5 OS Pleasures in your Day Today part 2

Tealady_2

Evening

Ladyhawk - Get well soon
Ampersand - You will be pleased to hear the snow has all gone in the heathrow area.

Well today was going well until we got a call off MIL to say that OH's nan had been taken to hospital. She has gone down hill very fast lately and is struggling to look after her self and had lots of unpleasant accidents in the house that she appears unaware of. So tomorrow we are going over to the house to clean up which will not be a pleasure:eek:. At least we know she is safe in the hospital and are hoping it will make Social Services take some action and put her in a home as this is the only safe option for her now.

Anyway pleasures for today,
1. Free lunch at work, left overs from yesterday's meeting and very yummy it was as well.
2. Finishing a job on my desk that I had been putting off but once started it was quite quick and easy as had already done most of the work without realising it.
3. OH cooking dinner and it being all ready as walked through the door plus he stuck to the meal plan
4. Just placed my first Approved Food order - how easy is it to spend far too much. Just need to find somewhere to put it all now . Think some of it will go to MIL
5. Nice chat with my mum who was very happy as I sent her a DVD she wanted. It was so cheap on amazon and she was so happy :A. Nice to be able to spoil her sometimes

Hugs to all who need them

VJsmum

Millie and Tealady << hugs >>
Ladyhawk, get well soon

For today

1. DD came back from Poland - she has been to Auschwitz and has found it an amazing, if very cold, experience.
2. Dad continues to improve, albeit rather slowly. Everyday seems to bring something new to overcome, but he is in good spirits
3. Lunch and an off load with friends
4. Trip to the doctor for some anti - anxiety tablets. I use them very infrequently, (i.e. have got through 28 in 2 years) but if I need them, i need them. Doctor is amazing and very empathetic - but she can't work miracles.
5. Stir fry for tea - my housekeeping skills have fallen away in the last couple of weeks, and I felt we needed a decent meal with lots of colour. Followed by strawberries and blueberries from Aldi - blueberries were part of the super 6 so Only 59p a punnet

Have a lovely time in NZ ampersand - say hello to Frodo! Have a good weekend all.

sparrer

Millie keeping you all in my thoughts and prayers
Ladyhawk hope you'll feel better after a good night's sleep
Tealady thinking of you and your OH, please his Nan is is a safe place
niksyg the square foot garden does sound a good idea, might look into it further in the finer weather
Chicken I love those programmes, they give me lots of inspiration for mine - pity they don't give me the money to do them though!
PK I'm with you re the phone, mine makes calls which is the purpose of a phone? Sending texts and taking photos are as much extra as I can understand
ampersand - thank you! Must be an MSE thing . Lovely post, will miss all your daily treasures but we'll be treated to many more about your holiday, when you're back. Safe journey, yi lu ping an! (Bon voyage)

1. The snow which fell last night has almost gone. Hoping for no more as I have to go to my Aunts funeral in Essex on Monday, but the outlook for this area isn't too good

2. Lost another 1lb, working hard toward my Easter goal

3. Cleaned through upstaits, got me warm enough to turn the heating off for a few hours (and hopefully work off a few calories)

4. nsd/npd

5. Grateful for radiators to dry clothes on, can't afford a dryer and as mentioned recently I remember bringing the laundry in from the line only for it to be as stiff as a board!

Stay warm and safe, sweet dreams
S

Broomstick

Heigh ho.

Ladyhawk, mega sympathies about the hacking cough. This really is a horrid one. I felt OK earlier when I posted before, then suddenly got really tired and put myself to bed (sleep) for a couple of hours complete with said cough. I'm now awake again and feeling much better.

Keep warm everyone who's poorly, no, change that to keep warm everyone!

Anyway, my five for today:

1. Stopped off at my parents and they unexpectedly fed us lunch. My mum had made a very nice goats cheese and fennel thing and the DSs had chocolate cake for pudding.

2. She also gave me a huge (as in refectory table size) white linen tablecloth (which she had inherited and had no sentimental attachment to). I'm going to put it by to make something with. It's lovely cloth. She also gave me a very big length (probably enough to make me a posh jacket) of toffee coloured linen. Pre-arthritis, she used to do so much dress making and her material stash is fabulous. I have no decent clothes at all. Everything I own is well worn and I've probably spent about £150 total on me, including shoes, in the last four years. So the thought of making new clothes using lovely fabric is really quite exciting.:D

3. I ended up spending £130 on a new section of exhaust pipe so lost my NSD but maybe rescued the car from something worse just in time. However, I got the garage to check the battery properly after last weekend's snow saga and they said everything is looking good which is a relief.:T

4. VJsmum,, have you watched Paper Clips? http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00h9xk2/Paper_Clips/
I watched it a couple of night's ago and it feels wrong to put this as a pleasure, but the fact that the project exists, and that people are being heard, is good. The image of the train truck will stay in my mind.

5. Pasta with fish sauce for tea.

Sleep well,

B x

Patchwork_Quilt

1) Hair re-coloured this morning at my usual salon for about half what the other, more swanky salons cost.
2) Managed to find, and I am very excited about this, a stash of vintage cotton thread in a charity shop on the way home. The kind that is on wooden reels. It is so much better than what is usually on offer today. I bought as many as I decently could, given that they were only 25 p each, and am sharing them with DD.
3) Yellow sticker lunch today - mushroom risotto. Plus I found some half price chocolates in T3sco for Tuesday. There's nothing like a Thorntons.
4) Coffee date with my bee lady - an hour and a half's nattering for £4.50. Well worth it.
5) A trip over to MIL and FIL with a roast tea and trifle for dessert. Nobody moved very far after that.

Hope you all have a peaceful weekend.

ampersand

Lost post AGAIN a few hours ago, so this really is it @ silly clocks, having given myself a 2am STOP time, already transgressed,

1. Call back from Phillips< NakedBus, NZ around minuit trente, I now have Rimu2 Bus Pass for 10 trips, any length, wherever, for $NZ254[£130-ish]. Given that Akl Int Airport>Napier rtn alone covers c.600 miles...bon!- and I have more like jaunts to make.

2. mummy?, having sent me a beautiful Welsh dragon pewter bookmark[in use instantly!]has also secured for us 2 tkts for Glorious Tim Minchin @ Hay-on-Wye, come 30 May. What a treat to return to! She loved him when I took latest concert DVD down at Crimbo and spotted this up on Uni noticeboard. AND - 75& on the essay worked on over crimbo...now that's a First! She is utterly courageous, beyond all measure.

3, Carry-on x1, Check-in x1 = cases down from loft. All measured: dimensions o.k.

4. = 2 cases down from loft.....AND WEIGHED, EMPTY.

5. BUT, one now has the Madness of a half-way decent NZ oil in it. Better re-weigh. I found it here some years back, might now give it an airing in a local auction or boot sale of Mine Own. Must check artist out first...then bed[which I've been saying in one form or another for over an hour now]

More 5[:-)] All necessary print-outs just finished.

Another More 5. £sterling tucked into body belt to wear on plane then bank to my ANZ a/c for single exchange fee. Costs will be silly otherwise,

Final no.5 for now. Slight progress made on comms with our charity someone, who has taken some dogged tracking, after unsignalled tfr between institutions. Even my bloodhound best was hitting brick walls and obstruction over and over again. Our Charity should have ben advised - it wasn't. I was lied to over several days of last and this week. Person now located, so a covering letter with copy of previous is en route demain, which is now aujourd'hui. I will NOT let this drop. It's too important.

Fibby last 5, last time.
Lady90 phoned again, touchingly effusive still re: photos and card[with great poem of Tennyson]. I have reiterated that there'll be cartes postales<NZ... .
I reflect on her life, still fully and vividly lived, and xx's earthly span now spent.
Maybe this will seem unwise by morning proper, but I think I'd like you all to have a flavour of this Scholar and Gentleman - pitifully small homage.

October 2011
Dum Spiro Spero
… or while there’s life there’s hope. The people in the Oncology department at
Addenbrookes could not have been kinder when after certain tests they told me when I went in for a nagging sore throat that I had cancer in three quite important and indispensable parts of my anatomy. I had been treating it at home with Gaviscon! They gave me a possible 12 months with a following wind although the chemo might help and that, let me tell you, is a barrel of laughs - not.
Nothing special there and many friends and neighbours have been similarly stricken in recent years and if I can handle this inconvenience with half the courage and dignity that they did I shall indeed be proud. Only trouble is that I had quite a few things still to do that now will remain undone. However I am unlikely to get Alzheimer’s and can plan my funeral to which all my friends are invited. There will be good music and a half of shandy and a sausage roll afterwards. Sorry but I cannot give you a date yet for the diary. In the meantime I shall commentate at the fenland fair and then drive to Scotland for the fishing.
Pity, but cannot make the USA trip as being in a log cabin in the backwoods is too far from the doctors if anything happens and, in any case, you do not want to get ill in America unless you are an eccentric multi-millionaire. In the meantime I look forward to hearing the cuckoo and nightingale and seeing the swallows arrive one more time.
Anyway, enough of that and we do what Churchill advocated and KBO or Keep
!!!!!!ing On. Of all the windmills at which this column has tilted over quarter of a century not a word of mine has made a ha’porth of difference* but it was better for my blood pressure to get things off the chest. I wanted conservation areas instead of mown grass, a magpie trap for the village, decent community facilities and, oh, loads of other things but not a thing has happened. Now I pick up various mumbles about lack of playground facilities. The Primary school ones are primitive and the new slide I see has been sealed off, no doubt under some ludicrous Health and Safety nonsense.
When my two grandchildren come and stay we bundle them into the car and take them to xxx xxx where they have a splendid playground. For a change we cycle up to xxx where there is another one. Both are smaller villages than xxx and our lack of a playground is, I think, a disgrace. Does not the Parish Council care? We have the Dirt Hills and the Village College grounds and it just needs a bit of good will and someone in authority with nous, imagination and energy to get it going. It cannot be rocket science. No doubt my appeal will fall on the stone-deaf ears of the council and as usual nothing will happen. Still this is not perhaps the time to make any more enemies…..but I do wonder why more people do not speak out. We tend to get the facilities and services we deserve.
My brush cutter broke down so it was down to young G R for his masterly
healing touch. New part from Bury required. G works in a large workshop piled high
with broken mowers, motor bikes, chain saws, garden cultivators and so on and his actual working area is reduced to a tiny corner about the size of a postage stamp which he keeps scrupulously clear. It must suit his method of working for he does a wonderful job and is always on time and not too dear. How he mends anything is a miracle, but he does, and does it very well.
Just had a thought. They say my hair will fall out and I have just lashed out with Andy for a haircut. Money down the drain……

* which words I heard near identically in the final Dickens story on R4 yesterday morning
###############
December 2011

‘My grandfather’s clock was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor’,
– since 1750 actually, if family legend is to be believed, so make that, ‘….stood 261 years on the floor’. Passed down through generations it has ticked and tocked through Napoleonic wars, world wars and the sinking of the Titanic. She has tolled the hours, years, decades and centuries, solid and dependable.
It was said that great grandfather kept his muzzle-loading gun inside it. It has no brass face, no rising suns and moons or clockwork ships tossed on mechanical seas as in grander examples, just flowers and a gaudy bird, species indeterminate, flirting its enamel tail; its case is honest English oak. It used to record the date but that piece of the mechanism died a century ago so now it just tells roughly the time. Many a houseguest has reported through gritted teeth how its merry chime drew to his attention the passing hours. It loses a minute each day and has other idiosyncrasies. The hands do not care to be moved backwards past the hour, the catch that secures its oaken door has a knack. Only the master of the house is allowed to wind it up and there is a special way of keeping the number of chimes aligned to the hour indicated by the hands. When ‘himself’ is away the pendulum is left in repose. She is a beloved but eccentric member of the family, round her head a crown of old holly, saved from previous Christmases when the house was full of people, laughter and love. It is a symbiotic arrangement; we look after her and she tells us the approximate time and bestows companionship. She is the heartbeat of the house so that when she stops we know it.
Thus it was one morning when coming downstairs I knew something was amiss. The
old girl had fallen silent. Cue the old clock mender, for rarely do you encounter a young one. I have known three in my time, two of them ‘gone from us’ but the current incumbent very much extant.
He came like the family doctor, his few tools and unguents in a Gladstone bag, himself dressed soberly for no doubt he had witnessed the demise of a few patients. We awaited his diagnosis while he prodded and I held the torch. Huge relief when he informed us that there was nothing a good clean would not cure so he would take the movement away to work on at leisure. Unhooking pendulum and weight, with the awful dexterity of a transplant surgeon he eviscerated it and was gone.
A broken clock is right twice a day and its smiling face remains but with the works
removed there is a sinister black hole like a truncated body. It felt like a death in the house but unlike human mortality, this corpse will be like Lazarus, ready once more to mark the minutiae of family life. When its current custodians have shuffled off, its care will pass into the hands of the next generation and eventually the one after that. Unless, that is, like the clock in the song, ‘It stopped – short - never to go again - when the old man died…..’
People are still being kind. I have received a couple of jazz records, a book on poaching (for me of all people!)* not to mention more cards and good wishes, offers to collect and deliver my morning paper and so on. You are very kind and I did not realise how many friends, some of them unmet, that I had. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

-* :-) [ no prize for guessing]
##############
February 2012....arrived and my day took another shape.

While all my stories in Sxxx Txxx, in which I write a weekly column, were faithfully reported and days at Hxxx, Wxxx and elsewhere really did happen, they were rather more spread out than I made them appear, written well in advance to cover a period in my life when I knew the gun would be idle.
In fact when he should have been out in the coverts, your beloved scribe was
incarcerated in an intensive care ward for the terminally confused at Addenbrooke’s
Hospital awaiting a bowel movement. Indeed it was not only Christmas Day but New Year’s Day and the four weeks that encompassed them that he spent in that not very edifying way.
They stuck a bolt along my femur to stiffen it, but two days later and a fortnight before Christmas the remains of the bone broke so, in shooting parlance, I had a leg down, not even a strong runner but a very weak one. All the urgings of our readers for me to keep’a’gooin’ could not sustain me against that little setback — so much so that I had to give two special shooting days to sons Nos. one and two, the latter who came from the USA specially to share Christmas with us. I lay on my bed of pain picturing P. standing by woods at W. in Norfolk where often I had stood, shooting at streams of birds well shown by SG the head keeper.
I believe they did me proud for they marched into the ward in full shooting attire clutching a hand-made card complete with photographs and P’s two woodcock pin feathers glued in. Even more impressive was the disc they had made on ‘one o’ they newfangled recording gadgets’. This took me straight back to the Wxxx woods with their russet bracken and shiny silver birches. I could hear plainly the whirr of wings and crackle of shots.
Being in the family the cameraman naturally concentrated on his brother and for that reason the film suggested the brave lad accounted for most of the bag. Not true of course although he did keep his end up. The film did manage to record the demise of the woodcock, shot third hand. ‘More luck than judgement..’ muttered the cameraman sardonically. For a few moments I was a happy man in a ward full of misery.
It was shortly after they had left I realised that, given my prognosis, I had almost certainly fired my last shot, and a tear sprang to the eye. I felt that I had let down shooting correspondents, running into their hundreds by now, who had urged me so passionately not to give up the struggle. It is hard to walk to a shooting stand when you cannot make it to the end of the bed without a large shot of painkillers. I was about to become a member of the non gun-owning public.
Now, in what is almost certainly my final move I find myself propped up in a bed in the xxx Care Centre back in sunny xxx. Nice place and nice people but I am very immobile. The usual xx article takes an hour to write and those at the back who mutter, ‘it looks like it’, can see me after class. This one took most of a day in my weakened state so I hope you are duly grateful.
Anyone passing with half an hour to spare is most welcome to call in for a natter to stop me dying of boredom and to keep me up to date with the gossip: maybe I can thank a few personally for all the lovely cards and letters.
#################
I am now to bed, finally - is hottie still hot? I will ask myself in some pale Rupert Brooke pastiche.

Bless you all - most truly.

villagelife

My five for past couple of days are

1. Lovely walks in the snow with my dog.

2. Still eating from stores apart from potatoes and fruit.

3. My slippers - a xmas present from DH and are keepimg my feet so warm and are needed on a tiled kitchen floor at the moment

4. DS2 wearing jumpers/fleece and not complaining he's cold whem he is just wearing shorts and a tshirt.

5. DS2 went skiing with a friend and their family yesterday and paid for most of it himself.

6. DS1 coming home for weekend.

Greenbuzby

Hi Everyone

Been a busy bee the last few days so haven't been on here, but here are my five for yesterday:-

1. Worked at a different office that is closer to home so was able to walk to work (try to get there a couple of days a week if possible as it saves money on fuel)
2. Was able to go home for lunch!
3. The phone cover that I ordered from fleabay arrived - was only £3.99 which I thought was a bargain as the shops wanted £20 for the same thing.
4. My sister and nephew stayed over last night. We watched a film and had a good chat.
5. Leek, bacon and butternut squash risotto for tea - my favourite!

VJsmum

Broomstick wrote: »

4. VJsmum,, have you watched Paper Clips? http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00h9xk2/Paper_Clips/
I watched it a couple of night's ago and it feels wrong to put this as a pleasure, but the fact that the project exists, and that people are being heard, is good. The image of the train truck will stay in my mind.

Thank you, I hadn't but I will. Am so proud of DD. She had said from when she started at the school 5 years ago that if she couldn't go on any other trip she would like to go to Poland. All of those who went behaved impeccably and were a credit to their school, according to the teacher. Unfortunately daft DD deleted all her photos accidentally, but one of her friends has posted his on facebook - so sensitively done. And at the moment I am cursing those few teenagers in our society who give the rest a bad name as this bunch of 15 / 16 year olds can hold their heads high and know that they have experienced an amazing thing and that they care.

One of the photos had a ?statue? Feature? of chairs. Each chair depicting 1,000 jews killed. So many chairs.....

Lest we forget, indeed.

Ampersand - beautiful words.

mhagster

quick 5:
1.up at very early o'clock: 5am, so phoned my sister , my in-laws & pottered about.
2.No Saturday scone, OH had dentist, so I stayed home, did some housework & chatted to friend on phone.
3.Bought a chest of drawers at op shop, we are very short on drawer space & I'd seen this set the other day. 4 big deep drawers now filled with DD2's clothes.
4.Relaxed this afternoon (snoozed!) and I'm enjoying a good book.
5.Lit my candles in my fireplace tonight, so nice & cozy feel to lounge. Heavy rain in morning ,dry in afternoon & quite a bit cooler this evening.

Have a good weekend.