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Monday, 10 December 2018

MONDAYS DIARY BY FIONA CUMMINGS


 Good day Bloggets. A long week ahead. But a very sociable one. Tomorrow I’m out with my footballer’s wife friend. Smile. Geordie and I shall go out for lunch to celebrate her birthday. A day when I shall have to glam up as she is a real beauty. I’m treating her to a lunch where we went with friends a few weeks ago. It’s a cosy country pub with a roaring coal fire. The food is so delicious. On Thursday I have the ladies coming again for our monthly get together. It’s my turn and I doubt they will be too impressed as I said in another blog, our lunches now are turning into some kind of culinary challenge if we want to even try to keep up with brilliant cooks.

I just don’t try to compete. Haha. They can dine out with my conversation and whatever comes with that. I’m so not confident to bake cakes like they do. But they won’t go hungry. What am I going to make? Not sure yet, though I have bought a lovely Stollen cake. It’s a fruit bread made with nuts, spices and dried fruits coated in icing and is filled with almond paste, or marzipan. Yum with a capital Y. looking up the recipe earlier, it looks really easy to make. I saw the recipe from a website called King Arthur and all of the reviews say his recipe is the best. As I said, it looks so simple to make. 3 hours preparing and cooking though. Or do what I did and pop to Aldi. Oh, my, what a shop. Hub and I went with Pip yesterday. She’s great I love her genuine enthusiasm when it comes to her shopping skills. Bless her she gets so excited about showing me things. This is such a gift. It means that I don’t feel pressured into grabbing and going. We actually browsed. We laughed around the shop and we got some lovely things for Christmas, well leading up to the big day. Aldi’s was like a winter wonderland yesterday. You should have seen my Husband. He was like a little boy in a sweetie shop. Bless him, he tried to sneak some Santa lollies to put in my stocking and some chocolate coins. It’s positively sad when you are blind to shop for gifts. Though I have managed to buy some gifts for him when we have been out to clothes shops. He hates clothes for gifts, but seriously I just never know what to buy for him. The one thing he has asked for this year, I just have not been able to get out and buy it. I feel so bad, sad even tearful just as he did for me for my big birthday some months ago. You know, my 30th???

Stop it!

 

He wanted to buy me a bracelet, but shopping for jewellery is really difficult. He did manage, but it was with our friend Julie and myself, so not a surprise. And it was jewellery he, wanted this Christmas.

 

He dislikes clothes for gifts as it reminds him of when he was a child. When he was at boarding school, he didn’t go clothes shopping with his parents he went with a dreadful person from some kind of social services. He said he remembers as a child buying shoes. He was so uncomfortable that he just got the first ones he came across and they were far too small. The person with him didn’t care. He felt so bad he didn’t shop with his parents. We are really not too sure why he didn’t, but it still has had some effect on him, even so many years later.

 

 I used to dread what my Mum had bought for me but on reflection, I was lucky, at least she did buy them and I was with her.

  

Today is the 10th day in December 2018. Outside it’s icy cold. In fact, I just can’t get warm in the house even. I have that horrid feeling where the inside of my bones feels as if someone is pouring cold water all over my body. And if they are, that’s a heck of a lot of water. In fact, one shall hope there is not a leak! Otherwise an environmental warning shall have to be announced.

  Our family are coming through this weekend so another meal out. Bring it on. I must remember to book a table for four of us. Where, is a good question. I know of two places that are nice, there is another but they don’t put the heating on and the coal fire? A joke as it’s never on either. We went last December and it was so cold, my gravy froze!

 

Hub left the house at quarter past seven this morning. He won’t return until at least half seven. More like eight tonight. It’s a long day for him, especially when he still isn’t well. I really really wish he would get himself properly checked out.

 

Well bin gate. Did I tell you about my recycling bins? They went out on bin day, never to be seen again until my friend found one whilst hunting for them for me. Very kind of her. The one she found was our paper one. How do I know? It has paper written in Braille. My limited Brail skills can read that. It has a huge number of our house on it too. That leaves two missing. I hate it when those stupid things have to go out. Firstly, they stay in our back garden. We have boarders of plants shrubs and flowers all around our back garden, so we have to keep them near the house against the kitchen wall. They are like large boxes. We put them out once a fortnight only for them quite often to be blown away. Or taken as they are expensive to replace. Three times now we have had to replace them. I guess someone has quite a collection. We have asked for them to be put back at the same place but sadly no, they don’t bother. I mean, that would mean they had to walk an extra twenty steps. But today my friend knocked on my door delivering some wonderful fruit from her garden to tell me that the council have delivered four, new boxes. They dropped them and drove off. She saw them do it so very grateful for her telling me as if they had gone again, or worse, one of us had come out of our front door and gone flying, and not to the Caribbean either, flat on our face. Wouldn’t you think they would knock and let me know? Anyway, thankfully we have bins now, our kitchen can stop looking like a scrap yard. We have three large bags in our kitchen, one with plastic one with glass and one with paper. We also have a huge box in the garage full of small boxes like from Christmas gifts that have been delivered or tea bag boxes or serial boxes for example and last night I added an empty box of cans of coke. I think there are about fifteen boxes inside one big one. It’s shocking to actually see what recycling we gather. I only hope the stuff we put out, actually does get recycled. So, this week when they go out, I will have to go out straight away to find them before someone else does…  it’s really difficult when they don’t leave them in the same place too. Sometimes they can be in the middle of the front of our grass. Sometimes at the top of our drive and other times they can be on our little rose garden. Then they may, put them back where they should, in front of our garage. And if you can’t see, you can miss them by one inch and not know they are there. But BW looked and said they were nowhere to be seen.  So now all new and clean at least.

 

Oh, it’s one of those days when I wish I could just go back to bed. I could sleep for hours. What a life that would be if I could do what I wanted when? But there is washing, cleaning, phone calls and wrapping gifts to do. I thought I had done them all but no.

 

And to think about what to cook tonight? I may make some sweetcorn soup. I just use a full bag of sweetcorn. A large one. Grate a potato, carrot, ginger and chop an onion. Add salt and black pepper. When it’s cooked, add cream, I have to put in vegan cream. I let it cool then then get my hand-held machine and make it into a thick soup without bits. It’s delicious. Though doubt this will be enough for my boys. Normally I would do a baked potato with cheese, fine for Hub but BW? no cheese? I know you can get hard and soft cheese for vegans, but the hard cheese so far, is disgusting.

 

And finally, some facts.

In heavily popular areas, it’s more common to rain on Saturdays than the rest of the week, because of heavily populated traffic causing pollution. But that is odd as why not Sundays? Unless by the time it gets to that day, whatever causes the rain has passed.

 

On both Jupiter and Saturn, it rains diamonds. Nice.

 There is a mission planned to travel to Jupiter in 2030. It is said that it will take three years. Jupiter is 120 times larger than earth.

A smaller planet crashed into Jupiter not sure when, and that explains why it isn’t as large as it would have been if not for the crash.

 

Well now you have heard that useless information, I shall go for now. I will be back soon with a blog Jack has asked me to write about. Later with love.

 

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