There's Been a Delivery

Jo - the plant is a fuschia. There are hundreds of varieties of fuschia in existence. Some are small with fat pink flowers. Others have dainty crimson and purple flowers. As far as I can tell, the nearest type to this is the variety known as Tom Thumb, but it's only supposed to get to two feet tall. Gladys, my fuschia, towers over me every year no matter how much I cut it back. It was planted by my father, however, and he had form for growing giant fuschis from what were supposed to be small pot plants. When I was tiny, he planted a 'small' fuschia that had to be hacked back twice a year so we could use the path and it cracked a sewer pipe. Here's an older pic that gives a slightly better view.

Bless - thank you. Bear remains calm, which is more than I'm managing. 

I've shopped at Temu. I'll be honest, I view it as a type of gambling, like putting a bet on a horse. I'm not against betting on horses, and if I could find a betting shop and work out how to place a bet, I would possibly bet on a horse with the prettiest name but it's unlikely. My form of gambling is shopping at places like Temu. I have concerns, but I shop using my laptop which has lots of anti virus stuff on it and I pick up stuff that I can't find over here. There are some serious temptations, but I work hard to limit myself. Today's parcel included some fancy dice for bear for Christmas and a couple of notebooks. 

The first is a cleaning notebook. I thought I'd do my best to follow that and hopefully I'll gradually get the home into shape. 

There will be plenty of times that I don't do what's on the list, or do more, or branch out and do something completely different. For example, I'm never going to meal prep. That has never worked well for me and I'm going to ignore the note for me to prep on Sunday. On the other hand, it's a framework and I'll take all the help I can get.

The other notebook is a planner. I thought it would only be a notebook divided into hourly blocks so that I could hopefully plan out what I'm doing, but it's more. There are pages about setting goals and making plans. If I work hard at sticking to that, it will help me direct my attention where it needs to go. Once I've got through the notebooks (if I can manage to stick to them), I hope that I'll be in a good place to keep going and use habits that I've developed. 

I keep thinking that they're a waste of money because I can just make lists, but if they give the slightest bit of help then it will be absolutely worth it. I'll share how it goes.

One thing that I'm not doing today is anything in the garden. It's cold, wet and miserable. Today is definitely an indoor kind of day. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

Sorting Out a Schedule

I've not posted over the last few days because I'm not managing the timing. I've usually posted late at night about what happened that day. Over the last few days, however, by the time it gets to my usual posting time, I'm too tired to be even remotely coherent. I've also failed with pics. Yesterday, though, I managed to get a nice pic of Gladys.

We'd been to feed the magpies and crows and they had some serious gang wars over the peanuts. 

I'm not sure what other bits that I've missed. I put a post up for the Green Party in the window for the local council by-election. The local Green Party have worked really hard for their constituents over the years, and I've quite a bit of respect for them. Except... I was talking about putting the poster on the side window of the porch so that more people would see. The representative (who is a lovely lady - seriously lovely), said that she thought that it would be better facing front so that more people would be able to see it from the bus. I just took a pic of the view from my front door, right next to the window that shows the poster.

As you can probably tell, buses don't come down here. It is a bus-free zone and the drivers would probably strike if anyone asked them. I nodded, smiled, put the poster where they asked and considered my voting choices.

A week last Friday I failed to cook tofu because the darned stuff had been left in the fridge and was frozen. The fridge is still acting up but I know that I'll just have to work with it until something drastic happens. The day before yesterday, Friday, I tried again. The recipe was baked tofu with ginger rice. The tofu was fine and I had no trouble coating it with gluten free breadcrumbs, although next time I think that I'll use the cornflour-and-fun-spices technique. This time the problem was with the rice. I pressed the wrong button on the rice cooker and the rice turned out like gravel. I ended up using microwave rice instead. It turned out beautifully, and it's definitely one to consider again. 

As a bonus, we have some fresh ginger left over, so if all goes well I can see some lovely fresh ginger, lemon and honey tea in the near future. 

I cleared out the freezer yesterday so that DH could take it this morning on his usual tip run. There were some fish fillets that bear said were particularly nasty and wouldn't eat, some green beans that expired in 2023 and all sorts of packets holding one tiny fragment. In a perfect world, I should have creatively used up all the crumbs. I thought realistically about the chances of that happening and threw out all those bits where there was one tablespoon of mince, or two chunks of butternut squash, or some brussels sprouts that expired in June. I'm fairly lax about expiry dates on frozen foods, but I loathe the things at the best of times so it was a great excuse. I got rid of a surprising volume, mostly packaging.

We now have some space in the freezer so we can use it properly. I've got some plans that I'm not going to share on here just in case. I also have an idea of what's available and I plan to start working through those this week to continue to make space ready for Christmas. Besides, Tesco are running a '4 for the price of 3' deal on frozen foods. There's not much that we'd use, and no decent plain meat, but I may as well get a couple of packs of peas and some bits for bear.  

I'm planning on posting in the morning instead, so hopefully I should be able to keep up a little better. 

Hugs and good health to all. 

All About Writing

I've spent a lot of today on Writing Stuff.

Apart from that, I've been coaxing bear to hand over his washing. I was all in favour of him doing his own washing when it was a good learning tool and he wasn't under pressure. However the pressure for his A levels next June has already started. He has promised that he'll hand over his washing tomorrow. 

It's crazy for bear. He's pretty relaxed at the moment, but the pressure has already started. That's the thing. He's already got all sorts of tests and practices lined up at school. To be honest, I'm worrying about him. He's currently fine, but I'll be watching like a hawk as he heads towards the A levels. 

The current pressure is about the MAT, or the Oxford test for Maths. Bear's college are devoting massive amounts of time and energy to get him ready for it. I knew that there would be pressure when I agreed that he should enroll in a high achieving Maths college, and bear seems to be handling it with grace, but I worry.

Writing stuff - apart from worrying about bear, I've been setting more stuff on Royal Road and you can find all of Across a Misty Bridge here. I've been working on a few things, and I'll share when I can. 

 Hugs and good health to all.

Lots of Writing Stuff

DH and bear made dinner and it was spectacular. It was a large Yorkshire Pudding, filled with gently cooked mushrooms and a wonderfully thick and savoury onion gravy, together with peas and baby potatoes cooked with pesto and lemon. It was fantastic. I was so impressed. We all agreed that it was pretty perfect and I think I'll have it for my birthday dinner - whenever that is!

It's been another quiet day in many ways and we watched some more of the classic Doctor Who episodes. It's been wonderfully comforting spending that time together and I got quite a bit of knitting done. The rest of the time has mainly been writing stuff.

Writing Stuff - I've set up the first chapter of Tales from the White Hart on Royal Road and you can find it here. I've set it up to release a chapter per day and queued them all up to release one at a time right to the end of the books, which takes us to the end of November. After that I'll be posting Dark Picture and Under Dark Hills. Then I can put in Back to the White Hart and whatever else I've come up with. I've come to the reluctant realisation that I'm not good at converting stories told as serials into novels. I've been having a real struggle. So I'll put them on Royal Road to hopefully direct people to novels, which, with luck, I'll get more written because I'm not stumbling over the serials. I'll share as I go along. Though I'm not writing anything more tonight as sorting out the scheduling of 67 posts left my brain in a very porridge-like state. 

And as I haven't got pics, here's the cover of Tales from the White Hart.

Hugs and good health to all. 

It's Not My Birthday

I don't fake much. What I write about me and bear and DH is absolutely true. As you can tell from the last few weeks, I don't do well at elaborating when nothing much is happening. However Sybil isn't the name on my driving licence, and neither is Lyssa. 

I've always been a bit twitchy about birthdays. It used to be one of the easy ways to steal your identity. Things have moved on since then, but apart from bear, whose birthday is ridiculously close to Christmas, I try to avoid mentioning birthdays for any of my family that are still alive. When I created the Facebook page for Lyssa Medana, I lied about my birthday, because of course I did. I put down 22 September 1968 as it was nearly my age although not very near my birthday. The birthday wishes have already started coming on Facebook. 

I always feel hugged by a birthday wish. Sometimes I feel bewildered as I listen in British to someone giving me wonderful good wishes in American - bewildered but completely appreciative of the kindness. I also always feel guilty. Last year I had over a hundred good wishes. I have something like 4.8k friends on Facebook. I have met, I think, one of them or perhaps two. Some may not have met me in person, but are very dear friends. Others are something of an enigma. 

This is the page for the writer so I'm extremely undiscriminate about who I accept. I have had far too many encounters with sleazeballs and scam artists. Sometimes it's people who have got caught up in the algorithm that recommends me as a potential friend. Sometimes it's about the writing business. There are also some truly lovely, wonderful, kind and generous people who I've 'met' there and now adore - rather like this blog. It's wonderful fun for me. I still feel guilty when I get the birthday wishes. 

I'll fudge over a few things here and there to try and stay vaguely anonymous, but I'm well aware that anyone who wanted to find me wouldn't have much trouble. I'm more comfortable being honest about who I am. But I'm kind of glad to have a cobweb thin layer of a different name between me and people who aren't keen on my books or who are not acting in good faith. It's something of a sanity saver. 

So if you are on Facebook, don't worry about my birthday. If you aren't already a friend and would like to add me, or want to follow me, the link is here, but it's all about the writing and I don't stress about it. This blog is for friends. I'm quite boring on Facebook. I mainly share funny posts, info from fellow writers and an occasional reference to my writing. 

(I also have a Facebook page in my real name, but it's mainly mums from bear's primary school so I don't check it very often)

And this is the pic for my personal page. I guess I should update it with something fancy, but I kind of like it.

Hugs and good health to all. 

Fridge Freezer

The problems with the fridge continue and I suspect that it needs replacing. DH seems to think that we can work around the fridge's little ways. I am not so sure.

Tonight we were supposed to have Air Fried Tofu, but I was going to toss the cubes of tofu in a mix of cornflour, garlic granules, onion granules and paprika. I planned to make rice in the rice cooker plus stir fry veggies in a pouch of sweet chili and garlic sauce that was part of the offer on jars of sauce. 

The tofu was frozen solid. 

I ended up doing the rice, the veggies in sauce and some herby vegetarian sausages. It wasn't a complete fail, but I would have preferred the tofu. 

I need to overhaul the contents of the freezer. There are a few boxes of food that bear requested and then decided to never eat again. I may throw a couple of them out to make room. I'm also sure that there are things that have lurked in there for years and I may as well get rid of those as well. I also need to use up the oddments lurking in the corners. We are in the run up to Christmas and I want to be able to store stuff in there. 

Apart from that, it's been a quiet day. I need to make more excitement in my life.

Hugs and good health to a..

Spiders Don't Have Skeletons

DH and bear have both explained to me that spiders can't have skeletons. It's not possible. It didn't stop me from indulging from Morrisons Halloween section.

 I nearly got the rat with the skeleton ears. The men in my life were equally bewildered and tried to explain to me that there were no bones in ears and there couldn't possibly be skeleton ears. It didn't stop the creators of that Halloween decoration. 

I've spent a lot of today going over the sequel to King's Silver. It was in editing when Three Furies Press shut down, so it's finished but it needs a lot of polishing. It's been fun, but it's meant an unremarkable day. 

Hugs and good health to all.