Somebody loves me!!

I'm all overcome!! Many, many thanks to Wendy for including me in her list of nominees for the I love Your Blog award. How good is that?!

Of course, it leaves me with a slight problem: I now have to nominate a further seven blogs. How to pick? I'm going to have to go and think about it for a bit!

Photies!

Omelette? Anyone?

This is the "burn" (stream for all you sassenachs) that runs along the bottom of my garden

And again, only it had rained a bit.

Just a small portion of the eleventy hundred thousand apples that my mother has given me recently.

My shiny new coat of just the one colour. But oh what a colour!

Onwards and downwards

I hate to tempt fate, but it seems as if the diet is going pretty well. I've lost two pounds a week for the last two weeks and I am now weighing 12 Stone 13. I haven't weighed 12 stone anything in over two years so I'm feeling quite pleased with myself. I was able to take off my engagement ring yesterday for the first time in that period too; not that I am in the habit of discarding it all over the place, but it's a good sign that things are going in the right direction.

After reading Wendy's blog the other day, I was coveting her new coat. Our local Asda didn't have that particular item in stock but they did have a rather fabulous red duffle jacket. There was only one, and it was a size 14 with no price on. I took it into the changing room to try just in case I was being massively over ambitious. If it was going to make me look like an overstuffed tomato, I wanted to be behind closed doors. But hey - the colour was perfect, the shape flattering and the toggles even met in the middle.

The only slight snag was the lack of a price tag. I didn't know how much it was. I stood in my little cubicle, stroking the red wool mix and pondered how much I'd be prepared to pay for it. After quite some stroking and pondering, I settled on a figure of £25. If it was £25 or less I was buying it. There. Decision made. And having made it, I procrastinated for about half an hour to put off the evil moment where I might find out that my coat was too expensive. In the end, all the mental wrangling and angst was unnecessary (as it so often is) because the coat was indeed £25 and I scooped it out of the bag when I got home and wore it for most of the afternoon.

Today is a bit of a landmark event. It's the first day that Kid-At-The-Bottom-Of-The-Heap is at school for the whole session. She'll be having her lunch at school and coming home on the bus. No more school run for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! What will I do with all this Kid-free spare time?!

Passing it on

I keep missing Jamie Oliver's programme, so have to watch it on catch-up on the pooter. I'm not really his target audience this time, because I can and do cook, especially now that I'm not working, but I have found the programme inspiring nonetheless. I'm an over-emotional soft-hearted bit of blubber really and I couldn't quite stop my eyes from watering a bit as I watched Natasha imploring her friends to "moove yer 'ips", or when Mick was so obviously delighted with himself at producing a delicious meal.

Interestingly, Kid-at-the-bottom, is going through a phase of wanting everything to be "homemade". Yesterday for lunch I made her sandwiches with homemade smoked mackerel "paté", and she complained that I hadn't "made" the cucumber. However I have been making lots of other things. In the last week alone I've made enough apple pies and crumbles to feed the world's military forces several times over. My crew demolished the lot within seconds of them coming out of the oven. I've also been producing blackcurrant jam and apple jelly. More apples are winging their way to me as I type: Mother is coming for lunch. Hope she approves of the soup I made this morning! In the spirit of passing it on, here's the recipe:

Roasted red pepper, tomato and lentil soup.

6 red/yellow/orange peppers

Olive oil

Sea salt

2 large onions, thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic crushed

Tinned tomatoes

1/4lb red lentils, washed

1 pint veg stock

Sprig of rosemary

S&P to taste

Roast half a dozen red, orange and yellow peppers by taking off big slices, placing them skin side up on a baking tray and drizzling with olive oil and a sprinkle of sea salt. Fairly high temperature, about 40 mins till the skins start to go crispy and a bit black. Let cool.

Sweat the onions in a pan with the lid on so that they cook in their own juices. Meanwhile, shred the peppers. No need to take the skins off. When the onions are softened, add the shredded peppers, tinned tomatoes, garlic, washed lentils, sprig of rosemary and veg stock. Simmer for half an hour or so until lentils are softened. Taste and season. Blend.

If the tinned tomatoes are whole, do the simmering before you break them up. I reckon this would be good with some melty-type cheese cubes on the top for those skinny people who aren't on a diet!

Talking of diets - I'm another pound down and inspite of AF turning up yesterday, I didn't have a major carb binge this week. Although I was a bit crotchety. Sorry to those who noticed and suffered.

Today's sartorial elegance consists of:

Hideous purple poloneck Christmas type sweater complete with sequins (it's warm, what can i tell you?)

Brown cord flares. Oh God, I've gone back to the seventies. I know who's to blame as well.

Sock Monster

Two months have passed since I gave up work. Tell me, when do you suppose the house will be tidy?

Periodically, I have this daydream where I am a little old lady living in a small terraced cottage with a gated front garden and a bit of a plot at the back, a couple of trees, preferably apple and plum, some evergreen shrubs and the occasional use of next door's cat. My house is cosy, full of well-read books, heavy curtains to shut out the winter, and a log fire. Next door are very good at providing me with logs. I keep them well supplied with plum jam. And all is spick and span and it stays that way on a daily basis.

Back to reality. And socks. I've decided that socks are the bane of my life. Not only do my children discard their socks willynilly, with no thought for how they're going to make the move from floor to laundry basket; not only do socks disappear into that black hole at the back of the washing machine; not only does my sockmonsterbox have more socks in it than there are in the drawers upstairs, and not only do my children seem to think that wearing stocking-ed feet to run across wet grass is acceptable, but on top of all this I can't tell which socks belong to which child anymore.

In days gone by it was easy to sort socks - the different sized feet were sufficiently obvious to make the job simple and if that wasn't enough, Kid-the-Eldest had all the grey socks, Kid-in-the-Middle had knee high white socks and Kid-at-the-Bottom-of-the-Heap had pretty frilly things.

Now they are all at school however, the waters have been muddied as badly as the socks. Kid-in-the-Middle wanted grey socks to wear under trousers. A few washes later, it's impossible to tell which grey socks should go to which child. Kid-the-Last wanted white knee-highs like her sister. Either hers have stretched or her sister's have shrunk because they all look the same.

I'm tempted to give up folding socks and putting them back into bedrooms. Perhaps we should simply have a "Bucket o' Sox" and everyone can dive in and get what they want out of it? It might cut out some of the work involved in keeping everyone's clothes clean, dry and fit to wear. Not that I'd be gaining anything exactly: for some reason, I seem to be spending quite a bit of time laundering the clothes of Other People's Children. They come here, play for a bit, eat my cakes, and what, strip off? I've got a box in the hall full of socks, pants, jeans, jumpers, quite a nice Trespass Anorak that will fit Kid-in-the-Middle soon if its rightful owner doesn't collect it soon and several half-pairs of gloves. Next time one of the kidlets has a friend over, I'm considering sending them home with a bag of our dirty laundry along with instructions to collect theirs when they return mine.

Today I'm wearing:

Brown linen trousers, size 18 but really starting to be too big now

Pale aqua, white, blue and brown top that I haven't been able to wear for years because it always gaped around my boobs. It's not gaping. Size 16.

Sparkly star necklace, non-matching star earrings/Brown high heeled boots/Brown cardigan