Tag Archives: procrastination

The Week Moves On

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I am, as I have said before, on drugs to suppress my immune system. This controls my arthritis and allows me to get around, type and do a bit of baking. Without he drugs, even typing would be tricky, with bent fingers and painful knuckles.

However, I do tend to pick up a lot of low-level infections in winter, and this year I have, so far, had three. They don’t really amount to much, but they do make me tired, hence the amount of time I spend writing about the time I slept instead of blogging. Whilst recovering, I also sleep a fair bit.

I can tell when I have recovered, because my brain seems to move up a notch and I start to write again and answer TV quiz questions faster. I actually beat a contestant on Mastermind last night. I was three behind on the specialist subject (Waterfowl of the British Isles) but pulled it back on the general knowledge. Sitting at home, relaxed, I would still only have come second, because the winner answered all his specialist question and then beat me on general knowledge.

So, self-congratulations done, I’m still a long way off the pace required to do well on Mastermind. I got a few on University Challenge, including a few that the students didn’t get, so I was happy by the end of the evening. Winter Olympics are OK, but it’s nice to have the quizzes back.

 

Julia made a nice curry last night, using the leftover pea soup as a base for the sauce. She also put meat in it, which was nice for a change, as i tend to make my curry vegetarian these days.

I noticed earlier today, that I have done 3,802 blog posts. It made me wonder how many individual titles I have come up with and how many I have duplicated.

I just did a quick search, but after reading about 30 titles became aware that my ability to procrastinate had taken over again . . .

 

The pictures are from February 2015 – I only have 9 photos that month – my early days as a blogger.

 

 

 

The Brain Cells v Old Age

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Ham, cheese, mushroom, spring onions

Yesterday, whilst writing the blog post, I had three ideas for prose sections to haibun/tanka prose poems. In my mind, though I am probably wrong, the two things are interchangeable.

Anyway, with three ideas in my head, I thrashed along through the blog post, added photos and tags and a title and sent it on its way into a world of pixels.

At that point I realised I had only two ideas in my head so I immediately set to, wrote one and hoped the elusive third idea would come back. It didn’t. Instead, I forgot the other one.

Three ideas. Two forgotten. One remembered. I really must remember to use a notebook.

And so I made my way to the kitchen. I did not, if I’m honest, fancy the cleaning, so I didn’t do a soda bread, just a couple of quiches, a rice pudding and yellow split pea soup. The quiches involved ready-made cases (mine always do) so it was just a case of filling them. One is Stilton and Leek. We had that last time too, but we do have quite a lot of Stilton left. The other is ham, mushroom, cheese and spring onion. As regular readers will by now have realised, it was filled with what I had knocking round in the fridge.

Stilton and Leek. Stilton does not photograph well.

The yellow split pea soup is ana amalgamation of several recipes as there are some very strange recipes out there for what is essentially a bowl of cheap peasant food. Mine has celery, carrot, sweet potato and spring onion in it along with the peas. It would have been carrot, onion and celery, but it’s another of those leftovers things. I could have started a new carrot and a new onion, but I have wilting spring onions and half a sweet potato left so what am I to do?

Later, I will move on from this very plain version to something slightly more fancy. Perhaps. If it’s OK I will stick with this version. It takes a bit longer than usual because the peas need around an hour to cook down, so I will have to see if it is worth it. Otherwise it’s back to red lentils.

Latest news – the timer went off and I got to the kitchen just in time. The soup was very thick and the water was gone, but I got to it just before it started to burn. I have mashed it so far and it seems OK, though will probably need diluting as it’s more of a thin porridge than a thick soup. I don’t think it needs the hand blender as that will take the texture and the orange speckles out of it.

The rice pudding meanwhile, a slightly fine-tuned recipe, is done too.  All that needs doing now is for Julia to come home, congratulate me on my industry, compliment me on my cooking skills and enjoy a yellow pea soup lunch. Tonight we have the pasta bake and tomorrow we start the quiche and salad lunches.

Veg for the soup

The only fly in the ointment (an expression which, Wikipedia tells me, comes from the Bible) is hat I have to finish cleaning the kitchen before she gets back. Then I have to do some of the actual writing I was planning. So far I have written what is going to be the second post of the day (I will have to do something else for tomorrow) and one part of a poem. It’s a start, but a poor one, and I need to do better.

Yellow split pea soup, or porridge. It needs more water.

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.

Fish & Chips and Forgotten Titles

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Haddock Special at the Dolphin Fish Bar, Sutton on Sea

It is the 10th today and I seem to have only written 8 posts, despite cutting and pasting a poem and an article of medallions. Despite this sharp practice I just can’t keep up. Today I am going to post two shorter posts and try to keep up that way.

Today I have top make tomato soup for lunch. That involves a reasonably quick recipe, but it is still time. I have read and commented today, had breakfast and skimmed a number of subjects on Wiki. (This may be leading us to the exact source of my time leakage. After reading Billy Mann I ended up looking at hammer types and after reading Derrick Knight I ended up looking a Esmond Romilly  and various other things. There are 32 types of hammer listed on the internet. I have three sorts that aren’t on the list and know of at least one other. However, I do believe that as long as it is big enough you can get by with just one.

Haddock Special at the Fishpan, Scarborough

That will leave me with the afternoon and evening to achieve something but Julia will almost certainly expect to see me at some point and an epic nap is probably on the cards. I’m thinking of doing fish fingers for tea, with potato wedges and mushy peas à la Nottingham.  They eat their peas with mint sauce in Nottingham. I’m not sure why but any excuse for vinegar-based condiments is always welcome. It’s a cheap nutritious meal and I get the ones that are supposedly full of extra omega 3. I just checked it up and find that there is limited evidence that this actually does any good, but I’m a sucker for implications that stuff does you good whilst you are eating it. If they could grow potatoes which included omega 3, I could eat chips and feel I was becoming healthier.

Looking at the featured image I feel vaguely ashamed of my lack of culinary expertise.

Undoubtedly the worst fish I’ve had for years – look at the scale of the fish compared to the size of the fish and the portion of chips. Even then, they had to add insult to injury by doing something unspeakable to the peas.

Plans and Plausibility

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Boiling the ingredients

Well, I did make he cauliflower soup I was planning, and it went well. The situation at the moment is that I can get a cauliflower for £1.20 or a large cauliflower for £2. You get more than twice as much cauli if you order the big one so it’s much better value, as long as you don’t mind cauli for three meals.

I have not yet got round to the pickled eggs because I can’t face the thought of peeling all the eggs. I need 12, so I will add at least three more to allow for breakages (and possibly a few more so we can have sandwiches) and it becomes a mountain of eggs to peel.

But I did settle down to do the writing plan. So far I have 93 things listed, and probably still have another 20 to do. It includes some new forms I have tried before, and makes a regular feature of magazines I have only tried a few times. Allowing for sloth and disorganisation and rejection, I can probably manage to keep up the numbers, and if I keep up the quality I can probably get the same results as this year despite the loss of a couple of magazines. At that point I ask myself why I didn’t try harder last year.

When I remember why, I despair about my memory. I was ill at the beginning of the year, and Julia was injured. Strange how easily I forget. The key is obviously to stay healthy. I was going to try that anyway, as five days in hospital is not the sort of experience I want to repeat. It’s a Burns sort of moment here – “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promised joy”

Before the addition of Stilton cheese

That sums up the pain of planning – things often go wrong. However, what is certain is that if you don’t plan you will end up with nothing but a pile of regrets. I’ve done that often enough. I wonder what I will be saying at this time next year.

Other than that I spent much of the day watching TV as I couldn’t find the enthusiasm to work while Julia was out wood turning, I then sorted out various medical things, including appointments (my blood clotting is now back on course and I am back to monthly testing) and insurance. I had been putting off the insurance. I was, as I feared, trapped in a labyrinth of customer service bots and had to give my information four times before they connected me to a human. Even then, it didn’t go well, though it is at least sorted. and I don’t need to worry about it.

Brooches from WW1 – cost 1 shilling and 6 pence in 1914.

The latest two articles on the website of the Peterborough Military History Group are a summary of military sweetheart brooches (where I noted a typo and several places where I could have written better) and one on the Home Guard training school at Osterley Park. It was quite an impressive place – set up by an ex-member of the International Brigades and associated with George Orwell. That led me to browse the International Brigades and George Orwell, then into his diaries. The bits I read are much more historic than my equivalents. He was writing during the Battle of Britain, though he still managed to discuss his income tax affairs in one entry, so even well-known diarists still have trivia in their diaries. It was a pleasant interlude, during which I discovered that James Robertson Justice (Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor films), once played professional ice hockey between the wars, fought in the International Brigades and was invalided out of the Royal Navy with a shrapnel wound in 1943. And this was just the tip of the iceberg of the life of a man I always thought of as a supporting actor in comedy films. Time spent with Orwell and a network of Wiki links, is never wasted.

I am now going to send Christmas cards to my cousins. I always think I should sprinkle them with wit and good cheer, but will probably settle, as I normally do, for expressing the hope that they are staying well and will have a good 2026. I normally start thinking in November, and finally get round to it about now – close to the last posting date. Such is my life.

Badges on Mother of Pearl discs – WW! and WW2

Repeating Old Mistakes

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And suddenly, as I checked the date to fill in a form last night, I found that there are only four days left until the end of the month. I have nine possible sets of submissions to make, and none actually finalised. After a marathon session this morning I managed to get two sets near enough done. I’ll get another couple done tonight and things will seem to look a little brighter. However, it’s a long way from the scenario of being ready in advance, which I imagined when I got the least lost sent off.

The previous few days had been spent writing articles for Facebook and newsletters, intending to metaphorically clear my desk before getting to work on the poetry submissions. By the time I’d sorted out a couple of technical hitches and spent a couple of days in Nottingham and relaxed a bit, I found I’d actually lost a week.

If I cut out all the extra writing, I doubt I’d be much better off as I’m the sort of person who doesn’t do something until they are forced to. Some call it working under pressure, some call it being lazy. It’s much the same. Having honed my procrastination skills for the last 60 years, I’m unlikely to develop a sense of urgency, or a passion for efficiency, in retirement.

In fact, I’m so committed to procrastinating I just drifted off and read an article about how to make myself more productive. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t worked.

Wood Pigeon

 

Introspection, by a Blockhead

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Bumble bee on bramble flowers – Sherwood Forest

Toast and marmalade, tea, emails, WP comments, find my glasses. This latter task would be easier if I had a pair of glasses to help me see. As it is, I have to stagger through a nightmare world where I rely on memory to find the right keys, as the letters tend to simmer and shift when I am trying to type without glasses. Old age, whilst a matter of amusement to the young (I remember, with pain, the things I used to say to my parents, the amusement I gained from each senior moment.)  Those turned into Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and, eventually, not only claimed my parents but showed me a glance of the world that is going to be my future.

At times like this, I think it is an advantage to be shallow, as there would be little to gain from an in-depth analysis of my past conduct and future health. You are born, you fritter away your life, and you die. My main regret, in  a life that featured too much frittering, is that I wasted so much time going through the motions and building a lacklustre facsimile of a career. I should have pursued my original writing ambitions and at least been a better poet, even if the rest evaded me. If you are going to fritter, you should, I think, fritter big time. There is no point in being half-hearted.

Flowers – detail

What is blogging, if it isn’t frittering? No man, said Doctor Johnson, but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, and blogging is a good example of writing without money. We sit, we write, some of us, I’m told, plan their blog posts in advance, and, after all this work, the money is made by WP, a soulless entity with an infinite capacity for capturing writers in its web and charging them for the provision of “new and improved” services. In the last seven or eight years I have seen many new services, but the “improvement” is, as far I can see, is on a level with a Unicorn or a water horse.

This is the first tick on my Friday list. Now I’m off to do the washing up. It’s going to be a long, slow day.

Wild flowers

The Shapeless Day

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Tea and Eccles Cake

Went to the hospital, as you know, returned and blogged, as you also know, made lunch and started to watch TV. Fell asleep. Woke. Collected post of a neighbour who is away for the week. Wrote. Stared into nothingness . . .

Normally Julia comes home about 4am. She is either here when I return, or arrives soon after. Either way, the day seems brighter and we have tea and a snack and watch TV and she tells me I need to exercise, stop snoring or declutter. Feel free to add to the list as you recall other things I have been told to do over the years. It’s not living life in the fast lane, but it suits me and gives the day some shape.

Fortunately, though food seems less important now I only have myself to cook for, and TV has less charm when sitting on my own, I can still write.

I recently started on September’s Numismatic Society talk, and I have a couple of other projects (including the articles for the Numismatic Society Facebook page) so I am being kept busy. Of course, I am always busy when I need to avoid doing something, and there is always a question when I’m writing. Am I writing because I like writing, or am I using it as a displacement activity to avoid something else?

Botham’s Whitby

One day I will examine that question in greater detail, but until I get round to writing my masterpiece on procrastination, this is as far as it goes. Now it’s time to eat. I ordered for two last week when I shopped and there is only one of me. The soup plan is now mushroom and thyme, because I have too many mushrooms. However, tonight it is going to be avocado, because I have also got too many avocadoes. We didn’t have them on Monday as planned, and I also ordered another two. Yes, that’s four avocadoes and as I’m not confident about turning them into soup it looks like I’ll be eating healthily for the next few days.

Photographs will be something selected at random.

Coffee and cake

 

The Pinnacle of Procrastination

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Boxed Lord Byron Medallion by Ron Dutton

I have a list of jobs to do. Some of them are quite important. None of them are particularly interesting. So I’m going to write another blog post and pretend it’s important because I am being “a writer”. It’s a bit like the old saying “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but give him a fishing rod and you won’t see him all weekend.” It works with computers too. Give a man a computer and he’s suddenly “a writer” or “a poet” or “a blogger”. And he’s nowhere to be seen when there is work to be done.

Butlins Veleta Competition Medallion 1954

Butlins Veleta Competition Medallion 1954

I can’t speak for everyone but I’m just a man with a computer who finds it easier to procrastinate if he can say he’s writing something. It’s not really writing, it’s just producing words and avoiding work.It is, as the title says, the Pinnacle of Procrastination.

If I was still mobile I’d be looking at fishing tackle catalogues and planning a retirement where Julia hardly ever saw me. My first purchase would be one of those waistcoats with loads of pockets and  I’d then dream my life away riffling through catalogues and muttering about test curves and breaking strain as I accumulated a mountain of gear.

Magistrates’ Court Medallion

At heart, I believe that most fishermen are also collectors. I had a friend who definitely was. He decided to take up fishing in late middle age (having been a keen fisherman in his youth) and he also decided, within weeks, that he was going to collect fishing reels. With Nottingham being the home of the “Nottingham Reel” it seemed a logical thing to do.

Collectors, you see, come in all shapes and sizes and are never short of an excuse to start a new collection. If they aren’t collecting things they are buying things to keep them in, or books to learn about them. And if all else fails, I can always claim to be cataloguing my collection. It’s not such a high level gambit as “writing” but it still suffices to deflect actual work.

Flying Horse of Gansu medallion & leaflet

A Sucessful Day of Procrastination

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I have all the copies I think I need (though the solicitor will doubtless disagree) for Number One Son, and have successfully not filled in any forms today. I know this isn’t really the attitude, but I’ve always taken the attitude that in these things it is easier to reduce the target rather than work harder. It’s n attitude that hasn’t always won favour with other people, but it works for me.

My excuse is that I had a disturbed night’s sleep and rose early to write poetry so had no time for forms and such stuff. In fact I rose at 7.30, worked till 9.30 (a variety of time-wasting exercises) and made breakfast when Julia came down.

At that point we watched TV, did the washing, had afternoon tea and, in my case, napped. We watched The Hippopotamus, which was adequately funny and had enough mystery in it to keep me involved. It’s originally a novel by Stephen Fry and is a sort of cross between Withnail & I and Gosford Park.

After that I made  a simple meal of pizza, using ready made bases, and that was really the end of the day. I have done a bit on WP and |Julia made the sandwiches for tomorrow. I didn’t ask what she filled them with and look forward to a surprise tomorrow.. We ended up watching a programme about celebrities in he dark and had hot chocolate.

As usual, I say “celebrities” but I don’t have a clue who three of them are.This could be due to  my lack of celebrity knowledge, or it could be down to them not really being celebrities. The best one in there is Chris McCausland, not only is his career buoyant, but he’s blind, so he’s at home in the dark. I like him I find him funny and I find it poignant that he’s looking after the others. But I don’t think tht even he will persuade me to watch any more of the programme.

And that was my Sunday.