Tag Archives: time passing

10 Years

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According to WP it is ten years since I registered. They just sent me a message to tell me. It took a few weeks for me to get into the swing of things so my first post was not until the 8th of October. I’ve just had a look at that first month – there are few photos and a tendency to forget titles. Some things don’t change. That month, we went to The Lakes to celebrate our 25th Wedding anniversary.

Guinea Fowl sheltering from the rain under a picnic table.

A lot has happened in the last ten years, but I expect you have noticed that. A lot has happened to us all.

Unfortunately, or possibly fortunately, depending on your point of view, I still can’t find much to say. House purchasing has driven it all out of my head. Solicitors, taxation and bills don’t leave much room for other thoughts. I’m just glad that we are doing it now. My parents left their final move until they were nearly 80 and it took a lot out of them. I’m not sure they ever really bounced back from it.

Fortunately I did manage to sneak some time to send submissions out. Life feels a lot better when I have submissions out, even if they eventually get returned. It’s hard to think of myself as a writer when I’m not actually submitting work.

A colourful salad – borage, nasturtium leaves and fat hen.

Bearing in mind some of the things I’d been saying about planning, and trying harder, I sent a submission to a magazine I have a patchy record with. They have already accepted something, so it paid off. That’s really the difference between positive and negative thinking. I could have sat here, avoided submitting and carried on thinking that they “never” accept anything. Or I could, as I did, send a submission and get a surprise acceptance. maybe I’m getting better. Or just luckier.

Yes, soup is a constant thread in this blog. I made Tomato, Pepper and Lentil soup today.

Photos are from October 2014. The cake was for our 25th Wedding Anniversary.

The Knell of Parting Day

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A knell is the sound of a bell rung solemnly. I checked it up before using it. What I don’t know is how you toll a bell solemnly. You just pull a rope don’t you. The solemnity is in the timing of the successive rings, I would have thought, not in the quality of a single ring. Anyway, that’s my thought on it.

Whilst looking at Gray’s Elegy and picking it over for a quote, I noticed that he composed it by reusing some lines for another poem he had tried to write. I’m glad to find it’s not just me that treats old and unsuccessful poems as raw material for new ones.

Where does all the time go? Twilight has arrived, the sky is holding just a hint of colour behind a veil of grey cloud and it is time to eat and change pace.

That’s probably what I miss most about Julia not being here, Well that and there seems to be more washing up to do. And no tea appears magically by my elbow as I write. However, without her there is definitely no change of pace. I get up. I do what I like. I watch what I like on TV. Nobody wakes me up to tell me to stop snoring. And then it’s time for bed.

She, meanwhile, has been to a baseball game and is currently at a Mother’s Day BBQ celebration hosted by the family of Number One Son’s partner.  They are spit roasting a whole pig. Canadian BBQs are very different to the ones we have in Nottingham.

I’m back from eating now. Quiche and salad, in case you were wondering. The same quiche and almost the same salad as I had yesterday. No, I haven’t developed a sudden love of salad, but we had it in the fridge and I hate wasting food. I am also pretty sure I would hate dying, so it’s probably time to start eating a healthier diet.

Tomorrow I will, I think, start with cereal and fruit. Lunch? It’s definitely time to get round to that mushroom soup. Evening meal is fish finger sandwiches. They are the ones that are marketed as containing Omega 3 and being good for you. This time next year it will be something else that is good for me, so I will just have to read the internet and try to keep up. I’m eating more sandwiches and fewer vegetables now that Julia isn’t here.

A Missed Day

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Last night (or this morning, to be accurate) I followed my normal habit of falling asleep in front of the TV. Normally I can write a few hundred words on waking but this time I felt so tired and stiff that I went straight up to bed. Fortunately I had already made my sandwiches.  This stiffness has been a feature of this week for some reason – I woke in bed a few days ago with aches in my hands, arms and back and it seems to have become a fixture. I think I may have missed my medication last week, which may be the reason.

Normally I take my arthritis pills on Saturday night. I had to change the routine a few weeks ago and have become a little disorganised. I also have to start injecting myself fortnightly now that we are back from holiday and am going to have to keep a diary to make sure I get it right. You can easily lose a week when you aren’t concentrating.

Actually, you can easily lose a month when you aren’t concentrating, which is what I seem to have done. Once again I am deficient in material to submit, and struggling to write. This isn’t due to lack of inspiration, more to the fact that I find a laptop keyboard harder to write with than a normal one, just as I find a keyboard less good than a fountain pen.

I need to get a grip and start writing. I will make a start by writing an extra post on Sunday to make up for Friday.

 

Day 195

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Day 200 is looming . . .

Will I soon have done 200 lazy titles, and will the time have passed so soon?

Numbers do not lie, which is the trouble with numbers. Apart from when they are i9n the hands of a skilled accountant. At that point numbers can do almost anything.

200 feels like the pinnacle of a roller-coaster, and we all know what comes next . . .

I’m very late with this post, having fallen asleep in front of the TV late in the evening and slept almost until dawn. Well, till dawn, let’s face it. It is now light and the birds are not singing. We must have got to that time of year when they all move out to find more food. That’s another sign that the year is moving on.

It’s also a sign that I need to become more regular in my habits. proper bedtimes are not only good for sleeping properly, but for blood pressure, weight and Alzheimer’s. n fact, going to bed at the right time is, according to the internet, good for lots of things. Strange then, that doctors seem unaware of the benefits. They certainly don’t mention it when I se them.

They just want me to take more pills.

Apart from depression. The favoured remedy for depression, I’m told, is no longer pills, but talking to somebody. The doctor gives you a number, you ring it and somebody on the other end tells you that they are too busy to talk to you now but will be back in touch in six to eight weeks. This has happened to two people I know. It’s a logical development from the concept of receptionists doing triage at the surgery.

Soon we will be able to ring the NHS and they will give us the number of  a local plumber if you need tubes fixing, or a car mechanic if your heart requires a couple of crocodile clips and a battery . I really don’t know why we ever thought training doctors and building hospitals was cost effective.

In the early hours of the morning I can grow very cynical.

Day 115

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We have now had 11 Spanish poppies in bloom. I know this from counting the dead heads, as at last one bloomed after we left for work this morning and dropped its petals before I got home. They are prolific, but not particularly durable.

I took some flower photographs tonight when I got home, so at least I have some fresh photographs to use.

They include Spanish Poppies and two different sorts of honesty – the white and the cross-bred purple and white.

White Honesty

Purplish Honesty

While I remember, here is a link to a very interesting page. I have never seen, or heard of, anything like it in my life. You think of all the hype surrounding our various national teams, but where is the publicity surrounding a genuine international triumph like this? You would think, with the current popularity of baking programmes, that there would be more news about it.

I’m running out of things to write about now. I think I’ve said enough about customers and their foibles recently. I’ve also said I really should get down to some serious work and planning, so I won’t repeat that either. Did I say how frightening it is looking back on old posts and seeing that you still haven’t done things you were thinking about two years ago? Time is not slowing down and I am not sitting here making extra time, so I really should stop frittering it away. Or should I?

When you have a diminishing supply of something, why not spend it in the way that makes you happiest? If I want to sit down with Julia and watch TV maybe I should do that and not worry about what I think I should be doing.  Life is too short to worry about writing a literary masterpiece when you could be watching comedians.

Dandelion using deliberate soft-focus. Or just plain blurred . . .

I think I need to brush up on my photography technique.

 

 

Day 80

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Has so much of the year gone already? This day Numbering title system is quite depressing. So to cheer things up, let’s watch Italy score a truly excellent try to the backing of Nessun Dorma.

I have, I admit, seen better, but they feature my kids and so (a) are not available on film and (b) I am probably biased.

This evening I watched one of those videos on health and am now convinced I am dying. This is a clear case of cyberchondria. and after a bar of chocolate I feel much better. For those of you who don’t waste time on links, it’s a clever pun on hypochondria, is a real condition and is caused by anxiety at the immense amount of information (and misinformation) about health on the internet.

The best antidote for worry is just to take a look around. Day by day there i more blossom out. White, pale pink, deeper pink and even red, though that is mainly camelias and they are, in general, a bit too showy for my taste. Set against almond, plum and cherry blossom, plus magnolia and even flowering blackcurrant, they are just to big and too red. Quince, which is also out, is red, but is subtler, with smaller flowers. The header picture is a quince.

That is all I have to offer today. I started off with big writing plans for the evening but ended up wasting time. I have sent one submission this month and have another ready to go, so I’m doing Ok, but am conscious that I still have another couple to do before the end of the month if I’m going to keep my numbers up. The numbers are important in themselves, but they are a way to measure whether I am writing enough (because practice makes perfect) ans whether editors think I am making the grade.

I went looking for photos of blossom in March but 2022, 2021 and 2020 have little to offer and in 2019 we had snow in March. These are some bird photographs from March 2018. Have we really done so little in the last four years?

Wren at Rufford Abbey

Nuthatch at Rufford Abbey

Robin - singing

Robin – singing

Time Passing

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I realised on Sunday evening, as I sat by the fire watching TV, that it was the first time in about a month that I have not noticed any pain. It’s very relaxing. I now need to make sure, as much as I can, that this continues. I can’t do much about  the weather but I can make sure I lose some weight, do my hand exercises and order the pills in plenty of time.

That was about all I did during the afternoon, as the promise of the morning faded. We had stir-fried vegetables for tea and watched Miss Marple. After that I read a few more blogs and went to bed. Life is less fun since I had to start working Mondays again.

It became even less fun when I actually arrived at work after dropping Julia off. We had one parcel of 14 items to send to Australia and one of eight items to send to Canada. IN addition there were invoices, queries, offers and fourteen other parcels to send. At one point, I started to swell up like the Incredible Hulk. I couldn’t find several of the bits I wanted, things have been moved since the last time I looked at them and time was pressing. Just as I was about to ask for help in locating several of the pieces, a customer came in without an appointment. It would be unprofessional of me to offer an opinion of either his parentage or the lonely existence suffered by his two brain cells, but if it were an international event he really could bore for England.

I have  a deadline looming in six days, and nothing fit to send. Another is lurking behind that one and then there are a couple of extras I have slotted in. There are more in May.

Have you noticed that the year is nearly a third over and, having been on hold for lockdown, I have done nothing that I had planned outside writing. Writing is OK, and I enjoy it, but I really did want to get more work done around the house and garden.

Oh dear, Spring has only just started and I am in a panic about time passing. Strangely, I can calm my fears by playing games on the computer, this feeling better whilst, in fact, making the problem worse. Life is strange.

We had pizza and salad for tea tonight – reasonably easy to prepare as we bought the pizzas ready made and just added a few fresh veg. It was made even pleasanter for me because Julia prepared it. I am a lucky man.

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.