A Norman’s eye view (belated black cat appreciation and photography homework)

Posted on November 2, 2017 by thepogblog

I forgot it was black cat appreciation day last week.  Again. Sorry Norman.  I have tried to make it up to him though.

Homework given at week 4 of my photography class was to do ‘a day in the life’ using entirely manual settings. That’s THREE numbers (shutter speed, aperture and ISO) I had to juggle and a light balance thingy that had to be right in the middle and, and, and…. well, I put it off because I couldn’t get my head around it. But it’s class tonight and I can’t really claim Norman ate my camera so I had a go.  And in his honour, I did a day in the life of him, from his perspective.

This is the view through the gate where he checks out what’s happening on the road into Beachville:

And from the shed roof (just to be sure Himself isn’t coming home early. In the summer he sits up here 15 minutes before Himself gets home to provide a meet and greet service):

A short break under the lavender bushes for a different perspective and to ensure a lovely smelling coat:

Followed by a proper lie down:

I caught him here:

But he was feeling a bit camera shy:

And after a long day, time to settle on the sofa for a while:

(Obviously I didn’t get the light balance quite right there)

Before a bit of night time exploration:

Ok, they are not terribly exciting photos, but I has some that ere complete white outs and some that were just blackness, so at least I got some actual detail in these!  I did have to refer to all my notes though:

But at least I don’t have to claim the cat ate my homework tonight :o)

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Cooking wth Mummy W part 1

Posted on October 29, 2017 by thepogblog

When I was between having sold Pog Towers, trying to buy Pog Towers 2, failing and moving to Beachville, Norman and I stayed with Mum and Dad for a few months. Mummy W and I took the opportunity to teach me a few things about cooking but she wouldn’t let me post anything about it on here because she isn’t a ‘proper’ cook. However, having used her casserole instructions today, I think I really have to share them as ‘proper’ or not, it’s delicious autumn food that even I didn’t manage to screw up. I wrote the instructions exactly as she said them while she cooked (being inexperienced, I was only allowed to chop some of the vegetables). So I give you:

Mummy W’s delicious casserole:

Casserole and dumplings

Oven on at 180 (160 ish for fan)

400g diced braising steak
1 carrot
1 parsnip
1/2 small swede
2 celery sticks
If using mushrooms (6ish) leave whole, stir casserole and add 5 mins before the dumplings go in.

3/4 pint beef stock
1/4 pint red wine/ can of beer (optional)
Tablespoon tomato purée (desert spoon if having dumplings)
Herbs (oregano, mixed herbs, thyme, bay leaf)
Dash of worstershire sauce
Salt and pepper

Dumplings:
50g Vegetable suet
100g selfraising flour
Approx 5 table spoons cold water

Cook meat on hob til there are no red bits left
Throw in veggies
Stir a bit
Throw in stock, wine and seasoning and bring to the boil
Simmer for a bit if you forget to turn on the oven
Pop in the oven for about two hours then add dumplings and cook for another 20mins / if no dumplings cook for 2.5 hours. After 1 3/4 hours have a look to make sure its not drying out. If it is, add some water

Make the dumplings:
Mix the flour, suet and water until the stuff is a bit like wet pastry and sticks to everything
Cut in half, then each half into thirds
Make sort of ball shapes
Plop in the casserole. Spoon saucy stuff over the top of each
Cook for 20 mins

Ta da!

(I added grated cheese to the dumplings, just because I could)

Somehow despite following instructions, I ended up with seven dumplings. Numbers are not my strong point.

And because I was on a bit of a cooking roll, I made this from other leftovers for pudding:

It’s filo pastry with some almost dead apples mixed with mincemeat. We’re going to have that with David Attenborough in a minute.

I’ve come a long way from toast :o)

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More ouch than anticipated

Posted on October 26, 2017 by thepogblog

I admit it: I kind of thought that a day or two after having my old lady leg all fixed up, I’d be pretty much back to normal and making the most of some time off work. This level of ouch is not what I signed up for:

But it’s not all bad. Norman has offered his full support:

Yesterday I had the best visitors:

(Best comment of the day came from Little Pea in relation to the spiceiness of his hot dog: ‘The sausage is spicing me!’)

And today I’ve had my first ‘helping with homework’experience in years with one of Himself’s little people:

And when you get to have those sorts of smile, things somehow don’t feel quite so ouchy :o)

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Magic sponge, a giant sandwich bag and hungry-ness

Posted on October 18, 2017 by thepogblog

I have a magic sponge:

I have to wash with it later this morning in preparation for an operation on my old lady leg (varicose vein).  Apparently it makes you really, really clean – so clean, you actually sparkle.  (It doesn’t.  It just means that they know all patients have washed with soap and something hygienic rather than a bit of water and a germ infested flannel).

Anyway, as well as the fact that magic sponges exist, I have learned a few more things in the run up to today’s excitement:

I’m not supposed to shower or have a bath for a week.  Clearly, that is not going to happen, so I have done investigations and invested in a Limbo:

It’s essentially the worlds biggest sandwich bag.  I’ve been warned that you can get trapped in them if you try to use them alone.  Himself leaves for work at 5.30am and I will not be showering at that silly o’clock when I also don’t have to work, so you can probably expect a post on that topic shortly…

I’ve discovered that I am 1.75 inches shorter than I used to be (when they measured me in my pre-op assessment).  I think this loss may have happened when I moved from Bumpkinsville to Beachville as in Bumpkinsville I used two pillows at night.  Here, two is too many.  Himself suggested the loss could therefore be in my neck and that I have moved from ‘swan like’ to ‘budgie like’.  Yup, thanks for that.

And finally, I have discovered this morning that my tummy is evil.  I very rarely eat before 9am and sometimes not until lunchtime.  This is mostly because once I start eating I don’t really stop, so the later I leave it the better (yes, I know it’n not actually healthy, but it’s a lot better than eating two packets of biscuits between breakfast and lunch.  And yes, that is possible).  Today I was only allowed to eat until 6.30am and can now only have water until 10.30am.  I chose not to eat anything as I thought it would make me hungry but now – at a time when I would never usually be thinking about food – now I am STARVING.  And my tummy is rumbling like it’s not seen food in a week.  And I can’t even have a mint :o(

Oh well, only a few more hours then my ouchy old lady leg will be fixed.  Hooray! :o)

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Popping my football cherry

Posted on October 15, 2017 by thepogblog

What’s a really good way to spend a Sunday afternoon when your girlfriend is not terribly keen on crowds and doesn’t do football?  Go to a football match together, of course. The sort with a record number of well over 30, 000 people…

But actually, although it was a teeny bit scary, armed with a cup of tea and a Twix (I admit I didn’t manage to quite get into the spirit of thing so to start with) it was a brilliant people watching opportunity, and was mostly just like being in part of an enormous pantomime. There was lots of booing, singing along, cheering and clapping. And when Beachville scored a goal (which I managed to completely miss, probably as a result of pondering something critical like who chooses what number a player is), I got carried away and did much jumping up and down and cheering myself.  It surprised us both. The most exciting part though, was going to the toilet.  The men’s queues were so enormous it took them all half time to get to the front.  The women’s? Empty. There’s something about equality there :o)

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My daftness match

Posted on October 13, 2017 by thepogblog

Between me and Himself I reckon most people think he is the sensible one and I’m the daft one.  I thought it to start with too.  Not so much these days though.  First this week we had the incident with the cordial:  we suspected that as there were bits of mould in it it might have somehow gone off.  Did he pop it in the bin?  No, he shook it then opened it.  And the kitchen looked like it had been the scene of a violent, sticky crime….

And last night I came out of the toilet and commented that Mrs Ghost must have started taking down the wall as there was a small pile of rubble under the radiator.

Him: ‘Oh no, that was when I took the radiator off the wall on Tuesday morning.’

Me: ‘Because…?’

Him: ‘I dropped my phone behind it and couldn’t get my hand far enough down to reach it, so I took it off the wall.  And a bit of the pipe.  But it’s ok, it still works.  It’s just some of the brickwork fell out and I didn’t have time to clean it up and then forgot about it’.

What makes this even more bonkers (to me at least) is that he did this at 5am,  before leaving for work and still managed to get to the station,  catch his train and fit in a 17km run before work.

I think I have met my match in daftness :o)

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Lights, camera, action

Posted on October 9, 2017 by thepogblog

I had two dawning realisations last week.  Remember that film I told you I took part in at work?  Well, I saw a rough cut of it. And it turns out that I don’t actually look how I thought I looked.  It’s most discombobulating.  Nobody sounds like how they think they do….I was ready for that.  But, well, I just don’t look like me.

The other thing was also related to cameras, but I was the other side this time, which is always a better thing.  At class last week we learned about depth of field and were sent out in the big wide world to manually set our ‘f numbers’ to achieve a few photos with a narrow depth of field and a few with a long depth of field.  If this is as new to you as it is to me, ‘long’ means everything is in focus, narrow means part of it is.  Kind of.  I think.  Our theme was ‘urban’.

So Himself and I set out like the good students that we are and I had a paddy in a coffee shop because I couldn’t blur the right bits and he could.  But I got there in the end, sort of:

I don’t really like the long depth ones.  They didn’t seem very exciting (and I don’t think I got them quite right anyway):

Until this next one, where I got a little more excitement than I bargained for and came to that second realisation:

And that is:  Don’t get so involved in taking photographs that you don’t notice the car driving towards you while you lie on a car park floor.  Ooops.

Next week we have to do an additional manual setting.  Hopefully the theme will be a little less likely to get me squashed in the name of photography.  But at least I’ll be my preferred side of the camera :o)

 

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Lots of rhubarb and a naughty ghost

Posted on October 2, 2017 by thepogblog

Remember, that ghost I mentioned before?  She’s back.  And I don’t think she is keen on my cooking.

She’s only done a couple of things recently: She turned on the TV while we were in the kitchen and the remote controls were all in positions that had a Norman stepped on them (even though he wasn’t in the room), they couldn’t have turned it on.  And she turned on the hob for no good reason.  (And according to himself, she has to be a she because he’s never met a man eat quite the amount of chocolate that she seems to be helping herself to.  Ahem).

Back to this story.  I cooked yesterday.  Actually, I more than cooked.  I channeled my inner 1950’s housewife and spent the entire day in the kitchen and loved it.  Until Mrs Ghost tried to kill me.

It turns out that I didn’t need quite the quantity of rhubarb I had bought to make a crumble for pudding, so after making fresh pesto sauce (get me!) for lunch sandwiches this week and cooking up some chicken to go with it, I made rhubarb crumble:

Rhubarb spice cake:

And a very small quantity of rhubarb and ginger cordial:

Then I cleaned up and started cooking dinner.  Dinner was in the oven, everything was put away and I sat down to check facebook or something equally mind numbing.  I could smell burning, but I assumed it was probably dinner and decided it could wait a while.  Then I could smell big burning and looked up to lots of thick smoke.  The hob – which I KNOW I had turned off – was busy cooking the oven gloves:

I flung open doors and stood outside til the smoke cleared and eventually went back inside to move clothes from the washing machine beeped and into the tumble drier.  And Mrs Ghost tried it again!  I put the clothes in, shut the door, pulled the thingy out the bottom to make sure it was empty of water, stood up to drain it in the sink and…well, somehow I’d trapped both ends of the cord from the hoody I was wearing in the door and was trapped in a stooping stance with a very full thingy of water.  It took a while to get myself out of that one, but I made it.  Phew.  (It must have been Mrs Ghost as only a complete idiot would be able to trap themselves in such a way…)

I told himself all of this when he came home.  Did he offer sympathy?  An exorcism?  Nope, he just laughed and told me to be careful…third time lucky and all that!  It’s ok though, today the only evidence I’ve seen of her is  a number of biscuits disappearing and a fair bit of cake.  Hmmm, maybe she does like my cooking after all :o)

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People, pictures and…a lack of spice

Posted on October 1, 2017 by thepogblog

I’ve always loved a course. Not the sort with pressure and exams; I love the sort where you learn and you chat and you hopefully have a bit of fun.  And I like the opportunity to meet new people.

It was a combination of those things that resulted in signing up myself and Himself to a photography course at the adult education centre up the road. It wasn’t terribly well though through…I can only use my camera on its auto setting, He has been teaching himself from books and experience for years. It’s also going to make for a very frantic Thursday nights as His train gets in 10 minutes before the class starts and we’ve not worked out how we fit in eating, but details schmetails.  We started this week :o)

With adult education classes I find the mix of people deposited together in a room based on just one identical thread of interest really fascinating.  This class was no exception. I thought it might not be quite what I was looking for when we walked into a room of seven silent, retired men, all earnestly staring at nothing, but eventually more people joined and a bit of chatting started.  Mostly mine.

We were asked to go out in groups, take some portrait photos and find some spicy facts about each other. I thought I would be ok; my group included a James Bond look alike and I was sure he was a spy. Sadly not; he was a journalist. But that’s really cool! Was he freelance or did he write for a publication?  The latter? Oooh, which publication? Right. Farming Today. Yes, that’s, um, diverse. Where had he written before that? Ah. Poultry Weekly. We might struggle a little with the ‘spicy’ side of this assignment then… (Although not as much as I struggled with taking portrait photos of what I can only assume is the shyest man living in Beachville who wasn’t keen on looking at the camera, however much I chatted and got him talking about his spicy fact – an interest in archaeology? Lovely).  Himself  had an interesting group though, a gorgeous girl who was in training for a bikini competition…and Mr B who got terribly confused when he had to load the photographs to the shared drive and managed to share with us his collection of previously taken table legs, a number of photos of his car and a one of his nephews passport photo, because he thought he looked just like a serial killer…

It was great. We got homework.  We had to use some of the teachers top tips to take some photos of autumn to review this week.  Unfortunately one of the tips was using natural light and it has been grey and soggy all weekend. But I got a few. Still using auto, but we start with the numbers on the manual settings this week :o)

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Not taking the biscuit. Or the cupcake. (Surprisingly)

Posted on September 27, 2017 by thepogblog

A few weeks ago I met Maureen and Margaret over the garden fence.  They invited me to the Macmillan coffee morning they were planning at the supported living residence up the road.  That day was today.

Not being one to turn down the offer of cake, I wandered up there this morning in the hope that I might meet some of the neighbours.

It was a little….odd.  One cookie, a couple of cupcakes and a table of jumble that I imagine some of the residents had previously owned for around half a century.  Nevertheless, I paid for a coffee and sipped it while desperately looking around wondering what to do with myself. There were two elderly residents deep in conversation and one earnestly folding raffle tickets with pursed lips.

I busied myself with buying and helping with raffle tickets and slowly people came in from the neighbouring houses.  I heard all about how Ann Marie from the next road down had a look around the house I live in when her daughter’s friend lived here 25 years ago.  I heard a lot from Geoff about his role in the rambling club, his reports on the coastal path and his lapsed involvement with the RSPB.  I met Mary from the house next door who, despite looking about 158, was as bright as a button and the only one who asked what my job was and seemed to understand my answer (which I’ve now broken down to ‘I write stuff’, but still seems to baffle people).  I also answered many, many questions about Norman from the residents…

Despite the initial panic, it was actually an enjoyable 20 minutes and at least now I have a few more faces to nod at which is the way you start fitting in, isn’t it?

And then, about an hour later there was a knock on the door and a lady proudly held this bottle out to me:

I had a winning raffle ticket!

I’ve never heard of ‘perry’ before, but the interweb informs me it is an ‘alcoholic beverage made from fermented pears’.  The fact that they needed to shout about the sugar and sweetener suggests one way or another it’s quite potent:

But I’m not going to complain.  And now I’m off to pop my perry cherry :o)

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