This is our last week(ish) in our house O.O – we are on the move into the wilds of Essex! It’s not really sinking in as a proper move as we’re not selling the house (are renting it out), but it is the last weekend we’ll be here as a family and if we come back to visit it won’t be our home any more. A bit odd, to say the least. Mum had a good point though – she said with this house it’s been almost like two houses in one – there was the house of our childhood, which in my mind at least is characterised by memories of a large sunbaked lawn, and then the house of later years, which was extended as we grew older and messier. The layout and thus use of both upstairs and downstairs differed significantly between the two “houses” and the changeover was 1995ish, when I was about 14. I love this house dearly but because we’re not selling it and we know the tenants there isn’t that emotional wrench. Preparing for moving is emotionally charged; I keep finding old toys and games from the past and actually spent some time playing with my Puppy in my Pocket. My doll Joanna (who is only 8 months younger than Ding) has an huge box of clothes, a cot and a highchair, and this is after I got rid of some clothes. What is she ever going to do with all those clothes?! Can’t get rid of them though…

I’m looking forward to the new house. We still have our own rooms there despite the fact that Ding’s married with her own home and I’m moving back into PB house and taking it over fully. I can just see new house at Christmas – it’s got that sort of Charles Dickens style that’ll lend it well to decent decs – Mum’ll hate it – DUST! Mwahaha So yeah – not really sure what to feel about the move (except feeling smothered by all the crap I own) so will need to write more later I expect.

Also on the moving front, as I alluded to, is me moving from my little flat back into PB house. The house tenants suddenly en masse handed in their notices, which was both timely in that I want the house empty, and slightly inconvenient as half the various contracts in my little flat are 12 months, and I’ll have to take 6 month hits. However it looks like I won’t be living alone. I decided to take in a lodger to help with the costs etc. but specifically to take in a friend. So my officemate and mad Brummy bint will be moving in with me if all goes to plan. And then, for added oddness, her brother will probably also be joining us. Although I don’t ideally want to live with people (one of my life ambitions is to live in a cave on a hillside, although only if it has broadband) there is a world of difference between living with random tenants who were there before you were, and living with a friend whom you get on with. Or at least so I’m told – having never lived with friends I can’t comment!

I made wine! It’s pink and cloudy and unfinished (buying some demijohns to rack it into since it’s currently living in a bucket in the kitchen) but it tastes like sweet wine and has alcohol in it! Stupidly easy to make – seriously – it’s sweet fruit tea with yeast. That’s what wine is. There’s a series of wine articles here (link) that explain how to do it if you’re interested. The yeast is optional-ish – as well as some fruit tea bags I used elderflower from the garden so it had it’s own yeast. I’ve added some wine yeast since to make it less sweet as I’m not a sweet wine person, although it’s certainly drinkable now. I also have five 75cl bottles (old Canada Dry bottles) with homemade elderflower champagne that is ready to drink. I’m not sure if it’s as successful – last time I tried it it had a distinct taste that was wrong although I can’t put my finger on who – elderflower can stink when it’s slightly old so I wonder if that’s the taste of older elderflower heads, but the last time I tried it it was still young – it’s had a good few weeks in the bottles since then (which despite having the gas released once are rather firm again!). Still – worth a try! It evidently worked – if it tastes bad then that’s poor choice of flowers rather than failure of champagne making-ness. Next will be elderberry wine using hopefully the berries I picked from the same tree last year and froze.

Moving on.

So yes, election and all. Just watching HIGNFY with Lembit Öpik – he’s hilarious. Anyway, moving on!

I watched Julie and Julia around Ding’s house last week. Generally a good film methinks. I’d already decided that I needed to start cooking – I’ve been living off canteen food which although cheap is more expensive that packed lunch, and also consists of the main food groups; grease, carbs, curry and pudding. Watching J&J further encouraged the cookingness. Also, I have realised that I’ve been doing it wrong. I’ve been buying food and then attempting to find a recipe to use the food in. Apparently the way to do it is to find the recipe, and then buy the required food. This was an epiphany. This also lead to me trotting to Tesco’s today (would have been Sainsbury’s but eh, money) with a shopping list for the week and spending over £70 for the pleasure. They had no real black pudding! Only pre-cut slices. For people who lack knives, probably.

So lunch was a “ready meal” of chicken satay (EasyCook – nom nom) I’d made a few weeks ago and frozen, and dinner tonight was also from the Spring issue of EasyCook, poached rainbow trout, steamed asparagus and hollandaise sauce with water cress. Part of the “10 things you can do with watercress” feature. It was pretty ok – 3.5/5 I would say (bearing in mind 5/5 is hard to achieve for me. Chicken satay was 4/5. My sister’s wedding main dish was 5/5 – that was cooked by a top restaurant). Lunch tomorrow is brocolli and goat’s cheese soup I made tonight (nom!) and dinner may be sesame coated white fish, steamed white fish with couscous, or indeed sausage-meatball and rice one-pot. I haven’t decided yet.

Back to main headlines – we’re moving towards a PR referendum! Assuming we get a Tory-Whig(ish) coalition. Yay-ness! I’m all for PR. Ironically this is the first time I understood PR, despite “learning” about it during politics A-level (which I left after a year lol). Non-science has never been my thing. Mostly, since I now live in a safe Tory seat and thus my carefully cast vote is in reality less useful than my toilet paper, I would like  my vote to count. I resent the apathetic non-voters in marginal seats – pull your fingers out!

Ooo if you are crafty this is good. This site has tutorials on how to make dolls (amazing, I wish I had the patience!) but also there is a life size Mini Dachshund! http://dollmaker.nunodoll.com/dog/dachshund.html – it’s adorable! I could have my own doxie without the associated back problems! Squishee…

Gosh it’s a smashing day. In the words of a classic Klingon drinking song:

The flowers are out, ‘though it’s not quite summer.
The sun is shining and the clouds are fluffy and white.
We are now appearing in a new series on Sky One,
We are very happy! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! *hit heads together* Ouch!

I’ve had a productive day so far. I was up until stupid O’clock finishing a paper draft, and then had to drag myself to work this morning to email part of it out. I packed up the bed that I don’t want (borrowed it off a friend, it was far too large), went to work, and then went to the big house to leave said bed in the garage and swap it with a single I have there. Lugging the wood and mattress for a 4-poster bed around on your own is not entertaining! Then I pottered off to Homebase (10% off doncha know) and went a bit mad.

A cherry tree! On very dwarfing rootstock, made for pots on patios lol. I would have preferred an apple tree but Homebase only had dwarf cherries and peaches today and I don’t like peaches. I may still get an apple at some point. My ideal is to buy some semi-dwarf rootstock and graft Annie, my apple tree from home, onto it. That way we can take her with us BUT this time she won’t end up as tall as the house… anyway that’s another story. Yesterday my mini-greenhouse arrived and is now in the garden also:

Does the job! The potatoes are planted (they’ve been chitting on the windowsill for weeks with only tiny shoots being produced – being in warm soil may get them going a bit better). I also bought… um… 12 strawberry plants. Not sure why, we have about 15 at home from last year – they are productive for about 3 years. Well, I do know why – they were £1 for 6, down from £4.99. I am one of those people who will buy someone because it’s cheap rather than because she needs it. Still I can pot them into the random crappy pots the landlord has here (the drainpipe things on the wall, a U-bend (classy) and two butler sinks) and they can make me strawberries.

This propensity for buying anything with an orange sticker on is how I’ve also ended up with a red gooseberry bush (never eaten a gooseberry, dunno if I even like them) and a blackcurrant bush. They were only £1.49 each! Bargain. Lastly I got a sorry looking coriander for 20p. For 20p you can imagine it looks very sorry indeed.

Well, two loads of washing are out drying, the bed is switched and made and I have some more potting to do!

I have an army of cloned Alfie minions! (and some seagulls and a crab.)

Go my army of minions! Take over the world! No, not that way. No, you can’t go outside. No, I don’t want a giraffe mouse, but thank you. No, peeing on the bed is not acceptable… *sigh*

*   *   *

Spock, come here – I need to clone you.

So lots has happened since I last posted – we all know I’m a bad poster. Let’s move on!

Cousin B got married! Then she got stuck on honeymoon due to the 6 day flight ban! I was a bridesmaid – I think it went well! No pictures as I was too busy being a bridesmaid/getting drunk/arranging the guestbook with Dad/losing my shoes and belt, but there are some around on FB etc.

As a sort of aside, a volcano erupted in Iceland and all flights to and from the UK were banned for 6 days – they started again yesterday. It was very odd not having vapour trails in the sky and no jet noise (everywhere I live is either near a large airport like Stanstead/City or a small airfield). It oddly seemed to have not much effect except on those abroad or wanting to go abroad at the time.

So I moved into a flat at the beginning of March. I decided I needed somewhere of my own rather than sharing with others or living at parents full time. It’s not bad – the neighbours (upstairs) aren’t too noisy and the area’s ok. This is the view from my backdoor – looking over fields and woodland . It’s a ground floor flat and has a patio (you can see the wall in the foreground), a lawn and a raised BBQ patio at the back. The only bad thing is no allocated parking.

This weekend is gardening weekend – planting seeds hopefully in the mini greenhouse I ordered, should come tomorrow. I still need to get another bookcase and sort through some stuff as it’s a bit boxes everywhere at the moment, but it’s getting there!

It’s election time!

Familiarise yourself with the parties here.

And I’ve lost the bloody remote control for my DVD player! We (Mum, Dad and I) watched Star Trek XI tonight. I watched it last week with Ding, and loved it so much I ordered it the next morning. Whilst looking for it on Amazon I found a box set of the first 10 movies, digitally remastered, in a presentation box for an amazing £35. The reviews complain that the box is too big. I do not understand. The box is the width of 11 DVDs (10 films plus an extras DVD) and to make it cute they made it a cube. It is precisely the size I would expect a box of 11 DVDs to be. It is also highly pretty and made me very happy when it arrived.

So we watched the new one tonight, having to use my DVD player as parental unit’s TWO players both refuse to play DVDs. Why are they still in the house? No idea. My remote control has wandered off, which means no pause, so whenever anyone gets up to go to the toilet or get some more food or put the kettle on or feed Thomas who decided that doing circuits of the house and garage until fed multiple times was acceptable, we had to rewind it to get back to where we were. Hurump.

However I love the film. Love Love Love. It reminds me why I loved Star Trek in the first place. It reminds me that Star Trek was the first entity I ever obsessed about, and that Spock was my first fanaticism target. Bearing in mind TOS would have been a good 20 years old at the time I first watched it. I remember crying in the Wrath of Khan, and making an unwise observation to my Dad that the Star Trek theme sounded a lot like Superman (apparently it doesn’t). I was only 6 when TNG started. Plus the new film is very funny. And Spock is very pretty. I bought the soundtrack. I was saddened to find out Majel Barrett had passed away though. As the computer voice, Lwaxana Troi, Nurse Chapel and Number One she’d been in all 6 series including Enterprise, plus 7 of the 11 films including the new one. She finished recording for the new film a couple of weeks before she died. She’s left millions in trust for her dogs – brilliant!

Anywho – I went to see a flat last week and was rather disappointed by it – tiny, damp and overpriced. No parking. I’m off to see another on Monday and although it also looks nice in photos I’m trying to keep distant. Failing miserably – I’m already referring to it as “my place” again. At least I’m not alone – I draw solace in the fact Ding said she fell in love with about 8 places before she got her last flat. Raargh I hate the inbetween bits. I just wanna make a decision and be done with it.

A few weeks ago I spontaneously went to an art class with JJ; not a real art class but one about expressing yourself on paper (or collage etc). It was supposed to help us find work-life balance or at least identify the gaps. I think it part it helped us find out inner five-year-old – there was glitter, tissue paper, poster paints and lots of PVA everywhere. I inadvertently focused on my crafts but also on how I can’t seem to get on top of them because I don’t really live anywhere. I live with my parents while saving up to buy a place, with a flat-full of stuff in a bedroom, with more stuff in an attic of a house we rent out. It’s not stuff that should be in an attic – it’s Pterry books, craft stuff, DVDs etc. Stuff that should be in a house. So I think I feel like I don’t really live anywhere, which means I can’t settle. Plus I’m spending a lot on petrol and not having a social life near work because I always need to drive home. Parental home is moving at some point, and the thought of trying to move a flat-full of stuff from one bedroom to another is depressing both me and Mum. Plus I’ve lost so much stuff. My camera (as you know), the latest Muse CD Ding bought me, my other camera, my boss’s work CD-ROM (eep), my Passionada DVD (Jason Isaacs), my USB mouse, my iPod charger (in use), my iPhone charger (reserved for when the iPod charger eventually breaks, only to be missing when the iPod charger vanished), my wellies, my boiler suit, various items of underwear (yes, you did need to know that), a ball of green wool and my crochet hooks – le sigh.

So in a drastic turn of events (considering our family has an issue with the idea of renting somewhere – “it’s wasted money!”) I have decided to rent somewhere near to work. Which in itself is exciting as I’ve never rented in my life. I’m hoping that having somewhere that is mine that has a full complement of rooms (i.e. my kitchen stuff can go in my kitchen instead of under my bed and in the attic) will let me feel a sense of stability. Today I visited estate agents. Tomorrow I may well visit more.

As a slight aside, I wish to highlight Toaster’s recent (ok, September, I’m a bad blog-reader) post. Clicky. I printed it for my office wall – to bring my mind back to the point occasionally. You can get accused when blogging (and often rightly so) of trying to be deep and meaningful. I like that post because it isn’t – it’s just achingly simple.

As a complete aside – new project- hay box cooker! Well, new project in my head anyway. I won’t start it until I have a place to put it in (there has been a “do not buy any new kitchen implements until you have a kitchen” edict placed upon me – I assume this also covers homemade kitchen implements…especially boxes full of hay). That link is to one particular design – they are variable – box + insulation + pot, and the insulation can be hay, wool, polystyrene etc. I envisage either wool (recycled) or polystyrene balls in pillows (not environmentally friendly but more efficient). The polystyrene one maintained 85C over many hours – amazing. Other wool ones maintain at least 65C. I would need a meat thermometer too – to be safe.

Dear camera,

I understand that living with me is apparently not enjoyable for cameras. I know my first camera went through a lot, yet it stuck with me – at age 6 I lost it at the butterfly farm (I got it back) after taking one picture of a butterfly and about 17 pictures of the sparrow sitting next to our lunch table, hung it on a tree in the rain for several days, and then finally dropped it on the floor of a ferry, smashing it (I put it back together again). Despite this misuse, this camera remained almost fully functional (although guessing the frame number became necessary). Sadly 110 film was never going to catch on.

I know I dropped my second camera on cobbles in Norfolk at age 10, accidentally named it Tigger when I stuck a Dymo sticker of my cat’s name on it, and eventually retired it with honour when film became obsolete. I stuck some butterfly stickers on it’s case, which perhaps wasn’t so honourable and destroyed its manly red and black image.

Third camera was a slight detour – a rescue camera adopted from my Dad when he upgraded it. That film bridge was perhaps too large for a 12 year old to be lugging around, but we stuck at it. We probably took photos of the eclipse together. Fun times. Sadly, it was not to be. Whilst distracted with my new digicam, fourth camera, Dad conveniently forgot he had given third camera to me and sold it to a friend. I never got to say goodbye…

My fourth camera decided to take the initiative and force retirement by taking about 30 seconds to warm up the flash in between shots, thereby embarrassing me at parties and gatherings. This tactic worked. I do realise revenge is perhaps a childish response, and I intended to sell it on eBay, before discovering that that particular model wasn’t even selling for £5. So camera four won.

Fifth camera had erectile dysfunction (priapism perhaps?) at a wedding after having some batteries of Ding’s inserted, oddly the same batteries had the same effect the same day on Dad’s camera. So that was curtains for that. I’m still not sure if that was some kind of suicide pact – I’ve never heard of batteries killing cameras so effectively…

Sixth camera first convinced it’s battery charger to run away, and then some months afterwards ran away itself, and given that it’s a rather large SLR bridge I’m not entirely sure how it’s managed to hide itself so effectively. Naked as well – I have it’s case. Maybe that’s why it’s hiding.

Eighth camera was a tangent that you really shouldn’t have been jealous of – an underwater film camera not only fulfils a different niche to yourself (trust me – you don’t want to try underwater) but it is, essentially, a FILM camera I bought for £10, and thus is automatically inferior. The fact it choked itself on it’s first film halfway through the holiday merely emphasises it’s inadequacies. The fact that I haven’t bothered to unchoke it and develop the film yet perhaps gives you an understanding of the worth I attribute to camera eight.

I realise also there have been a number of one night stands, those bright yellow cases and their films of one use wonder, so fleeting they don’t even earn a number. I know I have a half used one somewhere, but believe me when I say it means nothing, and I rarely ever think about it.

You, camera seven, purchased both because you were a good camera but also because you were lurid pink and thus less likely to camouflage yourself – have I not been a good owner? I bought you your own case (lurid blue with purple swirls). I kept you in it – it wasn’t just for looks! I bought you 2GB smart cards – which other camera has had such space? I took you everywhere. Was it that I offered to lend you to N to take pictures of chickens with? (Thanks, by the way. Running away just as he asked me for you wasn’t even slightly embarrassing). Was it N or the chickens you had problems with? Or the fact I was willing to trust someone else with you? Was it the fact that at least half of your 2GB was filled with pictures of my cats? Where have you gone that you have disappeared so completely?

And most importantly – do you realise you’ve left me alone with only an iPhone to document my cats entertaining activities with? My black cats? My black cats that show up as basically floating eyes in the wonderousness that is the 2 megapixel no flash “what do you mean when you say ‘focus’?” iPhone?

I trust that having read this and realising what you are putting me through you will perhaps reconsider your decision to desert me.

Kind regards,

Kai