Tag Archives: daily routine

More Soup and Mutterings

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Woke early and alert. leaned teeth, checked emails, read blogs, checked comments. The whole day stretched out ahead of me, a totally blank canvas. Had breakfast, watched birds (it’s the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend), swore at squirrel as it (for the second time in two weeks) unlatched the peanut feeder and dumped them on the ground. Julia went out for a walk. While she was out I read a bit, typed a bit and then decided it must be time for soup. So I got up, made butternut squash and chilli soup with tuna mayonnaise sandwiches and finely sliced cucumber, just as Julia arrived back home. Thirty seven years and we are in faultless synchronicity. Or she has mastered the art of mind control.

She has bought a new peanut feeder. I was going to make a new anti-squirrel fastener with bent wire but she has gone out and bought a caged feeder that will keep squirrels out. The moral of this is that if you content yourself with regular small amounts you can take a lot over the years. But if you get greedy and try to take too much, people will take counter-measures and you may find you are locked out. for good. They had been annoying her this week by chasing birds away and this was the final straw. It looks like they will have to confine themselves to bread and fruit from now on, and we don’t put much fruit out. In nutritional terms they have done themselves no good at all.

Now, at 6pm, I have the last vestiges of my blank canvas ahead, virtually nothing useful done, and no ideas in my head. Tomorrow I will not be making that mistake. tomorrow I will hit the keyboard knowing what I want to do in great detail. It’s that or waste another day. There’s a lot more to not procrastinating than I thought.

Looks cute but is actually the antichrist with a fluffy tail.

Where does all the time go?

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Last night I came home, did the washing up I’d left to mature for a couple of days and prepared the evening meal. We had some leftover chicken, wrinkly carrots, bendy parsnips, over the hill mushrooms, softening onions and sprouting garlic. I then threw in some stock cubes, pearl barley and water.

I’m thinking of marketing a line of cookware with the motto “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” featured on the logo.

With hindsight more water or less barley may have been better. And less cooking. I lost track of time and it ended up with a couple of hours on a very low heat. The result was a pearl barley risotto. I liked it, though I was surprised. Julia was equally surprised, and not quite so keen. She doesn’t always appreciate my deviations from the culinary norm, or the fact I hate wasting vegetables.

I watched TV with Julia, replied to comments on the blog, wrote 1,100 words in two parts, did the washing up again and made the sandwiches for today.

Then I fell asleep.

It really doesn’t sound like a lot of work when you consider it took the best part of eight hours. There was a slight nap involved (about thirty minutes – that’s all) and the TV probably took up two hours, so I suppose it becomes a bit more understandable.

Then there was today, which just seemed to fade away. I got Julia to work for 8.30, was at the shop for 9.00, bid on some ebay items by 9.30 and had several parcels packed by 10.00. After that it all became a blur and suddenly it was the end of another week – just one more day to go until Sunday.

Where do the days go, and the evenings and the weeks? In fact, where did this year go? Or my life, come to think about it. If the next twenty years go as fast as the last twenty I really don’t have time for naps.

Now I’m off to find photos for this post and to prepare myself for more postcode facts.

The picture is part of my collection that I found recently after some years in a dusty box – it’s a fund-raising flag used by the Foresters to raise money for their regimental war memorial at Crich.