What's Sleep?

I had a bad night, and didn't get to sleep until 7am. I purposefully only allowed myself three hours, then an hour's nap in the afternoon. It's left me grumpy, headachey, and my back hates me.

Bear has been awesome. You remember the garden yesterday? Well it now looks like this. 

You remember the flower bed in the middle? When father moved in, it was actually filled in by bricks. However father wanted a flower bed there and pulled the bricks up and added soil and plants. The trouble is, the margin between the bed and the borders is too small to, for example, put a chair or a little table for snacks. The plan is that bear will transfer the dirt (which is awesome black soil) to the bed under the window, lay down weed suppressing membrane, cover the space with gravel until it's level and call it done. He's pottered around between showers and video games and I'm very happy with what he's done. 

Writing stuff - I'm in so much pain, tired, and so fed up that I decided to abandon any hope of getting Further Tales from the White Hart expanded and reorganised and published it 'as is' here. 

I've also given up on translating Back at the White Hart from 46 separate very short stories, many under 500 words, into something that reads like a novel, and I've also given up on refinishing the selection of short stories and Dark Picture. I'll pull them together, check the spelling and grammar, and publish, purely to have all the stories accessible. Apart from anything else, I don't want to publish it on a blog because it's already looking stuffed. Then it's off my mind, off my lists and I'm a little closer to my goal of writing all about werewolves. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

Bear is Awesome

I may be slightly biased, and bear is doing things at his own pace, but you remember how the garden looked last time that I played out.

Bear and I have been out and while I've tried to help, bear has done everything that involves using a back.

And I don't know if anyone remembers, but we had an apple tree in a tub and while the blossom was pretty guaranteed, we never got much from it, and as it was hidden under the honeysuckle and I forgot about it, the drought saw it off. Bear cut the dead tree into bits, emptied the soil which I suspect is completely dead, and I now have a substantially sized tub that I plan to fill with a rose.

The soil is really good black earth, and it's wasted on me. Of course, I put in compost and dug it over many years ago, and father had a good play with it, but it's the sort of growing medium that most gardeners covet. Efforts continue, but I doubt that much will get done tomorrow as rain is forecast. My back is hurting, and I have eye strain so I'm happy to be coming to the end of the post, but I had to post to show how well bear has done.

Writing stuff has given me the eye strain, so I've not checked in on the blogs or awesome comments as I would have liked, but you can read how I'm doing with the switch in writing blogs on Wordpress here and on Blogger here. 

It Could be Worse

I can't move very well. I think it's something like a pulled muscle, but it's bad. But it could be worse. Yesterday we had chicken with roast potatoes, peas and gravy. It was all frozen stuff, apart from the gravy granules, but it was nice and I managed to get things into the oven (though DH took things out for me). There was a nice amount of chicken left over from the frozen chicken breast joint, which there should have been at the price of it. Bear and I had it in curry tonight, and there's a portion of the curry leftover as well. Again, it wasn't inspired, as it was the curry sauce in a jar with mushrooms and onions that I'd previously chopped and frozen. 

It got me thinking. The frozen chicken breast was £6.65 (very nearly the devil) for 800g and we got six very ample portions from it, and absolutely could have spread it over more without stinting. But there's a large chicken at Tesco that's on offer for £4.60 Clubcard price that's 1.7-2.1kg (around three and three quarters to four and one half pounds) and the fresh chicken is barn raised. It's not free range, but with all the problems with bird flu, it could be worse. It's roughly a third of the price by weight. And the potatoes aren't cost effective either.

But I have struggled so much over the last few years that I'm concerned that a lot of a proper chicken would go to waste. And with all the problems with farming and the weather, it feels worse than ever to waste food. I've always failed at making stock, and when bear is back at university, a small chicken will be more than enough. I think that once my back is a little less twitchy, I'm going to have to sort out the kitchen and make some decisions. I want to make it easier for me to make a proper meal and that means streamlining ingredients, keeping lists, and being thorough. After all, making the curry was a lot easier because I had the veg that I'd previously prepared and frozen ready, and that made a difference. I need to make realistic choices. 

I haven't done anything worth taking a pic today, as I've been working on writing stuff, so I had a little play with Canva again. I'm not sure about how the text turned out, but I looked for a sunny quote after the eclipse and the end of the relentless heatwave. 

Writing stuff - I've had a few battles with the transfer today, but it's continuing. The latest instalment of The Guest is on the blogger blog here and the wordpress blog here. 

Hugs and good health to all 

Knitting

I got some knitting done for the first time in ages. Partly it was because I didn't want to move around much as my back is stiff, and partly because it's finally cool enough to knit. It's just a basic blanket as I'm still feeling the effects of the co-codamol. I dug it out of the pile of unfinished projects and it was fun to watch YouTube videos while I managed a few rows.

And speaking of cocodamol, if you want to dream of sentient washing machines throwing spaghetti at your head, I utterly recommend it. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

Ouch

I've just done something interesting to my back. I was bending over and it feels like something gave. I've taken some co-codemal and I'm now away off to fairyland.

I typed fairy into the search bar of Unsplash and got this, so at least there's a pic.

Hugs and good health to all

Photo by Simona D'Auria on Unsplash

Not a Good Day

Some things went right today. I got a load more stories posted on the non-spooky blog, and I must be getting to the end of that. It's taking me some time as they don't copy over easily and I've had to do a certain amount of fiddling around to make sure that everything fits, each post has a picture, and the pictures that aren't mine have proper attributions. 

I have a headache. I have a big headache. I'm sure that I'm not alone as the heat does not suit me, and my stomach is telling me that I had something that didn't agree with me, so I feel like death. 

The headache was not helped by the government's alert going off. I'd say that you don't need to tell people not to use things like disposable barbecues or fireworks when the entire country is tinder dry and ready to go up in smoke, but there's a warning for nuts on a jar of peanut butter for a reason.

I am about to write about eight-legged problems. Here is a cute picture of a kitten to soothe anyone accidentally reading when they didn't want to, and it's the last part of the post so you can skip it.

Photo by Tuqa Nabi on Unsplash

Our house is currently over supplied with cellar spiders. You can find them on Wikipedia, if you really want to look. They look incredibly creepy, but they're generally harmless to humans and prey on other spiders. I take the view of live and let live and wish that they'd also go after the fly that got in yesterday and we haven't managed to squash yet. 

The live and let live part was tested when of those spiders decided to hang their latest meal directly over where we were planning to eat ours. Did I mention my upset stomach? DH was a hero and sucked up the scene with the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner, because while I'm happy for spiders to scuttle off into the corners, there are some things where I draw the line. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

I Blame the Weather

There's a load of writing stuff here, so feel free to skip. However, it's the reason why I've been skimming over blogs and not doing much apart from that writing stuff. 

It's far too hot for me. If we keep getting summers like this, where there's more than a couple of weeks of temperatures higher than 25C, I'm going to have to consider getting some form of air conditioning. It would have to be the portable type, though, as our house is the opposite of open plan. There are currently a lot of fans going. 

I've not done any gardening, because I've been too hot and also I've been distracted by the writing stuff. I didn't really bother with the eclipse yesterday, though I kept an eye on the light levels out of the window. It was strange seeing how the light changed and faded. Bear and DH had a little wander outside, but it didn't get completely dark. I feel that we've been sold unrealistic expectations by films. Besides, it wasn't going to be a full eclipse here, though it was still a little spooky. 

Writing Stuff - The quote that I made on Canva hits the nail on the head. I wrote a post explaining that I won't be posting on my Wordpress writing blog after October, which you can read here on the Wordpress blog and here on my revived Blogger writing blog but it boils down to me not really clicking with Wordpress and that it costs me money in the way it's set up and Blogger is free. Then I sat down to go through 598 posts to work out what I could transfer over en masse, like the collections for Under Dark Hills and Invitation Accepted  and what I had to copy over individually. I noticed a lot of stories that had been saved on my Wordpress blog as drafts were the non-spooky stuff, as the supernatural stuff is sort of my brand. It felt right to take them off a blog that was mainly supernatural, but I liked some of them. We may be looking at as many as thirty separate stories. 

Did you know that you could publish a book on Amazon that is as short as one page long? Nope, I'm not doing that, but I could definitely expand and re-imagine some of my non-spooky stories on there as short reads, and I may well do in the future. However, as I explained in the post, I'm worried about losing the stories and it seems a shame to leave them in the dark. I mean, it's not great literature, but I think that they're okay. So, being unsupervised, overheated and thinking it was a great idea at the time, I set up yet another blog for just the non-supernatural stuff. You can find it here. I've only got about half a dozen posted on there at the time of typing, but it shouldn't take me too long to get things sorted, especially if I stop getting distracted by reading the old stories. I was reminded of one of my favourites, Domestic Demon and it made me smile. 

Thank goodness there's cooler weather in the forecast, and hopefully I won't get too lost in this jumble of posts. 

Hugs and good health to all.