Windfalls

 In other news, I knitted a bunny for grandson 

as a companion for the elephant I knitted granddaughter

using another one of Julie Williams' wonderful patterns.

I cheated with the jumper as I had some self-striping wool 

left over and it meant fewer ends to sew in.

The garden is getting tangled and unmanageable.

So naturally I turned my attention to something tangled that I could sort out -

the ribbon drawer.

This is kept in a small chest of drawers that used to house

 my father's wireless-making equipment.

Top drawer buttons,

second drawer spools of thread,

third drawer tape measures, needles, pins, fixings and scissors,

fourth drawer, ribbons.

As a child there was a ribbon drawer for my hair.

I loved choosing a ribbon for the day.

They didn't stay in my hair for long though.

Now I come to think of it, there was a handkerchief drawer too.

Does anyone still give a child a clean hanky each day?

We had a pocket in our school knickers for them.

How bizarre!

A colourful hanky was a vital accessory for the ferryman game.

You chanted in a line opposite one child,

Ferry me across the river,

do boatman do.

For I've a penny in my purse and my eyes are blue.

(They aren't but that didn't seem to matter.)

Then the boatman would say. 

I'll ferry you across the river if you can show me something with the colour ...

and then you had to produce said item.

If you couldn't and with a brown school uniform it was a challenge

for the unprepared,

you had to race across the invisible river without being caught.

Miniature autumn tints in the bonsai walk at Wisley.

Giant pale pumpkin looking like 

a giant something else in the vegetable garden.

Windfall apples in the orchard at Wisley.

Too tempting not to try several of them and lament 

the paucity of choice in our supermarkets and greengrocers.

They all tasted so different.

When I say all, I mean a few.

I so wished I could pick these for crab apple jelly.

I seem to have been waylaid by Instagram. I thought it would never happen.

You might like to pick up some windfalls over there from time to time.

Winding down at Sissinghurst

 And some essential maintenance.

The tower is under scaffolding for the next six months.

A cold snap at last.

I have been planting tulips 

and trying to remember what my intentions were

for Spring 2018 when I ordered them.

In other news, furniture is being eyed up for reupholstering.

A new carpet is being laid.

Light bulbs have been replaced.

Autumn is the new Spring.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

If anyone wondered where I was,

I have been Kondoing my Inbox.

I had to because my computer said it was full

and could neither absorb nor discharge any further information.

I understood how it felt.

There were 8835 messages there going back eight years.

Of course there must have been many more.

I certainly do delete as I go, but for some reason

these had resisted the routine culling.

It was, and is, a sobering experience. 
All life is there,
from the mundane to the momentous.
There is no easy way to approach this task.
I cannot risk taking out the box wholesale.
I have found some vital documents and some useful contacts.
I have been reminded of happy times and sad.

The computer has dropped a couple of dress sizes
and is feeling more comfortable, but I must press on.
We're aiming for a size 8.
People send funnies, and each of these links was opened and examined.
Mercifully many of them had expired.
Here are a couple that were brought blinking into the spotlight.
You'll notice a common theme:

 Retiree Bathtub Test

During a visit to my doctor, I asked him, 

"How do you determine

whether or not a retiree should be put in an old age home?"

"Well," he said, "we fill up a bathtub, 
then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the retiree 
and ask him or her to empty the bathtub."

"Oh, I understand," I said. "A normal person would use the bucket
 because it is bigger than the spoon or the teacup."
"No", he said. "A normal person would pull the plug out.
Do you want a bed near the window?"

                    

If it goes quiet again, you'll know where to find me.

Also - 32,544 photos.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

Doors and windows

I'd like to say something profound about

all the doors and windows opening ahead for this busy bee

but as we've just handed her back fed, watered, and in one piece after

a weekend staying with us while her parents went to a wedding in Cornwall

I may have to come back to you on that one.

Unintended Kondoing

Well it needed doing admittedly,

but the matter was accelerated at the weekend while my back was turned.

My daughter-in-law, calling by to fetch a car seat in our absence

heard an alarm beeping and traced it to the freezer.

She wisely did not alert us to this 

as there was nothing that could be done about it until our return.

We ate the lamb curry with melted mango chunks lassi and binned the rest.

Luckily there wasn't any raw meat in it 

and I hadn't just batch cooked a month's worth

of delicious meals so I'm thinking of this as a fresh start.

Could have done with some ice cubes today though.

The last of the ha-ha-harvest

Red cabbage - mostly snail and caterpillar.

Carrots - mostly carrot fly.

Beetroot - mostly too big and woody.

Nevertheless I have managed to extract a borscht

from these flawed ingredients.

The snails and caterpillars were spared.

I have decided to give that bed over to tulips for cutting next spring.

It's too warm to plant them yet so I must hold off

otherwise they will be mostly - Tulip fire fungus.

Even Sarah Raven has suffered from this.

A little idea

that I'm pleased with.

I have a lot of toys left over from my own childhood,

my mother's nursery school

and my own children.

Some of them have seen better days, 

and are mostly without their original packing.

I have a goodly supply of small boxes and so until recently

was happy enough just to decant and store into those.

But with lids on, these were not very helpful to little B 

who likes to choose toys and put them away herself on the shelf.

So I photocopied the contents

directly on the photocopier bed

and stuck the startlingly 3D image

onto each of the lids.

I'm going to do the same with Lego.

I sorted that years before I knew there'd be anyone else

playing with it, so it's all complete with instructions 

but there are hardly any original boxes.

It was such fun that I am casting round for other things to photocopy.

Food perhaps?

Tools?

Art equipment?

Seeing red

Oh my goodness.

This is a trial of one's patience.

I have now managed to copy someone else's last, precious, 

but now unsupported, version of iPhoto

onto my computer in a bid to be rid of Photos.

And Hallelujah

it has let me upload from my phone to the computer

and now to upload from the computer to the blog

but not quickly.

Oh no. That would be asking too much.

We must wait and twiddle our thumbs

 long enough for the moon to rise and darkness to fall.

Krazy Kondo-ing 2

It had to go.

The craziest of crazy paving,

never sparked a scintilla of joy

but was at least functional, until the tree

 started clawing it up 

slab by surreptitious slab

the length of its bony root system.

I think I should have been a digger driver.

It maddens me every time I drive through 

a certain major road widening scheme.

There are big signs with photos of little boys in hard hats

and high vis jackets saying,

Our dads work here.

Kondo-ing walk of shame

As it's not warm enough to sit outside 

with a nice glass of something chilled,

I have been Kondo-ing the pantry this evening.

It goes without saying that I had many packets and jars

 of years out of date pasta,

 mystery grains, pulses,

a huge bottle of Monin ginger syrup,

stale ground rice, semolina, 

flax seeds, millet, hemp,

 Smash dried potato,

mung beans, moong dal, popping corn,

aduki beans, black eyed beans,

Horlicks,  drinking chocolate, and fancy herb teas,

but what really shocked me was the seven,

 SEVEN

different types of sugar, cluttering up the shelves.

Granulated.

Caster.

Golden caster.

Muscovado.

Icing.

Demerara.

Soft light brown.

Rainbow crystals.

No wait,

That's eight.

EIGHT 

different types of sugar, cluttering up the shelves.

The only one I haven't got is cubes.

Surely I don't need all those?

Well of course, granulated for

my brother's and builders' tea,

caster for light sponge cakes and meringues,

golden caster because Nigel Slater said so,

Muscovado for rich fruit cakes,

icing, for icing,

Demerara for putting on top of cakes

because Nigel Slater said so,

soft light brown for brownies,

and rainbow crystals for. . .

old times sake, because my parents used to put it out on the

coffee tray if we had visitors

and I wanted to amuse the children with it.

This isn't going well.

The only one that didn't spark joy was Muscovado

because it had gone rock hard.

You can tell I am a child of the fifties,

 born just as sugar came off rationing.

Must I stop eating cake?