Steadily climbing the mountain, enjoying the view along the way

KajiKita

beanielou said:

Fantastic projection on the mortgage. 

Thanks Beanie 😊
It’s given me a real lift and with Mr KK being soooo excited about booking his spitfire flight, the atmosphere here is remarkably cheerful for mid January! 😊

Finished work for the week 🥳
Popped into town, dropped off an end-of-land returns parcel and picked up some bits of food in two health shops. Treaty but healthy 😊

First wash of the weekend on. 

About to go and pull the kitchen apart to allow the plumber to come in and service the boiler later this afternoon. 

Once I’ve got that organised I will be out in the garden planting the bare root geulder rose and spindle plants that arrived yesterday to fill gaps in the veggie patch hedge. If I still have time after that, I will start relocating the large aquilegia that have colonised one of the veggie beds down to by the pond 😊

KK

KajiKita

Got the hedge plants in, which was something of a wrestling match! Also made a start on relocating the aquilegia to down by the pond. That veg bed will be the garlic bed this year 😊

I have a lot of cooking to do this weekend: two batches of work soups (last week’s experiment of making my own worked beautifully 😊) and a veggie roast thingamee from the Gaia recipe book 😊

KK

Brie

remind me when the spitfire flight is going to happen and if you're going to be there?

KajiKita

Brie said:

remind me when the spitfire flight is going to happen and if you're going to be there?

Probably August and no, he’s going to go on his way to France at the beginning of the annual beer and battlefields road trip with his best man 😊

KK

debtfreewannabe321

KajiKita said:

Brie said:

Did you sleep better??

I did but because I think the reason for my disturbed sleep is anxiety. I did a Tai Chi energy settling exercise before getting into bed and used the 4:7:8 breath once in bed, both on Sunday and last night and that seemed to really help. I'm going to continue these practices (they take seconds) and see if they continue to help as I think I am still dialling down my fight / flight response from the sociopathic ex, three redundancies, Covid times, getting Covid 3 times and how badly that aged me, the crazy-job etc etc. I think 'gibber' / intense had become my default state and I need to, gently, dial that down, so my body feels safe. If that makes sense, it does to me  

KK 

I feel like I'm in the same battle here for similar reasons...I listened to my audiobook last night and fell asleep about five minutes in and slept more soundly than I have in months. I might switch to listening to a meditation before sleeping. Otherwise I can lay there all night fretting about something or other. I feel like I'm in flight mode most of the day (would love to know why I don't lose any weight with all the running in circles I do 😉🤣). 

KajiKita

debtfreewannabe321 said:

KajiKita said:

Brie said:

Did you sleep better??

I did but because I think the reason for my disturbed sleep is anxiety. I did a Tai Chi energy settling exercise before getting into bed and used the 4:7:8 breath once in bed, both on Sunday and last night and that seemed to really help. I'm going to continue these practices (they take seconds) and see if they continue to help as I think I am still dialling down my fight / flight response from the sociopathic ex, three redundancies, Covid times, getting Covid 3 times and how badly that aged me, the crazy-job etc etc. I think 'gibber' / intense had become my default state and I need to, gently, dial that down, so my body feels safe. If that makes sense, it does to me  

KK 

 I feel like I'm in flight mode most of the day (would love to know why I don't lose any weight with all the running in circles I do 😉🤣). 

Ummm … this is exactly the reason you are not losing weight … Your ancient brain is reacting to all the cortisol in your system and thinking that you are constantly running away from a sabre toothed tiger so is hanging to every scrap of you, ‘just in case’! 

It’s the reason why I am taking the exercise slowly and steadily - I haven’t started the folk dancing on Friday evenings yet as I think a walk every lunchtime, little exercises in the house and dance mums is enough for now - apart from doing 10K steps during the course of the day yesterday, I did nothing else and felt better for it. I want to keep my physical stress response low, so my inflammation levels stay calm or drop back further and gradually dial up my fitness over time. I might be doing IronMan by the end of the year … 🤔 (joke!! 😂😂😂)

KK

KajiKita

Realised that I hadn’t checked the mortgage balance yesterday (after usual monthly payment has gone out as well as Mr KK’s OP). Down to £222K. Being below £200K this year seems possible, maybe …?? 😊

KK

KajiKita

Pootling along through another soup recipe. This is a new technique to me - cook up onion, garlic, add stock, butter beans, teaspoon of tomato purée, and a small tin of chopped tomato, cook until soft then blitz. Then add a tea spoon of sugar (just to take the edge off the tomato I think), haricot beans, chopped sage, and cook again but this time don’t blitz. The first blitzing gives you thickness, the second lot of beans gives you texture. Not seen this before. 

I also made an error … But learned something from it. The recipe works in dried beans weights but because I didn’t read it before going to the health shops yesterday I had to use tinned precooked and massively underestimated how much ‘wet weight’ of cooked beans I’d need. (I’m an eejet … 🙄😉)  Apparently it’s typically 3 x dry weight. I didn’t have enough butter beans to use for the recipe due to my error, so grabbed a random tin of cooked borlotti and blitzed those in instead. I’m not mad keen on the taste of borlotti but I’m hoping that blitzed and with the sage and tomato, the borlotti flavour will be offset somewhat. 

KK

beanielou

KajiKita said:

Realised that I hadn’t checked the mortgage balance yesterday (after usual monthly payment has gone out as well as Mr KK’s OP). Down to £222K. Being below £200K this year seems possible, maybe …?? 😊

KK

Absolutely it does. 

Greying_Pilgrim

KajiKita - kudos for trying out new recipes and recipe techniques 👍 How many was the soup to serve?  As it happens, I would have done exactly the same as you, and used a 'lesser' bean for the base, and kept my 'as per recipe' beans whole for the finished soup.  Some potato would have done the same job for you - and if it felt like you'd left it too late to cook 'chunks' of potato, grating raw potato would significantly reduce the cooking time, and when blitzed, no-one would be any the wiser you'd used it.  I tend to pop a spoonful of sugar in when making tommie sauce.  I tend to put it in at the start of cooking, and it rounds out the tomato acidity - you can usually tell when I've forgotten to add it in - unless I've benefitted from some really sweet carrots, or perhaps lobbed a parsnip in or something.  Blitzed down you can't tell - and for us, it gets extra veg into LG 😁

Greying X