Our bread board, butter dish and coffee machine have met with a sticky end. It was, apparently, all the fault of a carrot.
Picture the scene, if you will. There was I, reclining on my pillows and sipping V8 Citrus, one hand idly tickling Ygraine’s ear, when the peace was rent by a florid flurry of fine Anglo-Saxon expressions of exasperation, followed by a rapid succession of thumps and crashes from the kitchen below. More traditional phrases pierced the Sunday ambience.
He’d been making himself a smoothie, and a small carrot had been missed by the blender’s blades so he poked it with a wooden spoon then turned to the tap to rinse said spoon – only to feel the cold, wet splatter of smoothie hit the back of his head as the lid flew off. He span round, intending to grab the blender’s lid but somehow knocked the bread board which crashed to the floor taking the coffee machine and butter dish with it.
Naturally, the butter dish lid fell off and broke, splattering the freshly laundered kitchen rug with grease. The coffee pot shattered into a million shards of thin, brittle glass. The “2 thick wooden bread board cracked in two. Smoothie was plastered up the walls, over the worktops, up the curtains…
One of the nice things about lie-ins is that the other person gets to wash up.
***
You know the feeling of having too many jobs to fit into too few hours? I know, I know… keep calm, prioritise and deal with one thing at a time. No problem; I can do that. I just wish the number of minutes within any given hour would stretch a little.
I’ve been editing Tamsin, and have reached one of the chapters which requires a major re-write. Guess who’s run out of yellow printing ink. The cyan is almost out, too. If any of the three coloured cartridges run out then the printer won’t work at all, even for all-black text. That’s my only gripe with the machine, as otherwise it’s proved itself to be smooth-running. So, at some point soon I need to take an hour’s bus ride into Birkenhead for supplies. I’d intended to do this today but I need to walk into the village for a few groceries – and to find Siberian Pine Nut Oil.
My father’s condition continues to decline. My brother Eric told me that when he’d visited Dad, he seemed completely immobile and his eyes were rolling in his head like a blind man. One of the nurses told Eric she was amazed by Dad’s tenacity. So are we all, actually – but it seems such a long, long, cruel death. Who knows how much he’s aware of? To think of him lying there, trapped within his steadily declining body tears at my heart.
A young climbing jasmine needs planting by the patio trellis. There’s a huge amount of weeding to be done throughout the garden. Earlier this week I continued tidying the front garden, cutting back the willow tree and Berberis thunbergii hedge, a slow task due to its vicious two-inch thorns – which are the reason I chose it for hedging!
Oh, I bought some cream trousers… The shops seem crammed with the most hideous skirts imaginable – huge floor-sweepers with big, clumsy appliqué junk randomly plonked all over them. Long skirts tend make me look like a 5’ 2” garden gnome.
There’re various on-going writing projects - a short story I need to finish by the weekend, and another anthology whose deadline for submissions is at the end of October. Three poems were sent to a local magazine just last week, too. I’m already playing around with a few ideas for the third novel in the series, though before I even write one word of that I fully intend to finish Tamsin and Cry for Innocence first. I’m seriously tempted to change Cry for…’s title, so that the series would have its titles after the name of the main character of each book. And I need to firmly prod (I’ve already tried gently prod) a certain well-known magazine who bought an article last November and have yet to pay me for it. Grrrr…!
Last night I was chased through a city by Godzilla. In retaliation, I stole its eggs and made omelette. Pick on me at your peril.
Picture the scene, if you will. There was I, reclining on my pillows and sipping V8 Citrus, one hand idly tickling Ygraine’s ear, when the peace was rent by a florid flurry of fine Anglo-Saxon expressions of exasperation, followed by a rapid succession of thumps and crashes from the kitchen below. More traditional phrases pierced the Sunday ambience.
He’d been making himself a smoothie, and a small carrot had been missed by the blender’s blades so he poked it with a wooden spoon then turned to the tap to rinse said spoon – only to feel the cold, wet splatter of smoothie hit the back of his head as the lid flew off. He span round, intending to grab the blender’s lid but somehow knocked the bread board which crashed to the floor taking the coffee machine and butter dish with it.
Naturally, the butter dish lid fell off and broke, splattering the freshly laundered kitchen rug with grease. The coffee pot shattered into a million shards of thin, brittle glass. The “2 thick wooden bread board cracked in two. Smoothie was plastered up the walls, over the worktops, up the curtains…
One of the nice things about lie-ins is that the other person gets to wash up.
***
You know the feeling of having too many jobs to fit into too few hours? I know, I know… keep calm, prioritise and deal with one thing at a time. No problem; I can do that. I just wish the number of minutes within any given hour would stretch a little.
I’ve been editing Tamsin, and have reached one of the chapters which requires a major re-write. Guess who’s run out of yellow printing ink. The cyan is almost out, too. If any of the three coloured cartridges run out then the printer won’t work at all, even for all-black text. That’s my only gripe with the machine, as otherwise it’s proved itself to be smooth-running. So, at some point soon I need to take an hour’s bus ride into Birkenhead for supplies. I’d intended to do this today but I need to walk into the village for a few groceries – and to find Siberian Pine Nut Oil.
My father’s condition continues to decline. My brother Eric told me that when he’d visited Dad, he seemed completely immobile and his eyes were rolling in his head like a blind man. One of the nurses told Eric she was amazed by Dad’s tenacity. So are we all, actually – but it seems such a long, long, cruel death. Who knows how much he’s aware of? To think of him lying there, trapped within his steadily declining body tears at my heart.
A young climbing jasmine needs planting by the patio trellis. There’s a huge amount of weeding to be done throughout the garden. Earlier this week I continued tidying the front garden, cutting back the willow tree and Berberis thunbergii hedge, a slow task due to its vicious two-inch thorns – which are the reason I chose it for hedging!
Oh, I bought some cream trousers… The shops seem crammed with the most hideous skirts imaginable – huge floor-sweepers with big, clumsy appliqué junk randomly plonked all over them. Long skirts tend make me look like a 5’ 2” garden gnome.
There’re various on-going writing projects - a short story I need to finish by the weekend, and another anthology whose deadline for submissions is at the end of October. Three poems were sent to a local magazine just last week, too. I’m already playing around with a few ideas for the third novel in the series, though before I even write one word of that I fully intend to finish Tamsin and Cry for Innocence first. I’m seriously tempted to change Cry for…’s title, so that the series would have its titles after the name of the main character of each book. And I need to firmly prod (I’ve already tried gently prod) a certain well-known magazine who bought an article last November and have yet to pay me for it. Grrrr…!
Last night I was chased through a city by Godzilla. In retaliation, I stole its eggs and made omelette. Pick on me at your peril.
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