who drank all the milk?

Woke up early this morning and realised I was short of milk again and needed to get out and get some before Mark left the house. It was like Groundhog Day. Pulled on some skanky old exercise kit lying around the bedroom and hauled my sorry carcass out for a puff round the block (again). Have to say it was easier than last week, but I was slightly pre-occupied with the fact that when I got to the top of the road I realised I'd put my bottoms on inside out and there was a big flappy white label no doubt reading 'size fat arse' in big bold writing. Therefore my focus for the entire experience was ensuring that this label did not make it past the bottom of my horrible dog-walking fleece jacket for all to see.

Finished this weeks SLYMI - 'scrap your independence'. I have chosen to scrap my loss of independence - my current financial state. I am pleased with the end result. Although this morning when I went to photograph it I realised I had forgotten to add a photo. What a div. A swift attack of the scalpel sorted it and here it is:

Better get on - got the dentist this morning and I am seriously kacking my pants at the thought. Trips to the dentist always have me sweating and clenching my buttocks for several hours. (no bad thing there I suppose ha ha).

Celeb Chefs

What is it with Celeb recipes? I flick through their books (yeah, you know who you are, Tana Ramsay, Nigella Lawson et al) and then, bouyed up with confidence head off to the supermarket to buy copious quantities of eggs, flour and 3 different types of sugar in order to create such lovlies as ginger cake and shortbread only to find that once ready for the oven, the meagre quantities look as if they will not rise (pardon the pun) to the occasion at all. Tana Ramsay's ginger cake recipe led me to believe that the mixture would make two cakes, so I lovingly prepared two tins. Once half the mixture was in one tin it became quite clear that I would end up with nothing thicker than a biscuit in depth, so I threw all caution to the wind and poured it all into one tin. Sure enough, one reasonable cake was the end result. I have checked back again, and whilst her recipe does state 'makes 10 slices', step 7 implores you to 'divide the mixture between two non-stick 2lb bread tins'! Bitch. No wonder people get pissed off with baking. And another thing - I made her shortbread last night, and she says to use a 20cm tin. Well, I measured my tin, as past mistakes are ever in my mind, and it was about a cm short. Now, I struggled to spread the dough out thin enough to cover the base of my too-small tin, and the resultant shortbread was like this:

Thin enough, I am sure you will agree. A 20cm tin would have resulted in even thinner shortbread! I am definitely going to take her recipes with a pinch of salt from now on lol. And I will never forget this cake...

Now, for more civilised activities: The Exeter Crop was a welcome break in the old routine - I love spending the day with like-minded individuals, shoving bits of paper around and snipping and sticking. Oh joy. I did this layout for the weekly UKS challenge:

The challenge was to scrap 1. Something you love, 2. Use something recycled and 3. Use 'pearls'. I have scrapped one of my favourite Disney photos - a lovely wintry, atmospheric morning in Paris which I recall with such pleasure, and I made a be-ribboned tag from an old clothes label and stitched on some pearly buttons. I am pleased with the end result. I finished this one before lunch and then spent the next 3-hours cutting out bits of paper.... no change there then.

seemed like a good idea at the time

I got up early yesterday morning and we were out of milk. It was pouring with rain, and in my brilliance of early morning thoughts, decided I would run (yes - that's run) around the block, collecting milk along the way.

So off I chugged down the road, full of enthusiasm and enjoying the unusual feeling of hard exercise. I used to be (in my late teens) a county runner & exercised hard all my life with league netball and badminton until a knee injury about 5 years ago which put paid to all road running. Now I have lost a stone, I thought I would 'treat' myself with a little run-ette. By the time I reached the bottom of the first street I remembered what it is I always hated about running. It hurts. Since I had reached the main road at rush hour, the traffic was queued up and motorists were peering through their misted-up windscreens to see what lardy lump had turned out of bed to jog laboriously through the rain, so I couldn't stop and give in to the sudden feeling I might vomit onto the paving slabs. You see, in my mind I was all confident strides and bouncy hair.....

Anyway, I made it to the shop without stopping and walked back from there lol. When Mark got up I was wheezing around the kitchen as if I'd had 20 Woodbines for breakfast. He took one look at my dishevelled state and asked if I had had a shower with my clothes on. How perfectly fatuous.

I am going to the Exeter Scrapaholix crop on Saturday and very much looking forward to it. Should be able to catch up on a couple of layouts then. Here is this week's SLYMI:

Scrap with 3. I have picked 3 photos from the pointless annual egg hunt. This year we went to Killerton and joined in with the world and his wife who all seemed to be at Killerton that day. I am starting to despise these 'occasions' since they have to be shared with so many other undesirables... We had told Oliver he could go into the kids craft centre at the end to make some Easter bollocks or other but it closed just after we got his egg and the end photo was him with a face that could curdle milk at 20 paces. Honestly, there is just no pleasing some people.

a bit in love with scallops...

My latest SLYMI effort: scrap with a needle & thread:

The photo is of Oliver with cousin Vanessa, and although both normally display beautiful smiles, this occasion clearly demanded a couple of hideous gurns instead.

Got a few layouts ahead - want to have a go at the Kaboodle challenge, as previously mentioned, this weeks SLYMI is up today, I have our UKS team challenge to do a layout for and next Monday Jill & Linda's UKS team challenge goes live and I said I would have a go at that one. I don't normally partake of those since they invariably demand that you add something to a perfectly good layout which is usually totally superfluous, in order to meet the challenge requirements and it just annoys me too much.

Check out this piece of altered art over on Scrapcat's blog - just saw it & think it's fab - I would so love to churn out pieces of art like this...

I'm considering doing a layout soon which doesn't involve scallops, what d'ya reckon tee hee...

money, money, money. or - no.

Well, just a quick update on a rollercoaster week: having 'fessed up to my gargantuan debt, Mark was understandably shocked and upset. His upset was far worse for me to take than his anger and disbelief that I did not pipe up sooner. Let me just make it quite clear that this debt has amounted due to 'simple' overspending on a week in week out basis for several years. I do not have a designer wardrobe or a collection of priceless artefacts to point at as a culprit for my current poverty - I have merely proved myself incapable of making a choice between having 'A' or 'B' and have always said sod it I'll take both, thanks. And boy, it is costing me dear. I have had to reliquish all financial control of my accounts to Mark and am existing on a meagre allowance. Entirely my own fault and I am looking to take on alot of extra shifts in order to make a massive inroad into it to clear within the year. Take heed, readers: If you have a fiver - don't spend a tenner. And then don't keep doing it for over 5 years.

Creatively..... am working on a couple of layouts, one for the weekly SLYMI, and one for the Kaboodle challenge #9, a new one for me but like these sorts of 'open challenges'. Watch this space.

And I leave you with a couple of birthday cards I received this year - from Oliver:

You have to know a bit about Pokemon here for this card to make any sense, but it is Turtwig, Grotle and Torterra and their attacks. (obviously). I particularly like the way that where he has run out of room at the edge of the page, he has simply carried on below as if perfectly acceptable....

and this from Daisy:

I imagine her sat there, unsure of how to spell my name, finding herself bored and buggering off halfway through. Nice effort, I thought.

eye eye

Sunday was a lovely day this week - compared to last Sunday which was vile, (where we managed a row before 10.30am thereby spoiling the whole day for ourselves.)

We went to Beer for brekkie, which we do alot throughout the summer, and there I found, very weirdly, my old school mate Vanessa lounging by a beach hut on a deckchair. This is made weird by the fact that I have seen her only a handful of times in the last 20 years, and then twice in the last couple of months. I don't think I could have been more surprised if the Queen had strolled by.... anyhoo, after a lovely veggie brek (including tea and toast with marmalade) Mark and Oliver bimbled off for some (much loathed by me) rock pooling and I bullied Vanessa into walking the cliff path with me. It was very pleasant and convivial to walk along putting the world to rights. After that we returned home, I had a burst on the old cross trainer (yes, I still do use it!!) and then did THIS:

Ta DAH! I feel a real sense of achievement having done this, not so much because it looks better and we now have a system (?!) for sorting 'stuff', but because I actually said I would do something - and did it. I am a bit crap for spouting off about doing things and then not.... That grouting looks very noticeable now though.....

Had a sore eye yesterday - for those who don't know, I suffer a bit of dry-eye syndrome which sometimes can lead to corneal abrasion - very, very painful although a thankfully very, very short-lived spell. Nevertheless, when there is soreness, or abrasion - the whole day is pretty much a total waste of time, since blinking causes massive discomfort and/or pain and in truth, although it goes against the grain, you literally just wish you could sleep until the next day when you know the pain will be gone. The eye is very fast healing which is a constant source of amazement to me. Want to give Oliver a better day today - he was very sweet to me yesterday and sat with me to watch a film (with one eye for me) and then later he read me a story. So sweet because he would never normally voluntarily read anything.... That's a real downside to home-teaching - if I'm off-par, it so impacts on him.

To add to my discomfort yesterday, I had notification of my final children's tax credit award. Now, I use the term 'award' loosely here, since it appears that I will be getting sweet F A for the rest of this tax year, the next one and possibly half of the one after that. Since they were giving me around £200 per month, you can understand that I stopped breathing momentarily. I even telephoned to check this horrific fact, and was informed that this was, indeed the case. This information, delivered cheerfully in a lilting welsh accent did not seem as terrifying as when I had to repeat it to Mark later on. I am going to have to write down all my outgoings including my sodding debt which I have carelessly dropped myself into, and go through it with him. This is not a prospect I am relishing, but I think it will be good for me in a not nice way to start with....

And finally, think I will re-participate in the Art Raffle, which I have not done for months, but feel it would be good for me in order to be more creatively productive.

a slice of the good life

Have at last managed to do something creative:


This layout is for week 27 of SLYMI - scrap a happy story. My happy story is our decision to home-teach Oliver, and my pride at how he is developing so well away from the confines of school. I really enjoyed doing this layout, and I am pleased with the final look. Also I got to use my new curved & scalloped templates, just like the ones Jill and Linda were flashing around at the crop last week! Gotta copy.....

I have been very productive in my little kitchen over the last week - I have cooked up:

- a ginger cake (a la Tana Ramsay)
- 2 jars of strawberry jam (our own strawberries)
- 2 jars of pickled beetroot (our own)
- a batch of lentil & carrot soup
- a rhubarb crumble (our own rhubarb)
- chard and mushroom pasties (our chard)
- chard and mushroom quiche
- jam tarts (using my strawberry jam!)
- plus other family nosh of varying culinary standards lol

Although I feel very pleased with myself when I make/freeze something using our own produce, a little part of me can't help but wonder at how much more actual time I would have to spend elsewhere if I just bought already made food......

Talking of my little kitchen, had a bit of a freak out a few days ago when trying to dish up tea for the 3 of us and found I had no room to put out three plates. Now, you must agree, that's a bit rubbish. Even by balancing plates on top of the washing up and the cooker, I was still struggling. Soooo, today I intend to clear up this space:

And here is the rest of the non-space I have:

Ig


Inore the lack of grouting in my tiles - it was one of those jobs which didn't get done when we moved in as it was unecessary, and now I don't even notice it. Well, I didn't until I posted these pictures.