Advanced composting

Posted on March 31, 2025 by thepogblog

I really enjoy having a nice garden.  I am, however, pretty terrible at actual gardening.  Both my parents and Mr Rs parents are amazing gardeners and I am often asking for hints, tips and help (and on Tuesdays I am occasionally accompanied to Mum and Dads by a plant in dire need of resuscitation, which they put in plant hospital and get looking better than it ever did at my house).

Mr R’s Mum and Dad have a compost heap and I became really interested in this last year as maybe that was the magic ingredient my plants were missing…decent compost.  Also, we throw out so many vegetable cuttings and peelings and surely composting would be more eco friendly?  And bless them, they bought us a compost thingamy for Christmas.  We just need to set it up. Only we don’t really know what we are doing.  But it’s ok!  The day has been saved!  As last week I saw the Village Repair Cafe cross post to the Village Gardening Network on facebook that the next guest at their monthly meeting was going to be a compost expert.

To my amazement, Mr R agreed to come with me.  Stepson 2 nearly fell off his barstool laughing.  Mr R told him there would be a rave afterwards and Stepson 2 commented that was clearly the only reason his Dad was going.  Being the older in mind than everyone else, I explained that even if the village garden network meetings were rounded off with a quick rave, we’d not stay that long as we’d have to get back with enough time for a nettle tea before bed.

We went.  Stepson 2 requested evidence if we weren’t actually the youngest people there.  Evidence was provided (I meant to write ‘youngest’. We weren’t the oldest either though).

And actually, of the 45 or so people there, at least five (In addition to the baby) were younger than us, and it was a really interesting evening.  I mean, we probably needed a basic level composting talk before going into that, but there was some amazing information about getting serotonin (the happy chemical) from the soil and the importance of the soil biome on the gut biome (I think that’s what he said).  And we know now that…well, we know it’s probably more complicated than we’d thought, but I have ordered a bokashi bin in addition to the big green thingamy so we can get started as soon as possible as one thing we did discover is that our soil is not great, shop bought compost is not great and…I’ve forgotten to plant the blimin’ tomato seeds again.  I’m hoping Beryl up the road has some sparsies again this year otherwise I’m going to have all the compost and nothing in it.

Still…one step at a time, eh? 🙂

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Training to be a strong Pog

Posted on March 27, 2025 by thepogblog

I have had quite a few clients over the years who hit their 50th birthday and decide it’s time to…:

  • Get fitter
  • Have a health check
  • Eat better
  • Do more stuff
  • Get things done

I think this is a great plan, but why wait?  I decided to get a head start and get myself as healthy as I can by the time I am 50.  Which gives me approximately 354 days.

I already run (plod…involving a fair bit of walking) four times, do a circuits class and a spot of yoga each week, but I am not very strong.  And if you listen to the experts (and even if you don’t and just engage common sense instead), being strong becomes increasingly important as you get older.

So to address this particular thing, I asked Mr R for a weighted vest for my birthday.  I know we talked about the actual weight and the plates and what it would look like, but I think I must have made it into one of those tangles of wool I mentioned in my last post and…well, there are a couple of issues.

10kg (just over 1.5 stone) didn’t sound that heavy.  And the fact that it was a 4kg (ish) plate on the front and one on the back seemed almost irrelevant.

Oh fuck a duck.  Let me tell you, it’s not heavy…for about two minutes.  And then it is like some evil giant is pushing you into the ground with his thumbs pressing on your shoulders as they start to sag, followed closely by your knees and you wonder if the short dog walk you planned on might be your very last.

I did it though. 2km (accompanied by Mr R just incase I fell over and got stranded like a beetle on my back). And boy did I feel it the next day.  And two days later I repeated it.  Because the only way hard things get easier is to keep doing them, right?

But now we have another small issue:  I did not consider what it would look like.  Or maybe I did, but it was cold and it would be covered by my coat.  But actually, I only have one coat big enough to cover its bulk and it’s getting warmer and…well, I think I might have to accept that I’m going to be mistaken for armed police.  Or just a bit of a weirdo.

But I’ll be a strong weirdo, right? 🙂

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Tuesday related wondering

Posted on March 26, 2025 by thepogblog

I wonder sometimes what happens in Mum’s head. I don’t mean in an exasperated sort of way (although exasperation does take up a large percentage of my wondering).  I mean how it is that some days she cant remember where her bedroom is to walk back from the bathroom, yet minutes later she can tell me she wants to wear the cardigan that I made her – the same cardigan that the previous week she swore beyond doubt I’d never given her and she’d certainly never seen.

Someone said to me last week that it’s good she still has her knitting.  But at the moment Mum doesn’t believe that she ever could knit and I’ve hidden her wool and knitting needles as she was getting stressed thinking that she needed to finish a jumper (something she’d not made since before her stroke).  Even looking at the Tuesday Blanket squares, she has no recollection at all of making them.

Yet I’m told…and I see…that some skills come and go.  That this is far from linear.

But in my rather basic view of how a brain works, there are bits of wool (obviously it’s wool) that connect up all the memories and thoughts and skills.  And when something disappears in Mum’s brain I assumed that the wool got snipped and the connection is lost.  So how does she remember where her bedroom is in relation to the bathroom the next day?  Or remember the cardigan she forgot, or like last week, totally forget my name or my relation to her while we sit in a coffee shop and remember as we drive home?  And how does she manage to lose her coat three times between pulling up outside her house and getting inside?!  Maybe the wool isn’t cut.  Maybe it’s just in a right old tangle.

Don’t worry, I don’t want actual answers.  I just wanted to wonder my wandering wondering out loud…or so to speak.

And sometimes I wonder if actually my head is almost as tangled as Mums 😳

 

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The black humour Tuesday

Posted on March 23, 2025 by thepogblog

This Tuesday included a first visit from the community nurse.  Mum was referred to her when Sister 1 took her to have a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate / respect form) put in place.  One of the first things the nurse confirmed was that Mum’s DNR had been put in place, but had been put ‘on the wrong part of the system’ which meant nobody could actually access it.  So that was good 🙄.

The nurse asked lots of questions.  Dad and I mostly answered them.  I think the nurse realised pretty fast that this would not be her average house visit.  She said (between gasps of laughter) that most people are a bit broken, disillusioned and very grumpy by the time she is brought in.  I assured her we were all of those things, but dipped in a serious amount of hysteria in an attempt to keep it all together.

At some point in the conversation we realised that we might as well do two for the price of one and Dad was also added to her list.  Dad has a DNR through the hospice, but we had no clue if that had made it on the right place on any system and we don’t have a printed copy of it for the house (which apparently you should), so the lovely nurse said she’d just do one for Dad too.  We went over the questions quickly until…

‘Would you want advanced life support or ventilation?’

Dad answered slowly and the nurse started writing as though taking dictation…

‘Yes, if I am half way through a book….it does worry me a bit that I might die half way through a good book and never know the ending. ‘ (Dad is a voracious reader).

Part way though the dictation the nurse looked up trying to get the right facial expression in response to this, but mostly smiling widely.

So we’ve agreed that should Dad get really poorly at some point , we’ll pop him on life support until I can finish reading the book to him. We’ve also agreed no War and Peace or Pillars of the Earth for that reason.

We have a slightly (very?) black sense of humour in our family these days 🙂

(And here’s a bit of Mum, keeping it real…)

 

 

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Still not nailing the adulting thing

Posted on March 17, 2025 by thepogblog

Two weeks ago I walked in to a lamp post.  I was just minding my own business, looking up across the green to the top of the hill to see if I could see which was our house, and it came out of nowhere.  It bled a bit (My head.  Pretty sure the lamp post was ok).  Then it did this:

Then it did nothing.  I’d hoped for at least an impressive purple bruise to match the pain levels, but it just went that mouldy yellow colour a few days later an that was it.  Quite disappointing really.

This week I was putting on my makeup.  I don’t wear much makeup – not enough to look younger (I use the Zoom filter for that, and thank my lucky stars that none of my clients ever see me in real life), but just enough that I don’t end up actually scaring people.  I’ve been wearing the same make up, put on in the same order, for years.  Until last week when I had some sort of brain fart and put my mascara on, followed directly by my powder.  The wet mascara transferred itself under my eyes and the powder brush liberally smeared it above and around.  It looked like the lamp post aftermath should have looked…

And then I woke up with burst blood vessels in one eye.  I can only assume at this point my face has just given up.

And the reason I tell you this?  Because the Pog Blog used to be entirely about my daftness.  And I suspect sometimes between looking out for Mum and Dad and step mumming I might come across as someone who knows how to adult these days.  And I just wanted to assure you that is absolutely not the case.  I am entirely winging all aspects of my life, as I am sure the vast majority of people reading this are.  I just wanted to make that clear 😁

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Finding Floof Mc Floofy

Posted on March 14, 2025 by thepogblog

On Saturday Mr R went running early and I decided I might as well get up at 6am and take Percy out to get started on the day.  But when I looked out the front window, Mr R was still standing outside on his phone.  I opened the door to ask in a slightly irritated way why he’d not got on with starting his 39 km run, because we needed to get a few things done before he and Stepson 2 went to the football at lunchtime …

‘I’ve found a dog’ he said. ‘I’m taking it’s photo’.

It turned out he was trying to post on the local facebook page that he’d found a dog, but he is not into social media and it was unlikely to get an immediate response so I told him to get going and called to the dog who floofed his way enthusiastically through the front door and turned many many circles in his happiness at (I assume) being inside.

Floof liked his circles.  He also liked the back garden.  And barking.  Percy was not keen, especially as this unexpected visitor was delaying his Saturday expedition.

I posted on the local facebook groups.  I think most locals were still asleep.

I stood at the front door incase anyone was out looking.

I put Floof on one of Percy’s leads and walked up and down the road in the hope he would show me where he lived.  He didn’t.

The vet opens at 8am so I popped Floof in a box on the passenger seat and we chatted about whether if his hooman couldn’t be found he’d be able to live with us.  Or perhaps one of my sisters.  Floof smiled a lot but I’m not sure he quite understood.

The vet nurse scanned him, he had a chip…but the chip was not registered on a UK data base.  The vets kept Floof and…to cut a long story short, his hooman did see my facebook post and he was picked up later in the day.  It turned out his hooman had come home drunk and left the door open long enough for Floof to go on a great adventure, ending outside Our Towers.

I rather liked Floof.  He was terribly smiley.  He probably wouldn’t have worked very well with our lifestyle though.  And I think Percy prefers the less fury brother option. Also, it turned out his name wasn’t Floof, which was slightly disappointing.  It was a different start to the weekend though 😁 (I’m hoping for a less floofy start to this weekend).

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The ‘she’s a horse!’ Tuesday

Posted on March 13, 2025 by thepogblog

This Tuesday, other than an initial (and now weekly) disagreement over the number of pants one Mummy W needs to wear at one time, Mum was surprisingly agreeable to everything.  She even agreed to take – and use – her walker at the garden center we visited to look around and get a coffee and cake (coffee and cake is at this point a non negotiable part of every outing).  She did nearly take a lady out by ramming into her legs, but the lady was very lovely about it…

The excitement clearly took it out of Mum though, so when we got back and after a coffee and a cake (yes; that’s an additional one of both as the garden center one had been ‘ages ago’) we opted to sit on the sofa and look at old photos.  And by old photos, I mean ones where – if Mum was in them – she was very young.

The slight issue with this is that other than Mum, my Aunt, Nanny and Grandad, I can’t prompt on who anyone is (although Dad could help out with some).  Also, Mum wont wear her glasses anymore, and I’m not sure she can see much without them.  In fact, it tuned out that in some cases, she could see very little without them…

😁

If I don’t do any cooking for Mum and Dad on Tuesdays, I usually take a Marks and Spencer ‘treat meal’.  By coincidence the meal I bought them this week was corned beef hash.  Dad reminded me that when Mum was in labour with me a nurse sent him home for some sleep (!) and when he got in at around midnight he made a variation of corned beef hash for dinner.  As he finished the hospital called to say Mum was actually going to have a caesarean and he needed to get back as soon as possible.  He did, was presented with me and…felt a bit sick (I reminded him of his hastily eaten dinner before a slightly hair raising 20 minutes in his Mini).  The coincidence is that night was 49 years ago -5 days.  We explained to Mum that it is my 49th birthday shortly and she told me I was very old.  I pointed out that she is 30 years older than me so…

‘I’m not.  I’m younger than you’ she said with utter conviction.

And as is widely understood, it’s best not to correct in these situations, so I will shortly be 49 and and 79, I guess.  Sometimes though, that feels entirely accurate.  Especially on a Tuesday 😉

 

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Babs for Babs Tuesday

Posted on March 6, 2025 by thepogblog

The best bit about this Tuesday was giving mum her birthday present.  It’s a Babs the Chicken nightlight (the joke being Mums name is Barbara and she always hated being called ‘Babs’.  I think she’d forgotten that, but it made me smile).

On a more serious note, it is touch sensitive and has no wires, so I thought it would be easier to use at night when she wake up than a torch with a fiddly button (although Dad says she usually forgets the torch so I imagine she’ll forget Babs too, but hey ho).  She seemed quite taken with it:

Her birthday was actually Monday.  I called her an hour or so after she got back from an afternoon tea with Sister 1 and Sister 2 to celebrate. I sang happy birthday to her.  ‘I don’t think it’s my birthday’ she told me.  ‘Nobody has mentioned it to me.’

On Tuesday though, when I told her to put on her shoes as we were meeting one of her friends for lunch (we’ve worked out that giving her any more notice of planned happenings results in lots of worrying about what she wants to remember but has forgotten the who and when of), she said that she hoped they were bringing her a present as it had been her birthday and it would be rude of them not to.  🤦🏼‍♀️

Sometimes things stick.  Most of the time they slip….🙂

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Basic Human-ing

Posted on March 3, 2025 by thepogblog

Full time step-mumming continues.  And I think that three and a half months in it’s going better than expected.

In an attempt to make it work, I started to introduce ‘basic human-ing’ quite early on, one item at a time.  This Pog-made approach goes something like this:

Every so often I identify one thing that makes me want to scream and teach Stepson 2 how to do it in a ‘basic human’ way.  If this is adhered to over a sufficient (but crucially unspecified) time, a reward is provided in the form of a packet of chocolate fingers, a steak pie or the purchase of additional marshmallow to top the homework / football (depending on the day) hot chocolate.  If basic human-ing is not maintained, no reward is provided.

So far we have  created habits around:

  1. Stripping his bed on Monday morning before school and putting the clean bedding back on after school.
  2. Wiping down the worktops after making food (this is easy to check as it’s demonstrated by work surfaces that look like they have had water poured over them, but baby steps and all that).
  3. Drying up after dinner without any sudden urgent ‘just need to go and do something’.
  4. Addressing the significant numbers of wrappers, receipts, bus tickets and fingernails (?!) left in the bedroom through the purchase of a small bedroom bin.  If the bin it not used, bedroom cleaning will be handed over to Stepson Two (I battled with whether this should be his to do anyway, but I figured if I do it at least it’s properly clean and may smell less like dead badger.)
  5. Picking the bathmat up after each shower so it can dry on the towel rail rather than fester on the floor.
  6. Our next significant step when the kitchen is done and dusted (literally), is to learn one proper dinner recipe (meat and veggie versions) that I can request stepson makes on occasion.

And he’s done brilliantly. However, 5) is a new one to all of us, brought in because Stepson Two has two showers most days what with gym visits and football, and I can only assume stands and drip dries on the bathmat, leaving is as drenched as those worktops.  So we’re all trying to remember to do that, because all the rules have to be lead by example, obviously.  But the other evening, after my circuits class shower, Stepson Two gleefully called me to the bathroom door and pointed:

‘Pog:  You failed at basic human-ing!’

I had.

Dammit. 🙂

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The ‘it was Harrods!’ Tuesday

Posted on February 27, 2025 by thepogblog

This Tuesday was slightly more chaotic than usual; unpacking after Tescos I discovered that Mum and Dads freezer had at some point started to defrost, then refrozen.  It took a while, two knives and a bucket to get the excess ice off to get the drawers out…then back in.

Getting mum washed and dressed resulted in more heated discussions on the appropriate number of pants to wear (Me: not three, Mum: definitely three).

Mum and I cooked kedgeree for their tea; a dish Mum used to make, but insisted she’d never had it before.  She seemed to approve of the end product though.

Then it turned out that at the weekend when we’d all gathered for a tea party for Sister 1 and 2’s birthday, and I’d forgotten that I’d put camembert and part baked bread in the oven:

…for over an hour.

Even though I thought I’d cleaned it, it wasn’t enough, and the fumes the next day had nearly finished Dad off, so I cleaned the oven properly…with oven cleaner and everything (creating more fumes and banning Dad from the kitchen until about August).

And the moss on their driveway was becoming a slip hazard so Dad asked me to buy bleach at Tesco to kill it. That didn’t seem like a good idea on any level though, so instead I took some garden tools and a bit of elbow grease to get rid of that.

And then we went to the hospital to see one of Mum’s many doctors, who basically said ‘it is what it is’.  So that was time well spent 🤷‍♀️.  We did see a man in handcuffs being brought in by two police officers with what looked like a stab wound in his neck though, which added a certain something to the day.  I’m not sure what the something was, but I thought it worth a mention.

What was interesting was talking to Mum about the past.  I asked if her Mum had made her birthday cakes for her as a child.  She said no – her Dad had done all the baking.  This is very likely as Grandad was a chef in the army in India in WW2, and then later in the local hospital. I wonder how many other men baked cakes in that era…?

And as the past was obviously a more welcoming place than the present on this particular day, I asked a random question:  I’d recalled a fuzzy memory a while back from the 80’s. The memory was Mum sitting at her sewing machine in the evenings sewing covers for coat hangers.  They were all padded and silky on the outside, and she used to get very, very frustrated making them.  I had a vague idea that she made them for Harrods, but that couldn’t have been right, could it?  Mum did remember sewing the covers and how cross she used to get doing them and which of her friends had got her involved and even where that person had lived. But couldn’t remember who they were for.  Dad remembered though, and I was right.  Mum used to spend evenings getting very cross with coat hangers (‘because they had to be perfect’) to ultimately supply Harrods!

From kedgeree to cakes, ice to moss, doctors to prison inmates and all the way to Harrods….all in one Tuesday 🙂

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