Sunday Lunching.

This is the highlights from our Sunday lunch. well the visual ones at least. I started cooking at 10am and we ate at 1pm. We had roast chicken or stuffed mushrooms if you were a veggie. roast potatoes, home made stuffing, yorkshire pudding, clapshot, cabbage and cauliflower cheese finished with home made bannoffee pie. 

Preparation is a leisurely affair, I started with making the crumb for the bannoffee pie, then into the fridge. I prepared the chicken and popped it into the oven, along with the pan for the potatoes, pealed the potatoes and parsnips and put them into blanch,  cut the cauliflower, put the potatoes and parsnips into the hot oil and then into the oven, cut and chopped the carrot and swede for the clapshot. stuffed the mushrooms and made stuffing, put cauliflower in dish, made cheese sauce, lay table, cut cabbage, make yorkshire mix, spread toffee on crumb, chop banana's whip cream, sprinkle chocolate,have a shower, remove chicken, remove potatoes, bake cauliflower, bake mushroom, bake stuffing, return potatoes, cook yorkies, boil clapshot, boil cabbage, mash clapshot, slice chicken, make gravy, serve, eat enjoy. 

We had friends for lunch, so eating was also leisurely. I love to cook for people, to share our table and our food. We talked and it was good. To spend that precious time with people. to, sit, to talk, to listen, to share, to support, to laugh, to enjoy. I would love to have more Sunday's like this.  

grown up children

When friends of ours are having difficulty with their young children I often joke that the first 20 years are the worst.

Both OD and YD are grown up, but we still worry about them a lot. This is what happened to YD yesterday.

We were giving YD a lift to town and she said.

"guess where I ended up today?"

"where"

"The motorway!"

"The motorway?"

"Yes!"

"How?"

"I don't know"

"what happened?" 

"well I was riding along and the next thing I knew I was on the Motorway!" 

"What did you do??" 

"pulled over to the hard shoulder used the phone and highway patrol came and escorted me off, they said it was quite common and laughed" 

Now YD did this on her learner motorbike, she is not legally allowed to ride on the motorway, she did absolutely the right thing, once she was on the motorway. However she has added a few more grey hairs to our heads.

We took OD into town, This is an expensive exercise! After the money bit, we all went to pet some ducks.
yes, real baby ducks. OD was very excited, The Rotary club has a duck race (plastic) next bank holiday so they brought some ducks into town to promote the race.

awwww, they were cute,

I had a lovely package in the post,

my bunting has arrived! I cannot wait for the jubilee, LSP and I then had a very English tea,

on being fat

I am fat, obese, grossly obese, morbidly obese, chunky, big boned, heavy set, voluptuous.

And Happy.

I know, what a shock! I do not look in the mirror and think I look ugly. I look in the mirror and think , that's me.

Yes I am often on diets, this is to try and make myself live longer, yes thats my only worry is that by being fat I am making my life shorter. I am about to start my summer walking challenge, which I enjoy. I love doing the GCC steps challenge, I enjoy exersize. I love swimming and walking and cycling.

The reason why diets are fairly short lived is that I have no real desire to be thin.

When people look at me they see a fat person, often people judge you for being fat, think you are lazy and lack self control.

When people talk about their drinking or smoking I do not think that they lack control. I very rarely drink. have not smoked in 6 years, but continue to eat what I enjoy eating.

 I love my food, I enjoy food. I love creating food to eat and to share.

Being fat is frustrating. mainly due to shopping. I can just fit into Monsoon xl size 22. Not all of their styles suit me so I am limited. I love Monsoon dresses. I also love laura ashley clothes but they do not go above an 18/20. I can do M&S and John Rocher at Debenhams. Then there is Evans. hmm good old Evans its there for when there is nothing else. There are only a few styles I like in there. new look is for younger people than  I.

Well I had better crack on with the housework, We have guests for Sunday Lunch tomorrow and I will be doing a full roast. Roast chicken. yum. (oh and a veggie main as well) followed by banoffee pie.

happy weekend.

A free night out.

Tonight we are going to have a free night out. I occasionally peruse the bbc site for recordings of shows and found one near to us tonight. I applied for tickets and was successful. The only thing is, is I am not to sure what we are going to see? I know it has something to do with poetry, so fingers crossed it will be good. I am not dressing up as its a radio 4 recording not tv.

Yesterday I was having a day of dropping things.

I was sat with 9 other people in a small noisy training room. At coffee time I made myself a coffee and then as I sat down I threw it all over myself, all over my brand new Laura Ashley top that I had bought especially for the occasion. (Laura Ashley top 1/2 price then an extra 30% off). This was 11am! I spent the rest of the day smelling of coffee.

I came home and cooked tea. I decided a treat was in order. So I made some Angel Delight. yes it was the last packet in the cupboard. I remembered this as I dropped it all across the kitchen counter. 1/2 pint of angel delight wasted.

I look forward to telling you all about our night out.

Sunday

Ahh, Sunday.
It started well with the nice breakfast and we had a nice calm start to the day. Coffee and Croissants. bliss. Then we went onto the Archers, my Sunday treat, just listening. I have only been listening to the Archers for the past 2 years but it has now formed part of our weekend routine. It is a lovely treat.

Now the spaniel and his collar are trying to remove....the skin from our legs, the walllpaper from the walls and the leather from the sofa. This is going to be a long 5 days.

We went to the shops for a few hours.To run some errands and to escape from the dog. Now the world had chosen to take time out and spend it in the same place as us. We went into Swindon to the Outlet village. Our first warning was the car park being very very full. now LSP left to her own devices would have just driven on. I however was on a mission to try and get her some Navy Blue trousers.

We did not get the navy blue trousers.

Getting LSP to participate in clothes shopping is very very hard, she hates it. Now we have a wedding in the next few weeks and LSP has not sorted out her outfit. There was much tooing and froing over facebook yesterday morning about what people would be wearing etc. Now LSP and I have been together a long time and we know each other quite well. Back in January when I bought my wedding outfit I also bought LSP a nice new top to wear. I did not however get the trousers. LSP is very happy with the new top.

I will have to go and find the trousers on my own.

We were joined by our older daughter and our shopping for trousers turned into a shoe shopping expedition. hence no trousers for LSP and 4 pairs of shoes for OD!

Swindon Outlet village has a farmers market on a Sunday. There was nothing that interested us, There was plenty that intrigued, including the £19.12 chicken!  All we bought was a loaf of rosemary and olive bread.

I had to call into the supermarket, to pick up some other essentials (family can not live by bread alone)
I had my handbag. I wandered around popping things in the basket, got to the check out, started packing, looking in my bag to pull out my purse.

No Purse.

Panic.

Cue me running (yes running) across the car park to the car to see if my purse was there. If my purse was not in the car then it was lost, lost misplaced, abandoned and vulnerable. I had images of it being emptied of all of its cards and recipts. Now it only contains my debit card for my current account and a million loyalty cards. However it is all very scary.

Yes it was there. I walked quickly back to the store and paid for my goods.

Tea last night was nice ham on rosemary bread with salad. yum.

more dog tails

" No "

"no I cant take it Off" 

"Ow"

"stop hitting me with it"

"just lay down"

"stop ramming me on the leg with it"

Yesterday Morning we had to go back to the vet. As the Spaniel was still paying a lot of attention to a certain area of his body. He has over cleaned himself and made himself sore. He now has to wear a collar for the next 5 days. 

We had a fantastic walk to the vet. There was an abundance of wildflowers around and that was lovely. In the vet, now the Spaniel went in and the Labrador would not move from outside the door to the consulting room. It was so sweet she was tilting her head from left to right listening to what was going on. 

Now he is blind, daft and wearing a collar. Therefore he is hitting his collar against everything including any human he happens to come across. He has managed to scrape both mine and LSP's legs as he has been rubbing it against us. last night we had a friend over so both dogs were confined to the kitchen for the evening. 

This friend did an amazing thing on Friday night. She walked 10 km across Cardiff at midnight in her pyjamas. No she was not drunk,  She was doing a sponsored walk in aid of Ty Hafan. Ty Hafan is a children's hospice in Wales and hundred's of women put aside time to walk in the freezing cold and rain for 2 hours in their Jammies to raise funds. 

Now when she arrived at our house, it was in chaos. Me, LSP and my sister had some of the contents of the loft in the sitting room sorting through charity and car boot stuff. We took 4 full bags of clothes to the charity shop and 6 boxes of car boot stuff to go to my sister. She is going to do some car boot sales in June and I am happy for her to try to sell our old junk. We were nearing the end of the sorting so having already walked 10 miles at midnight she then helped us move our stuff between houses. 

Whilst we were loading and unloading a young man arrived at our gate with a bunch of wildflowers. He had brought them for our youngest daughter, she was not here as she was not back from work and he could not stay as he had got a taxi to bring them. (how lovely) 

We had a nice evening of chatter over spag bol and trifle before she became our first guest in the spare room. This morning we have had a leisurely breakfast before starting our Sunday.  

fluffy sleep assassins

here we are its 06.45 am at the weekend and the dogs have had me up for over an hour! Dont worry they are both back to sleep now, it is just me who is wide awake. There has been no blog this week as I have been on a training course and have no space in my head to think about anything else. Normal service will be temporarily returned over this weekend.

Yesterday morning, the dogs woke me up at 3am (nice) As I was up I put a load of washing on. As the load came to an end I was thinking that the machine was not running right. After the load had finished, I stopped and checked the trap. Now when I replaced the trap, I did not realise it had not gone in correctly.... I did not realise but LSP did.

How LSP discovered this was by the unique way the washing machine washed the entire floor. yes the washing machine simultaneously filled and emptied with the soapy water filling the kitchen. Now our kitchen is not massive so it turned into a paddling pool. The dogs both reacted in their own way.

The spaniel panicked, span around in a circle, slipped, hurt his leg (mildly) yelped and splashed his way out of the kitchen. The labrador, pondered the situation and just laid down. yes laid down in the middle of the water. now this may have been her way of trying to help soak up the water but I doubt it.

All of this information was commuted to me by text. I shared this with the people I was training with much to the amusement of the group. (in a break of course). When I returned home, I had a look but was not in the mood for pulling out the tool box. The kitchen slate floor was very, very clean.

So this morning, when the doggies woke me up at 6am I approached the washing machine with tools in hand. with the help of pliers I managed to get the trap out again. for some reason it did not want to go back in, so yes I lay on the floor, torch in hand and could see nothing. No reason why it was now it would not now fit. So....I used some washing up liquid as a lubricant and hurrah! it is back in and the washing is happily  washing itself in the machine.

So my fluffy sleep assassins,  its like having 2 annoying toddlers. They wake us up in the night for a drink or a wee or just for a whine. As they are old we are back and forth to the vet all the time. The Labrador needs monthly injections to help her joints and the Spaniel has developed a gland problem. Now dogs have a gland that, when blocked needs draining, (if you have a dog you know what I mean, If you have not had a dog you dont want to know) It is possible to learn how to do this yourself at home!!!! We take the dog to the vet for the vet to do it. Now I am not normally squeamish, but this is one thing I cannot be in the room for and LSP had to go and take the poor spaniel in.

This course I am on is an hour away from home so I spend 2 hours a day just travelling. This is where my kindle has come into its own. LSP bought me my kindle and I was very reluctant as I do not read a lot and thought of it as a waste of money. LSP bought me one anyway as a treat and I filled it full of free books. there are so many free books out there, especially the classics, Grimms fairy tales, Oliver, A portrait of Dorian Gray, Great Expectations, Dracula.....etc. I was happy with the free books and have spent the week reading Grimm's Fairy tales. Gosh they are dark and clearly the brother's Grimm had an issue with stepmother's. Stepmother's consistently conspire to murder their step-daughter or to make them slaves. (think Cinderella and Snow White). I have this week now purchased a book for kindle as well.

A History of Christianity, the first 3000 years. by Diarmaid MaCulloch. It is a subject that interests me greatly. Now why get it on kindle? It is huge, its the size of my handbag! That is one of the main advantages of my kindle is that it can fit happily in my handbag, alongside everything else.

It is now a more reasonable hour so time to hang up the washing and feed the fluffy sleep assassins their breakfast. Have a happy weekend everyone.