Christmas and coldness and frost bites

Posted on December 4, 2017 by thepogblog

I have snow (on the blog.  Not in Beachville.  And actually, the snow is only on some formats – possibly just desktops, but you know.  Snow is snow, and I kind of have some, somewhere).  And that must mean it’s winter and therefore people can’t get too shouty when you mention the c word.

So he are a couple of Christmassy photos for you:

It turns out in Beachville, Santa has impressive transportation:

(And it was actually magically too, because the Small Boy I was with and I only looked away for a short while and the bus has disappeared and been replaced with the more usual 5A.  The Small Boy was suitably impressed).

And I was incredibly impressed by this gentleman’s seasonal efforts.  The photo does not to it justice as, as well as baubles, his beard had lights.  That flashed.  Frankly, this is the only way to dress up a beard to make it acceptable :o)

And not even slightly festive, other than the fact I got really cold, I went to my second ever football match:

I have informed Himself that I think I will opt out until warmer weather happens, although this Small Boy / seagull did make me laugh quite a lot:

It wasn’t just the very serious football information he provided me with (‘We’re pretty much guaranteed to score at least one goal because their defense is just terrible’ and ‘Oh. Well.  This referee doesn’t know what a foul is’), but the other random information and questions too, such as showing me a little lump on his hand and asking ‘Is that lump frostbite?  Because frost bites look a bit like mosquito bites don’t they?’

Happily I could confirm that it wasn’t frostbite.  And I discovered that when you’re kept smiling, you might get cold, but you don’t get frostbite.  Or frost bites :o)

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From wtf to wow

Posted on November 29, 2017 by thepogblog

I have a ‘wtf’ folder in my work email filing system.  It’s to put those things that just have no relevance or connection to anything, yet someone somewhere thought I was the right person to email.  The folder achieves nothing, other than literally (virtually?) filing away my wtf-ness on the topic.

Sometimes I think there should be a way to file life experiences that cause the same reaction.  Today for example, I was told that someone would be coming to look around the house at 11am.  I tidied and made things a bit more presentable (the house and myself) and at 11.15am called to find out where the individual was.  ‘Oh, she cancelled’ said the person on the end of the phone. ‘We did call to tell you’.  I informed her that as I was sitting next to my mobile and had been all morning, I could be pretty sure nobody had called.  ‘Could you hold?’ she asked before coming back laughing to explain that ‘there was a lot of confusion.  You and the person coming to your house have the same name, so when she called to cancel, we thought we had called you.’  Not only did she make no sense but I had tidied and presented for no reason.  Grrr.  I mentally filed it in that wtf place and got on with work.

And my day promptly got better.  I saw the postman walk towards the house, holding a small parcel and laughing.  Because, as it turns out, the parcel was addressed to me using Sister 2’s preferred naming convention:

And in the parcel?  These amazing penguins:

And because I got all jealous over Little Wisps PJs the other day:

(Well, who wouldn’t?)

Sister 2 had sent me the closest she could find:

Oh. Wow. I love them.  They are never coming off.  :o)

(I think the moral of this story is that you should throw things in the wtf folder so you can get on with the fun, smiley stuff.  And having a Little Wisp and a Sister 2 also helps a lot too.)  :o)

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ooh la la-ness in ooh la la land

Posted on November 28, 2017 by thepogblog

When you go to Paris for a long weekend to meet the family of Himself (all there for a birthday) and take a walk down the Seine, just the two of you, it’s best not to meet the family for lunch afterwards and start the conversation with ‘a funny thing just happened with this ring’.  Because all sort of the wrong conclusions will be jumped to, never mind the fact that it’s clearly a man’s wedding ring sitting in your palm.

So this isn’t that sort of story but it is a story about that ring…

Because there we were, wandering down the side of the River Seine towards the Eiffel Tower (I know:  Romantic.  We did kind of spoil that by alternating between hopscotch and running races, but fun is far more…well, fun.) Anyway, I saw a lady pick something up from the leaves on the pavement and glanced over.  It was that ring.  She looked at me, and I said something about how she should take it to the police station in case someone was looking for it.  She put it into my hand saying that she couldn’t as she had no papers and started to walk off.  Then she came back and asked for some money for a coffee for good luck.  Himself gave her 5 euros.  She asked for more.  I said she could have the ring back instead, thinking it was a scam.  She said no and just walked away.  We spent a while looking for anyone watching us, assuming that it was a scam to find out where our cash was and we were about to be mugged, but nothing.  We kept our eyes open for pickpockets, but still nothing.  In fact, we just seemed to have acquired a very small man’s gold ring, complete with hallmark.

So should you know anyone who lost their wedding ring by the side of the Seine in the last week or so, tell them to give me a shout.  There is something a little different about the ring, that the owner will know about.  We found it right by this bridge:

Which, when you go up here:

Can be found about here (only the other side of the bridge.  That did almost work though!):

And just to balance the slightly touristy pictures, here is a lady dressed head to toe in green:

And here is some cow wallpaper:

I rather liked ooh la la land :o)

 

 

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Accidental exhibitionism

Posted on November 22, 2017 by thepogblog

You know when you decide to go for a run first thing to deliver an important letter by hand because it will get there faster, only it’s dark so you borrow a fluorescent running top from Himself’s drawer?

And you know how you get a few funny looks but assume it’s because even though you’ve been running for over a year now you still seem to channel a cross between a three legged donkey and Pheobe from friends?

And how when you finally reach the office you’re aiming for, someone is just opening up, so you hand them the (slightly sweaty) envelope and realise they are smirking at you, even though you stopped running?

And when they have gone inside you look in the direction of their smirking and realise you are moedlling the top inside out with big, oversized flappy labels flapping in a very obvious, funny look inducing way?

But you decide that it’s still quite dark and the road isn’t too busy so you whip off the top to turn it the right way round so that the flappy labels don’t flap as you run back along the side of a busy road as it gets light?

And at the exact moment you are standing at the side of the road, with only a sports bra,  leggings and clear evidence of your love of cake on show, the lady with your envelope turns all the office lights on, lighting you up like some demented mannequin left on the pavement, just as a double decker bus full of people drives past?

Yes?

That.

(I didn’t :o), but I bet some people laughed… :o)  )

I thought this was quite pretty. Unlike the scene at the side of the road in Beachville this morning :o/

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Advent calendar makingness

Posted on November 20, 2017 by thepogblog

I have been sadly lacking on the makingness front recently.  There doesn’t seem to be as much time for it these days, but a rather fantabulous opportunity came up recently.

I can just about handle myself around small people, but the teeny amount I know is mostly Little Pea sized and very limited around Little Wisp sizing.  Any small person over four and I don’t really know what’s cool, what’s not, or, well, anything.  Which makes things a bit tricky as Himself has two boys who are both quite a bit older than my four year old nephew.  And they are lovely but I don’t really have a clue.  I heard a while back that you could get a ‘Match Attax’ advent calendar.  I know both the boys love these football cards so I thought they would be appreciated.  Then I discovered that they were £22 each (!) and not all the reviews were good.  But surely I could make something along the same lines?

So on Saturday, as it was soggy and cold outside, Himself and I poured ourselves a glass of wine and made a rather unique, large calendar for the boys:

We popped googly eyes onto small bags (because as Sister 1 will tell you, Googly eyes can make anything look better), numbered them and in all odd numbers we put some sweets, all even numbers we put a pack of Match Attax.

We pegged the pairs of bags together (one boy will have spots, one stripes.  Each day they’ll both get a bag), and we’ll peg them all to a long piece of string that will be tied up in their house.

Hopefully I’ve come up with a makingness that will make these bigger boys smile :o)

(If you want to do something similar, the bags and eyes are from Amazon – you can get the tiny pegs there too – then you just need some string and your choice of fillers.  There are cheaper options for Advent calendars, but this worked out significantly less than two Match Attax calendars – which apparently don’t contain proper packs of cards if the reviews are correct.  And it’s ALOT less than the whisky advent calendar I saw advertised at…£145!)

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No trainers needed – part 2

Posted on November 17, 2017 by thepogblog

We’ve discussed before that a lot of the enjoyment I get from running is in the finishing.  Actually, most of it is.  Which means that I frequently have arguments with myself when I lie in bed – especially now it’s getting colder and darker which go something like this:

‘Get up and go for a run’

‘Or have an extra hour in this lovely cosy bed’

‘You’ll love it once you’re out’

‘You wont.  You’ll mostly daydream about getting home while you wheeze and sweat and people laugh at you’

‘You can have more cake…’

We’ve discussed the cake element before too, and yet again it was that which got me out of bed this morning.  And I’m glad it did.  My reward (and yours via photos, no trainers needed):

And from earlier in the week:

There’s lots of graffiti in Beachville – a lot of which I love and a lot of which I just look at thinking ‘but how?’  Like this one, which made me smile because of its cheekiness:

So, even when this is what greets me as I step outside the front door at the moment:

The finishing bit makes it all worth while.  Now I’m off to make some banana bread as a reward :o)

 

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Trying REALLY hard to relax. And failing.

Posted on November 16, 2017 by thepogblog

Before I moved to Beachville I’d been yoga-ing every week for a good few years.  I’m not sure if it was the actual yoga, my ridiculously patient teacher or some of the people in the class who became really good friends, but I’m convinced that one or a combination saved my sanity a number of times.

So when I moved, I was a little panicked about not having any of that,  but that lovely teacher knew some other teachers down here, so I started a drop in class the second week after moving.  It wasn’t the same.  I know things take some getting used to, but driving there was a nightmare (and there wasn’t an alternative), parking was worse (Beachville is permit happy and using a meter if you find a space takes time, patience and a phone connected to the interweb) and then the class was so crowded you could never stretch your arms out without getting overfriendly with the person next to you, and on two occasions there wasn’t room to lie down and extend legs.  It was not relaxing….

So I found another class.  It wasn’t quite as crowded, but I had the same issues getting there and in this one people breathed SO loudly (think When Harry met Sally) I had an unreasonable urge to bop them on the nose, and at least one person clearly didn’t believe in deodorant or washing their feet.  At one lesson I forgot I had my running watch on – which announces things to me when I’m running.  I knew that I wasn’t quite getting the relaxing experience I was aiming for when it informed the whole class that ‘heart rate is 85’.  I was lying down.

So I decided that it was daft to pay each week to go and lie in a crowded room and get stressed.  There had to be other options, right?  At the moment I don’t have room to do yoga inside the house, so I looked up mindfulness apps.  I found ‘Headspace’ which has ten free sessions.  I decided that Himself might also benefit from a bit of relaxation too, so last week we tried out the sessions as we went to bed.  Three minutes of meditation; what could go wrong?

The first night Himself fell asleep within two minutes of the session finishing.  I got a bit grumpy as we were part way through a conversation.  The second time, he was asleep in half the time.  I tried hard to be pleased for him as he reported the next morning that he’d ‘not slept so well in ages’ (while I’d lay listening to evidence of this for what felt like hours).  The next time he fell asleep 30 seconds into the meditation and I decided that this level of relaxation was not required by anyone every night and maybe once a week would be enough for him.

But it was ok, because this week he’s been away, so I’ve had the opportunity to do the sessions on my own without having to listen to his snores.  The first night I got SO cold part way through that I had to pause the meditation, go downstairs, reheat both hot water bottles and get back into bed.  It didn’t really work as I’d heated the hot water bottles so much I was pretty much cooking as I tried to get back into it.  The second night somehow my iPad fell on my head and my nose managed to hit the relatively small bit that allows you to fast forward.  Almost to the end.

I’ve given up.  I’ve decided I wasn’t designed to be relaxed anyway.  I’m going to try to find another yoga class without parking issues, space issues, breathing issues or stinky issues.  There has to be one closer than Bumpkinsville, doesn’t there?! :o)

 

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Cooking with Mummy W part 2

Posted on November 13, 2017 by thepogblog

My mum make the best lasagne.  I mean The. Best. Capital letters and everything.

So it was second on the list of things she taught me when I was living there.  It was second mostly because of the cheese sauce.  Unbelievably, I made a perfect cheese sauce, first time.  More believably, when I recreated this last week, I used a total of 1.5 pints of milk because it just wouldn’t sauce up.  In the end I had to use another method (and go to the shop for more milk as that’s practically a weeks supply).

It was worth it though.  This is how Mummy W makes The Best Lasagne (again, I made notes exactly as Mum explained it to me):

Oven at 180 (160 ish for fan)

For 4 normal people (or one normal, one Himself having a hungry Monday and one large leftover piece):

500g mince
1 pepper
1 onion
400g tin tomatoes
5 Mushrooms
2 tsp Herbs (mixed, oregano or thyme)
Worcester sauce (count to 5 while shaking)
Tomato purée
Salt and pepper (tsp salt, 20 grinds of pepper)
Lasagne sheets

White sauce
Tablespoon of cornflour
Pinch mustard powder
3oz cheese
1/2 pint Milk

Brown mince in pan (don’t need oil)
Dice up pepper, onion and mushroom to about 1cm or a bit smaller
Throw in pan and cook for a bit with the mince
Throw in tomatoes, rinse juice out with a bit of water
Add Worcester sauce, herbs, salt, pepper and turn down heat a bit
Add tomato purée depending on how much liquid there is. (Mum reckoned a desert spoon, but it was the most heaped desert spoon I’ve ever seen…)
Turn up totemperature and leave to do its thing for up to 45 minutes if you are following a proper book, 20 mins if you are MummyW.
Needs to have some juice (as lasagne will soak it up) but not too much

Sauce****:
Pop cornflower and mustard powder into measuring jug
Pour a bit of milk in and mix to a bit of a paste
Add milk to 1/2 pint
Pop in saucepan, heat and don’t forget to stir with a wooden spoon and scrape bottom of saucepan so you don’t get burnt bits
Bring to the boil for a few minutes to thicken
Take off the heat, and add cheese. Stir til melted (or put back on heat if it doesn’t)
Add pepper

***When it all went wrong the second time, I mixed the cornflour with some butter in the pan, then gradually added the milk and heated for a while til it thickened before adding the cheese and pepper.

Put thin layer of mince on the base so pasta doesn’t stick
Layer of pasta
Mince
Pasta
Bit of white sauce (plus mozzarella if you are feeling fancy)
Mince
Pasta
All the rest of the white sauce
Grated Parmesan on top (for unknown reasons, stops skin forming if not going straight in oven).

Pop in over for 45 minutes. Stand on a tray in case it all bubbles over….

Oh yum, this is good.  Now I want lasagne for tea…. :o)

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#this is me

Posted on November 9, 2017 by thepogblog

Back in August I told you about a film we created at work (#thisisme) where I talked about my hair pulling from a few years back.  Happily there wasn’t much of me in the final cut (I’m still weirded out that I look like that) and the other people who took part talked about things far braver than my story, but I did say I’d share it if I could, so here you go:

At work it’s been watched over 4500 times and many people have commented that it’s helped them in some way.  A few people have sent me messages about their mental health story and a couple have talked to me in person.  I really believe that the more people talk, the easier it is to handle the dark bits – whatever shape those dark bits might take.

All of us in the film gave permission for the content to be published externally so if you think it might be useful to people you know, feel free to share the You Tube link.  I don’t mind being weirded out so much by myself if it helps someone else.  :o)

And if you’ve missed the posts I wrote on this at the time this is what I talked about in the film:

hair 3

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Little Wisp smiles

Posted on November 8, 2017 by thepogblog

I’m one of those people who isn’t good with change.  So moving to Beachville was a big thing for me.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love the place, the fact that you don’t have to look too hard for something fun to do, that there is always somewhere new to explore and  (despite my concern that I was a pretty committed single cat lady not all that long ago), Norman and I love living with Himself.

But it has been tough too.  Sometimes it’s lonely and sometimes I get frustrated that I still don’t know how to get somewhere in the car through the blimin’ one way system.  I miss my friends and the classes I used to do.  I’ve had to remind myself it took quite a few years to build up that bank of lovely people, and it will take a while here too.  And that is ok.

I think the hardest part though is that having all lived so close for so many years, I’m no longer round the corner from my family and even though they are not far away at all (it’s only 50 miles), it’s not quite close enough to just pop in to say hi.  Between my brother in law and Little Wisp being poorly, I’ve felt guilty many times since I moved here that I’ve not been able to help out as much as if I were around the corner.  In fact, last time I saw Little Pea he greeted me with a big hug and an ‘Auntie Pog, I haven’t seen you for AGES!’

But that makes photos all the more lovely.  And this is one I was sent this morning that made me smile from ear to ear but made my arms ache to cuddle Little Wisp:

The message with the photo was ‘This morning mum found me playing with my lovely geeraffee that untie noodles made me 😃‘

(Because my family love a nickname – it’s just we don’t all use the same one.  So to Little Pea I am Auntie Pog.  For Little Wisp I am Untie Noodles.  Obviously.)

So, I wanted to show you all how very beautiful my amazing niece is.  Just because she doesn’t feature as much on here as Little Pea did as a baby doesn’t make her any less special.  And it wont be all that long before we get to do Little Wisp and Untie Noodles weekends – if I’m really brave, with Little Pea too – and by then I will know all the cool places to take them and might even be able to get round the blimin’ one way system!

:o)

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