Travelling On

rtandon27

Flooding! 😱 Wow beanie - hope it's not affected you!

beanielou

rtandon27 said:

Flooding! 😱 Wow beanie - hope it's not affected you!

Not me personally but some people I know have been affected sadly.

taka

beanielou said:

It just went on & on & on taka dident it.
No bb or mobile for 24 hours. 
Some bad flooding locally. 

It really did! I've never seen anything like that lightening. Some bad flooding indeed north of me. Not much flooding in my city - a bit of surface water flooding in areas that always struggle but not too much damage as far as I can tell. Smallish river next to me's level doubled but was thankfully nowhere near flooding as it was very low to begin with. My bb was down only briefly when the storm started. It seems BT and plusnet were having problems from what my collegues were saying yesterday.

Right off to head home and enjoy a bit of the sun!

Karmacat

Oh my!  The Scottish floods look bad, it has to be said - a friend who lives up a mountain posted a pic of her local road completely collapsed, there's a lot of landslides that haven't been fatal but are causing disruption on a grand scale. 

Way down here ... we've had brief drizzle this morning, the paving stones are definitely damp, and thats it.  The sky is completely grey, that featureless yuk ... I really thought we'd get some proper rain last night, the Met Office warnings definitely said so, with 80% probability, but nothing.  I even managed to sleep again after I switched the fan off at about 3am, and didn't wake up feeling sick from the heat!  It's definitely broken, blissful. 

Meanwhile, I'm doing almost an hour of cleaning, throughout the day - really, its catching up from well before I retired   it feels a lot nicer to be in here.  Not finished yet, but it will be by the time my brother and sister turn up.  I'm also navigating how to turn the bathroom downstairs into something that stores the accessories they each need to use while they're here - fair bit more cleaning left to do, but I'll get there without letting the fatigue get to me (I ruined my mother's last visit to me - I was too ill to let her stay because I'd worked so hard in cleaning up ready for her.  Never going to do that again to a family member).

ETA - panicking when I first came on here, couldn't find this thread!  I'd somehow unbookmarked my own thread **shrieky blue**  all fixed now

rtandon27

First blackberries of the season gleaned from the farmyard bushes! - about 2 cups worth - Giving them a good soak and then into the freezer for winter vitamin C 🌞

apple_muncher

Do you soak them to drown any wee critters that had the gall to cling to your blackberries? Or have I been missing a vital trick all these years...?

rtandon27

apple_muncher said:

Do you soak them to drown any wee critters that had the gall to cling to your blackberries? Or have I been missing a vital trick all these years...?

Exactly!

Three good soaks before draining off in a colander...anything that floats to the top gets poured off first (mostly the berry 'fur', very rarely a critter...can use a bit of vinegar or salt in the water but I never do...air dry for a while and then spread paper towels to finish drying..then flash frozen flat in the freezer & stored in a zippy bag once frozen solid.  Soaking & drying this way is more gentle then washing in a colander and the berries remain intact.

I usually get a bag or two over the course of a month & then use them up throughout the winter on top of porridge or in crumble.

Suffolk_lass

Ooh, I do the opposite - I freeze the tub of blackberries then wash them while frozen before cooking - mind you I do cook mine. All hedgerow foraging. Lovely stuff

Karmacat

Lovely!  Blackberries have been ripe for ages round this way, but I confess I haven't picked any yet, I've just been focussing on my own task list, sadly.  Still plenty there, of course, but now my task list is to get my living room, bathroom and patio fit to be used by my brother and sister, by Tuesday ... no blackberry picking pour moi, not yet. 

My Sainsbo delivery arrived yesterday, £12 voucher well used, and nearly all of it cleaned, just got to do the last bit. 

Our rain experience was very different from the rest of the country - drizzle for most of the day, which was great as it softened up the soil a bit, then an hour or so of proper rain.  This morning, the alchemilla is still wet, so I reckon there's been more in the night.  Woo hoo!

rtandon27

Hope all is going swimmingly with the sibling visit KC!