Feed me Seymour!

The weekend before last was spent planting seeds. It's an annual event for me, even if the seeds germinate they are doomed to an early death in my excuse for a garden, but I get a kick out of it all the same. The fact that a 10 foot tall sunflower can grow from such a tiny seed just blows my mind.

This year's contenders for East Anglian Roulette, chosen primarily due to the poorness of my sandy soil and therefore standing a fighting chance of survival, are:

Red sunflowers
Yellow dwarf sunflowers
Garlic chives
Red Basil
Lime Basil
Nasturtiums in 4 varieties
Tomatoes
French Tarragon
Catmint
Lemon Balm

The shoots started to appear at the end of last week on some of the trays and when I saw that the nasturtiums and sunflowers which normally have sturdy shoots like beansprouts, were sending up spindly, thin, red-stemmed shoots I concluded that something was amiss.

My seed compost was contaminated! A pox on you Mr Innes and your demon seed!

I have no idea what I'm growing but I'm assured by an expert that at least it isn't cannabis. I shall keep them going just for the sake of curiosity but I sincerely hope that I'm not going to be eaten out of house and home by a bunch of Audreys.

Prince of Toads

The good Cap'n and I have tried for many years to get a population of toads and frogs living in our garden. The fact that my mother-in-law is so terrified of them that she can only refer to them as "those hoppy things" has absolutely nothing to do with it m'lud. Captain Scarlet just likes them and I want them to keep the slug population to a minimum.

A good few years ago when we first had a garden pond, we would spend many hours searching woodland ponds trying to acquire some spawn, often precariously slithering down the bank in danger of going in. We once managed to snag a pair of toads in coitus. They must have been practising tantric toad sex because we drove 10 miles home to bring them back to the pond and they didn't even seem to notice, "Did the Earth move for you darling?"

It soon became apparent why toads lay eggs in such huge numbers, the game of Toad Survivor is a tough one. To begin with our first pond had a sitting tenant - a large, belligerent looking koi carp who was rather partial to tadpoles and we would despair at watching him trawl round the pond sucking up the tadpoles and smacking his fat, pouty lips with delight.

We decided to have 2 ponds, one for fish, one for wildlife. The 2 ponds were however connected by a little waterfall made of Welsh slate - the top pond was for the fish, the bottom one for the toads & frogs. Despite our best filtering efforts we discovered that the tiny toads that had survived trial by fish were ending up in the top pond. In order to get there they actually had to travel about 15 feet along a pipe which led to a mini pumping station (so positioned because of the power supply) which pumped water through an unltraviolet filter (to keep algae at bay) and then back 15 feet into the top pond. This must have been quite an adventure for them ... but at least they got a tan on the way.

The saddest discovery was when we saw on the stone edging of the pond which got very hot in the summer sun, several tiny flattened toad bodies looking for all the world like fossils in the stone - we think they hopped out of the pond and got stuck to the hot stone.

Despite all this I am happy to announce that we still have at least one toad in the garden. I heard him calling for a mate tonight - if you don't know what that sounds like imagine the sounds of crepe soled shoes on a shiny floor. I'm chuffed to bits and can't wait to tell my mother-in-law that we might be having tadpoles soon.

Back in the saddle

I'd like to thank everyone for their kind emails and comments following my last post. I'm fine now, thank you - I don't often wallow in self-pity but when I do I tend to go for it in a big way. This gets everything out of my system and I bounce back like a weeble.

I've been tagged by DQ with this delightful 3 Things meme (which Clare should be an expert at by now).

Three Things That Scare Me:
1. Spiders - 8 legs, 8 eyes, mostly hairy - what else can I say?
2. A kidney & pancreas transplant - being cut from breastbone to hip. There go my abs of steel.
3. Politicians.

Three People Who Make Me Laugh:
1. My husband
2. Aardman Animations (a collection of people I know, but I don’t care, their films rule)
3. My cyber friend Dizzy Liz

Three Things I Love:
1. My husband
2. My cats
3. The written word

Three Things I Hate:
1. Coffee
2. Cleaning the shower
3. Poor manners

Three Things I Don't Understand:
1. Myself
2. HTML (but I’m working on it)
3. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle


Three Things On My Desk:
1. A beanie baby dragon wearing a pair of slippers (Old Navy keyrings)
2. 2 clementines
3. A big pile of blue folders (23 performance reports close out on the 15th April which mean they’ve just arrived to be reviewed)

Three Things I'm Doing Right Now:
1. Errrr, helloooo, this meme
2. Ploughing through the big pile of blue folders
3. Wondering what the hell I can do to make a living from home instead of being here.

Three Things I Want To Do Before I Die:
1. Publish a novel or two or three or four
2. Drop my BMI so I can get on the transplant list
3. Drive on a skid pan

Three Things I Can Do:
1. Make a mess
2. Make yummy Yorkshire Pud
3. Make beautiful greetings cards

Three Things I Can't Do:
1. Knit
2. Whistle
3. Keep houseplants alive

Three Things I Think You Should Listen To:
1. Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of The Worlds
2. Baz Luhrman - Sunscreen
3. The elderly - hardly anyone gives them the time of day yet they have such great stories to tell.

Three Things You Should Never Listen To:
1. Your inner gremlin who says you can’t do it
2. Your iPod at full volume - you only have one set of ear drums in this life
3. People talking about you

Three Things I'd Like To Learn:
1. Russian - I know a few words but it is such a beautiful, lyrical language
2. To paint in watercolours
3. Photography

Three Favourite Foods:
1. Funnel cake/freshly cooked doughnuts
2. Sundried Tomatoes in olive oil
3. Roast potatoes with rosemary

Three Shows I Watched As A Kid:
1. Battle of the Planets
2. The Clangers
3. Blue Peter

Three Wonderful People to Inflict My Meme On:
Shaz
Clare
Mrs Woman

Henry's Day

It is a cruel twist of fate that Mother's Day this year falls on 18th March which should have been my son's 14th birthday. Note the "should" in that last sentence, Henry died when he was almost 4 months old. His death left an enormous wound in my heart which never quite heals, instead it gets torn open again every time his birthday rolls around; this year it had to fall on Mothering Sunday.

Henry was born at 26 weeks gestation by emergency caesarian after a rollercoaster ride of a pregnancy - this week we're going to terminate, no we'll try for another week, this week we're going to terminate ...

He weighed just 1 lb 10 oz and had been given a 50/50 chance of survival. It was 3 whole days before I was allowed out of intensive care to see him in his own little intensive care unit. I could barely take in what I saw before I passed out. Some mother I turned out to be.

The following day was Mother's Day. Next to my bed was a card from him - it contained a Polaroid picture of him and his hand prints. Later I got another card and some flowers. Clever little lad was my boy, especially considering he was intubated on a respirator and had just undergone surgery for a collapsed lung the night before.

The day before he died we were preparing to bring him home from hospital. We'd just bought his pram and his cot - I hadn't allowed myself to buy anything when I was pregnant, but I started buying things and then he died. What's wrong with this picture? Did I tempt fate?

Early one morning we got a call from the hospital saying we had to come at once, they wouldn't say why. In my heart I knew that he was gone. He was 15 weeks old.

The only time I got to see him without tubes or tape on his face was when he was dead. My sweet boy. When I can't sleep I imagine him lying sleeping on my chest and it calms me.

That day was a a blur but 2 things stick in my mind - I saw a herd of deer in a field in the early morning mist. They were startled to see anyone out so early. I sometimes see deer on my drive to the dialysis unit and the memory stabs me in the heart.

It was still early in the morning when we drove home and we ran over a hare. It's the only time I've ever seen a hare and I have the image of its huge paws zig-zagging along in front of the car until we caught it. I screamed. Does everything we touch have to die?

My kidney failure was diagnosed when I was 7 weeks pregnant. The doctors like to say that it was the pregnancy itself that prompted my kidneys to fail but the truth of the matter is that I'd been symptomatic for over 2 years before, and despite repeated visits to doctors no-one put everything together until it was too late.

The simple fact is that Henry saved my life. If I hadn't fallen pregnant no-one would have known how dangerously high my blood pressure was and I would probably have had a stroke and died. Another irony for you.

I have to wonder what I fucked up so badly in a previous life to be given this one.

Cutting room flaw

Happy Red Nose Day everyone. At last Shaggy Blog Stories has been published so everyone should hightail it over to www.lulu.com with their flexible friends at the ready. It'll be money well spent 'cos I'm not in it. Run along now, I have a shattered ego to nurse.

The Princess and the Pea

A few years ago my mother decided to move out of the bedroom she shared with my Dad, and move in to the spare room instead. Her decision wasn’t due to marital problems, merely down to a matter of comfort – she felt she couldn’t get in and out of their double bed anymore.

The guest bed in the spare room proved to be uncomfortable so they went out and selected a replacement. When the new bed was delivered Mum was adamant that the shop had sent the wrong one so it was sent back and replaced. A few months go by and Mum starts to complain that the bed is uncomfortable again. A replacement was sought again, delivered, installed, slept in and duly condemned.

This pattern went on for almost a year – something like 5 beds were bought in one year. My parents are both pensioners so can ill afford to throw their money around but my Dad’s world revolves around my Mum, and he was willing to do anything to make her happy. He attempted some modifications – removing buttons, adding padding, adding springs, boards, planks, anything he could possibly think of. Eventually they ended up with one of those space-age foam mattresses and at last she seems reasonably settled. That is until she decided that she wanted a new chair.

We went through the whole saga again with the chair. Supposedly the wrong one kept being delivered, one particular attempt got replaced twice at considerable extra cost but the search for a comfortable seat continued. I have one of the cast offs in my living room – doesn’t match my living room but rather than throw out a perfectly good chair I took it in. My Dad now sits on another of the rejects. Mum finally accepted one chair but most of the time chooses to sit on the settee from the old suite.

My Mum has always been difficult to please so I didn’t really give it a lot of thought – I just thought that’s Mum all over. Every Christmas I have endeavored to buy her something that makes her say “Oh that’s wonderful, just what I wanted!” but every year I’m crushed by the disappointment as she primly announces "thank you". She didn’t even unwrap her Christmas presents from me last year. And I have since heard through my Dad that every single item I spent ages choosing was unsuitable in some way.

What we didn’t realise was that the bed and chair saga were part of her developing dementia due probably to Parkinson’s Disease, and in the space of about 6 months my Mum has gone from being a tad daffy to barely recognizing the people around her.

She often thinks my Dad is her mother. She asks if her father (who died 60 years ago when she was just 16) is in the other room and she cries and has tantrums every time my Dad breaks it to her that her Dad is dead, it’s as though we have killed him off.

She either calls me by my sister’s name (my sister died nearly 30 years ago in a motorcycle accident) or she thinks I’m one of her friends. Sometimes she thinks my brother and I are dead and she has to get ready for our funeral. She behaves like a child.

Mum had a brain scan recently – Dad was perversely hopeful that she had a brain tumour, his reasoning being that the doctors can do something about a brain tumour. As it turns out her brain is actually shrinking and parts are being starved of oxygen because the Parkinson’s is hardening the blood vessels. She will be given some drugs usually given to Alzheimer’s patients.

None of it is her fault of course and we don’t blame her for anything but when you have everything you do thrown back in your face as not good enough it gets a little old. It is an awful situation and I worry constantly about my Dad’s state of mind. I find it stressful visiting because I don’t know what to say to the woman who should know me better than anyone, the woman who shuffles off to her bedroom because I’m a frightening stranger. My Dad lives with it day in day out.

I get upset because I’m having a shitty time with my illnesses and it should be my Mum giving me a hug and making a fuss of me. I’m sorry this has been a bit of a self-indulgent ramble today.

Comic Relief

Here's a great idea - go over to Troubled Diva and help with the mission to assemble blog stories and publish in a book in just 7 days! The book will be called Shaggy Blog Stories. It's all in a good cause and you'll get some publicity for your site too - a double whammy.

Go on, what are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?

Hubble dubble

Captain Scarlet loves it when I'm on a diet. Our tastes in food aren't compatible at the best of times but when I'm trying to cook low fat meals he turns his nose up at them and I end up cooking him something like egg & chips. He thinks he's died and gone to heaven which has a certain irony given the food he's eating but he has nary a worry about his heart or his waistline. All this from a man who thinks butter, cheese, oil, fat on meat, etc are poison. The awkward git.

Tonight I found myself with several pints of milk lurking in the fridge, normally in that situation I would make myself a macaroni cheese but since Xenical and cheese don't mix I decided to try and make a milk-based low fat sauce instead. I was thinking something along the lines of Alfredo but t'internet kept coming up with recipes containing cream and parmesan cheese so I took things into my own hands.

I should state for the record that I am NOT a cook in any way shape or form. Do not try any of my recipes without written approval from your doctor and always have a large bowl handy. Oh and those purists who sneer at the use of purees and dried herbs can just kiss my curvaceous British arse.

I had some fat-free creme fraiche in the fridge so I thought I would mix that with some milk, bring it to the boil add some garlic puree, black pepper and some dried parsley - boom, Alfredo's your uncle, right?

Wrong. Creme fraiche and milk curdles when brought to a gentle simmer. It was like grey cottage cheese and I promptly dumped it in the sink. I had plenty more milk to play with.

Next, I began on more familiar ground by mixing some cornflour with a little milk until I had a smooth paste and then added the rest of the milk. In my more carefree days I would have made a roux with some butter and plain flour but there's a kidney and a pancreas out there with my name on it and I need to get on the list so I can get to them.

I brought the milk up to the boil to allow the mixture to thicken slightly and then I added about an inch of garlic puree, some salt and black pepper, about a dessertspoon of dried parsely.

I tasted it and it needed something. Flavour I think, but all I had left in my arsenal was some sun-dried tomato puree and a few oddments of herbs.

I added the tomato puree, still missing something. After rooting around in my little used spice rack I happened upon tarragon. Ahhhh my second favourite herb after rosemary, what the heck I'll bung in some of that, I thought. So I added about a dessertspoon of the the tarragon and took a spoonful of the sauce to taste it.

Can I have a drumroll please?!

Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr tish!

Scrumptious!! Just add pasta for a truly unauthentic Italian meal. I'm trying to figure out what to call this little concoction of mine. Any ideas?

Wuthering slights

You know you've Arrived in blogland when you land a £70,000 book deal. It's something that most of us, if we're honest, secretly aspire to. I expect most of us who do aspire to such things didn't expect to be discoverd within the first few months of writing but that's exactly what happened to Wife in The North.

What hasn't crossed our starstruck minds, I am sure, is that we would be parodied for our efforts and successes. Whilst following links from some of Wifey's commenters, I discovered that her writing is being parodied on another blog set up to be almost identical to hers. I confess that I found Strife in The North to be rather amusing and certainly quite clever but it is one of those things that make me go hmmm.

Eat sour grapes much?

Pail Rider

Take a memo Miss Funnyfanny:

Even if you cheat and take your last Xenical at lunchtime, if you decide to have sweet & sour pork balls for supper, even if you are only having it with plain boiled rice, always carry a bucket somewhere on your person. Failure to comply will have dire consequences the following morning.

Yours truly,
The Management

iChoons

There's a first time for everything and it's Drama Queen who finally broke my duck and tagged me. Spanish Goth started it, Shaz jumped on the bandwagon, I pitched a fit at being left out and now the rest, as they say, is history.

This is apparently how it goes.

Take your iPod, you have to switch it to random and list (truthfully) the first ten songs + artists. If you don't have an iPod (like me) you will probably have to use your iMagination instead.

Answers on your blogs please and then you have to TAG another 5 peeps - let the fun begin. And that's an order.

My list (sans iPod) goes as follows:

1. Shine by Take That (playing on Radio 2 during my drive home)
2. Gangsters by Specials AKA (as above - you know you're getting old when they start playing Specials AKA on Radio 2, Terry Wogan was playing some Clash the other morning, but I digress)
3. Night Fever by the Bee Gees (from the album Saturday Night Fever; The Original Soundtrack - on the boom box at home)
4. If I Can't Have You by Yvonne Elliman (SNF-OST)
5. Disco Inferno by The Trammps (SNF -OST ... are we starting to notice a pattern here?)
6. Strict Machine by Goldfrapp from the album Black Cherry
7. Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers from the album Inflammable Material
8. Hung Up by Madonna from the album Confessions on a Dancefloor
9. Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum from a 70's compilation
10. Pretty Fly for a White Guy by the Offspring from an air guitar compilation

Now then, as most of my known blogonauts are already taking part in this, the only others that I've had contact with are Zoe, Sonnjea and the owner of There's Life Jim who I only know as Mr Man's Wife (although I refer to her on my blogroll as as Mrs Woman as believe she at least deserves her own identity). I hope you guys don't mind too much - I need to look like I have some friends out there.