.

We'll be looking for a new shed, then.

Yesterday, the Nintendo Switch arrived, so I was mostly playing Zelda when not moving the contents of the shed to a different outbuilding. First thoughts are that not only do the controllers indeed frequently drop their connection but that they do it in a bloody stupid manner: rather than just stopping moving, Link wanders off in a random direction, eg: off a cliff. It is quite fun so far, though.

Today, we went to see a horse. Either we've been lucky or we've got a lot more picky about which we actually bother to go and see (probably a bit of both), because we both liked Galahad enough that I'm trying to set a date to go back with our riding instructor to see what she thinks. (Unfortunately, she's in France without her diary. Back on Tuesday, though.)

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Living room!

2017-03-30T19:54:26Z

After a hard afternoon and evening of furniture rearranging and assembling, it's all done other than putting the pictures back up on the walls!

(I very much hope that that rug will start behaving. It's currently got a Wii balance board and a side table holding it flat in an attempt to give it the idea.)

(Jo seems to like the new rug. It's already showing signs of her presence....)

(Sinister Ducks.)

(Aaaand I've just realised that the new sofas aren't really visible in any of those pictures. The blue bit in the front of the last one is the pouffe (it's got a storage space inside!), the sofas are the same colour.)

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That was quick!

2017-03-29T18:13:42Z

Quicker than expected, in fact: the new floor's all done, when we were expecting it to take until tomorrow. Unfortunately, we'd ordered things like new shelves, rugs and little felt pads to go under the furniture to stop it from making scratches for delivery tomorrow to tie in with it, so we're still a little short of furniture in here. Hopefully, we'll be all sorted by tomorrow evening. Hopefully.

Jo is pleased that she has her sofa back. The sofa bed was just not a suitable substitute, her legs were always hanging off the edges.

Both the anemones and the horses have been making the most of the sunny weather we've been having recently:

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Bits and pieces

2017-03-23T14:14:27Z

My parents have been to visit, which was nice, and short (possibly the two are related!). They brought us new living room lights (we saw the ones that we wanted in John Lewis, but they were out of stock when we went to order them online. A short panic that they were being discontinued later and my mother had bought them in her local store, as she was going there anyway. They are, of course, now back in stock online), which was good, and then put them up for us, which was better. They're much less fussy than the old ones, and removing the centre light from the ceiling fan / changing the blades on it has also made that look much better.

Just the floor to go, now, and it is finally booked for next week. We went for the middle ground, in the end, and are having laminate from the guy who did the third quote after the other two had annoyed me too much. I honestly couldn't have told you which of the sample books was wood and which laminate, so hopefully it's going to look nice! And then we need to buy some rugs. And new shelves for DVDs. But other than that it's nearly done....

In the less successful home improvement department, we were supposed to be having a new garage door today but the chap phoned first thing to say that his minion had called in sick. Hopefully that will get rescheduled in the not too distant future.

(My parents broke their journey home at Ebbsfleet, in the end, on account of not wanting to get up very early. It all worked ok.)

Following my failed attempt to listen to a bloody mp3 on my bloody phone, I bought the album (digitally, for £7, as the CD was £40!) and then remembered that I no longer have an optical drive in my laptop, so couldn't burn a CD to listen to in the car. In theory, I can use the drive in the desktop as an external drive, so we fiddled around trying to do that but, although I could see the drive, I couldn't see the blank CD that I put into it. (The next day, Mike messaged me from the office to ask why an untitled CD had appeared on *his* laptop. Sigh.) In the end, Mike bought me an external drive, so I spent an afternoon ripping and burning copies of all the CDs that have come into the house since I ceased to have a means of doing so: actually not that many, but it does take a while.

Yesterday, presumably to be blamed on one or other of the parents (although they claim not), I had some sort of odd twelve-hour lurgy: I woke up with a sore throat, got increasingly shivery as the morning went on, spent the afternoon wrapped in a blanket while each of my joints individually got more and more achy, developed weepy eyes and a splitting headache, didn't finish my dinner and felt a bit sick afterwards, felt a bit better by (early) bed time, and woke up this morning with a slight headache but otherwise feeling fine.

In between all that, I've mostly been playing The Last Guardian, which is exactly like the reviews say. It's very pretty, very Japanese, and very random. You are a small boy who is accompanied by a giant cat-bird, over which you have very limited control, while you wander around a mysterious and largely abandoned complex of towers and dungeons. The controls are utterly terrible, and this is a sadly common conversation in the house these days:
Flick: [repeats $keystrokes over and over for five minutes in an attempt to make the cat-bird do a $thing]
Flick: Can you see what I'm doing wrong here? I think that I need to get cat-bird to do $thing but he's not doing it.
Mike: It does look like that's what you need to do. Do you want me to look it up?
Flick: Please.
Flick: [continues to repeat $keystrokes, throughout the conversation]
Mike: It says you need to do get cat-bird to do $thing.
Flick: That's what I'm trying to do.
Mike: You need to hit $keystrokes.
Flick: That's what I'm doing. That's what I've been doing for ten minutes. This game has the worst controls ever.
Cat-bird: [for no obvious reason suddenly does $thing]

I have no objection to tricky puzzles, but these aren't, they're just capricious. Or, possibly, the cat-bird is capricious. Either way, it's a bit tedious. Very pretty game, though.

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1 dpi

2017-03-09T20:14:17Z

I'm getting to the stage where I have to decide what I'm actually going to do with them....

I've vaguely thought about making a bag from them, in which case I'm pretty much done. Or I could go on and make an actual quilt, in which case I'm very much not! Decisions, decisions.

Jodie's sofa has arrived, sooner than we expected. It didn't arrive in Ashford on today's lorry, and when they did some digging they found out that it was actually in Dartford. Rather than drive it to Ashford to then drive it here, they just brought it directly. It's rather bigger than the old on, Jo looks positively small curled up in the corner of it!

We've given up on the Dettol automatic hand wash dispensers, because they start having hissy fits after a couple of years and spew soap everywhere until you take the batteries out. However, we've still got three soap refils: does anyone use one and want them?

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Bits

2017-03-08T18:22:44Z

We're still rather up in the air about the new living room floor. In fact, I've just booked another quotation: wood-flooring guy replied to a request to quote for vinyl with cheaper wood options, vinyl-flooring guy a) still hasn't actually produced a quote and b) lost a lot of brownie points when he looked at our upstairs bathroom flooring and pronounced it to be cheap B&Q stuff. That didn't quite ring true with what we know of previous-owner's decorating habits, so we checked the box and it's actually the brand he's pushing us towards, admittedly their cheapest range....

On the plus side, we do have a new sofa. On the minus side, we don't have two new sofas: one of them didn't make it onto the delivery lorry and is in the wrong warehouse somewhere, although we're assured that it does actually exist. At least it's only Jo's one that's missing, not ours!

My mother has panicked me slightly by revealing that she's got her outfit for my sister's wedding all sorted. I did have a look in the shops in Canterbury this afternoon, but the only thing I was ever slightly taken by was a £200 (in the Hobbs discount shop) beige linen trouser-and-tunic combination. Given that I have at least one much nicer beige linen trouser-and-tunic-and-jacket combo in the wardrobe upstairs, my next mission is to rearrange enough of the living room furniture currently in the spare room to actually get into the wardrobe and see what I have that might be suitable. As my parents are coming to visit in a couple of weeks, I may enlist mother's help. (Father is tasted with putting up the new living room lights, which should do to keep him happy for a few hours.)

I think I have found some suitable shoes, though: some lacy Skechers, which look vastly nicer in the quick snap I took in the shop than they do in that official website photo.

We were supposed to be going to look at a horse this morning, but then the owner sent me a message to say that they'd decided they couldn't bring themselves to sell him. This, I suspect, will be the down side of trying to buy someone's beloved but no longer needed middle-aged horse.

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Ducks and flowers and decorators and seedlings

2017-02-20T20:12:39Z

I've just been looking at the bird 'flu guidance for when the current control order runs out (at the end of the month). Given that free-range birds can only be kept in for twelve weeks before they become barn-raised, which happens at the start of March, I was expecting some changes and had my fingers crossed that I'd be able to start feeding the ducks properly again. Actually, though, they're just officially permitting what I was already doing on animal welfare grounds....

So, it looks like they'll not be getting ad-lib food until at least May. They don't like this at all, and my first duck egg of the year is getting further and further away. I'm very jealous of Mrs Farmer, who moved her hens into an unused polytunnel and is getting far better egg production than usual for the time of year.

In more pleasing spring-time news, yesterday we noticed that one of the dwarf irises on the drive was about to flower and a few more had green flower spikes. We went out at lunchtime today to see that half a dozen of them had suddenly burst into bloom. Oddly, the flowers last year came out the day we went to Eastercon and were pretty much over when we got back. It's been a cold winter this year, and was warm last, so I can only think that it's because they're better established this year: last year was their first.

The decorators have been hard at work on the living room today, and there's one coat of fresh paint on everything. We're camping out in the study: it's not a very small room, and would probably be fine with just the two sofas and coffee/side tables in it. Those plus the usual two desks and masses of books, though, are making things very cosy. Jo is bemused but coping.

Tomorrow, I'm going to pot on the first of this year's veg seedlings. Fingers crossed for a better spring / early summer than last year, and resultant shelves full of passata and other bottled stuff.

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The fridge man cometh back again....

2017-02-17T19:35:00Z

This morning, Mike woke me with the worrying news that the fridge and cupboard doors were not longer properly attached.

This afternoon, the fridge man came back and moved the attachment points to ones that are, in retrospect, far more sensible (we were both a bit "yeah, should have thought of that").

Fingers crossed....

Also this afternoon cameth the second guy to measure up and quote for the hall and living room floor. The first guy said "The floor's a bit uneven, we'll need to put something down first to level it off". The second guy, who was actually a floor fitter not a salesman, was really worried about the unevenness of the floor, and thinks we should get fake (vinyl) wood instead because it's cheaper and will work on an uneven floor.

I'm actually quite tempted: I'll be able to use a steam mop on it, for a start, which you can't do with actual wood (you have to use a very-lightly-damped cloth/mop, which sounds like a marvellous way to turn muddy paw prints into a thin even coating over the whole floor). When I asked first guy about dealing with mud, he said "you can wipe it up with damp kitchen roll", which didn't really seem like a satisfactory long-term solution when Jo's left a trail around the room: I think he thought I meant actual lumps of the stuff. Second guy, on the other hand, immediately said that he didn't think we should go with the kind of (fairly rough and grained) wood surface we'd been planning because it's a nightmare to keep mud-free when you have dogs.

Mike's slightly coming round to the idea, but wants to see it in a house. We shall see.

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Note to self

2017-02-15T19:41:03Z

Defrost the ice box in the old fridge more frequently in future.

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The fridge man cometh!

2017-02-14T16:02:29Z

After a saga of epic proportions, six months of varying degrees of faffing, and six weeks of putting up with the fact that the fridge wasn't in the kitchen, I finally have my shiny new fridge:

Not only is it significantly bigger than the old one (and we've kept the old one), so that fridge tetris will be less of a common game, but it's also actually attached to the cupboard door, so that you only have to open one door!

I am probably more excited than I should be by this.

One of the things we'll be replacing when we have the living room redecorated is the side tables: if anyone would like a nest of three pale wood side tables from John Lewis, please say. Also up for grabs: a hand blender/whisk and a rolling pin with a set of interchangable thickness guides. We can bring them to Eastercon. (There is also our coffee table, but it's pretty battered and would need a good sanding and re-varnishing, as well as being a bit big to conveniently bring to Eastercon. Say if you've a particular desire for it. Again, pale wood from JL.)

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Quilty

2017-01-31T14:42:54Z

(LJ app still letting me post to my LJ even though it won't log me in. V mysterious!)

It has stopped being quite so cold, for which I am very grateful. It is rather misty, but I suppose you can't have everything.

I seem to have been quite busy, with living room redecoration arranging, pooch wrangling, failing to find a new horse, and several quilt-related things.

( ...living room redecoration... )

( ...pooch-wrangling, failing to find a new horse... )

( ...several... )( ...quilt-related... )( ...things... )

The down side of my being out at weekend was that Mike had to horse wrangle by himself when they were coming in to bed. They behaved on Saturday but on Sunday went charging off, spraining a couple of Mike's fingers in the process. They were also behaving like idiots list night, trying to get to the new mares (even GB!): possibly they've come into season. To be on the safe side, even though it's going to be a bit slippery I'm going to just let them run down the hill on their own tonight rather than try and lead both of them in along the road.

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