Mud & Mischief

I bought a dehydrator a while back from eBay. The seller was a lovely lady in Staffordshire, James went and collected it whilst he was over that way. It was bought by her brand new in October.

I’ve used it several times, made apples rings and beef jerky and dried bananas (which are actually quite chewy and very yummy). Yesterday I put a batch of apple rings into it for the weekend - and this morning found they’d hardly dried at all. The fan was working, but there wasn’t any heat. O calamity, o woe. Soggy apple rings and still squidgy bananas.

Reading the manual, it says it has a 12 YEAR guarantee. But that’s in the US where they are made. I can only try, I thought, and rang UK Juicers Ltd who sold it originally. Talk about customer service - the nice man at the end found the original invoice for Mrs H-S, asked me when I’d bought it (about a month ago) and said right, they’d better have a look at it and he’d sending me post-paid return labels in the mail tonight, and I was to package it up and give UPS a ring to collect it.

Glad there was no one around as I must have looked pretty stupid sat here with my mouth hanging open. I guess I was all emotionally geared up for a battle - no idea why I was taking that point of view (might have something to do with the builders….) but his cheerful “yes, sure, we’ll see what we can do as you’ve only had it a month”just kind of threw me. In a good way. I’m not complaining!

So fingers crossed they can fix it for me, as the last lot of dried apple rings were divine.

Off to do my ironing now - we’re away in the van to Gaydon for a Land Rover show this weekend. First one of the season. Spring has truly arrived.

I should stay away from that blogthings website. I get sidetracked for hours.

Your Life Path Number is 5

Your purpose in life is to life freely and collect experiences. You love life - new adventures, new people, new ideas. You are very curious, and you crave novelty in all forms. You tend to make friends easily, and you enjoy the company of all types of people. In love, you are fun and even a bit intoxicating. But you won’t stick around for long. You are impulsive and spontaneous - which sometimes leads you to do things you regret. Sometimes you can be overindulgent with food, sex, or drugs. You have many talents, so many that you are often scattered and unfocused.

And then I remember how to change the font and background colour….

Gee, it’s May on Monday. And I’ve not really updated anything I’ve done in April. Must have been an exciting month…

Actually, it wasn’t too bad. Went to Spain on the 8th for a week, which was nice. Not quite as much sun as I would have liked but at least it didn’t rain. Slightly manic second week of the Easter break, in that I’m not totally sure what we did but we never seemed to be at home or be able to arrange going anywhere or to do anything as there was always something on.

On Monday I went down to Birmingham for the night and saw Miss Saigon with Mom, my aunt and my cousin. Thoroughly enjoyed that, especially the helicopter bit. Spent an hour at Mandy’s (aunt) on the way home discussing gardening and the best way to germinate sweetcorn and how impossibly provincial some Brummies are in that they didn’t know what a butternut squash was. lol

And have spent an hour at the lottie this morning, child free and in peace and quiet. If you ignore the council blokes strimming the graveyard a hundred yards down the road. Dug up a massive bagful of couch grass (damn the stuff, it’s enough to make me want to say to hell with organics and pass me the glyphosate). Planted some leeks. Going back later today to plant a few more potatoes and sow some carrots. Didn’t do enough carrots last year, so have large piece of fleece, and I’m going to grow myself a half ton this year.

See, I knew we’d end up talking about gardening. Off to investigate my greenhouse and sow a few more peppers- they do take an awful long time to germinate. Then off to a funeral. Bob, one of the old boys from the allotment. He was always there - part of the fabric of the place. didn’t actually have a plot, but his house is right next to the driveway into the lotties. You have to swerve around his garage to drive up to the top. Is very sad, and very strange not to see him sat by his garage, with his old black dog, Ben. Ben died in January, and Bob had a stroke the month after. Another stroke and a heart attack finished him off last week. He was always there - he was an engineer and had all kinds of lathes and presses in his garage. He fabricated bits and pieces for all the classic car owners for miles around. Apparently there’s going to be a large classic car procession from the church to the crem, which will be lovely.

Four months into the year and two funerals already.

They keep sending me catalogues. *sigh*

I’m so weak. I have no self control.

Then they offer me free postage if I spend x amount. And a free gift (of more books!) if I spent just a little bit more than the free postage amount… damn them.

However, it does mean I have 31 books for £31.95. That’s an average price of approximately £1.03 per book. Can I really complain? With free postage to boot?

Jax - suggestion - first book for your bookclub thing - Labyrinth by Kate Mosse.

Have just been outside draping fleece (the garden variety, not jacket material) all over my plum and apple trees, in case there’s a frost tonight. It’s a bit clear out there, which hopefully bodes well for tomorrow’s weather, but may mean we get a few degrees of ice in the air. Hence draperies everywhere.

Spent a thoroughly enjoyable day in the garden potting on and sowing and planting and tidying - James even mowed the lawn. Well, hacked at it as there’s nothing sharp about those blades. However, it looks much tidier than it did, kids toys in the playhouse, I offered them a penny for every dandelion head they picked, so we should limit the weeds this year. Still can’t find my pink garden notebook, so will have to start blogging on just the notes I’ve got.

Pictures too - must find the photos of Spain and put a few onto flickr. Asuming I can remember how to do it as it’s been so long since I last did anything with photos.

Feeling fat - tomorrow morning, I’m going to weigh myself and see if I can eat healthily whilst I try and figure out which particular diet I’m going to inflict on us all. GI? You are what you eat? Weight watchers? Exchange plan? Who knows??

Going to go finish off the last of the G&B dark chocolate with ginger now, as that won’t be allowed tomorrow.

I did the Ecological Footprint from an earlier post.

CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES
FOOD 1.2
MOBILITY 1.3
SHELTER 0.7
GOODS/SERVICES 1.5
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 4.7

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 5.3 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 2.6 PLANETS.

I think it was my answers to the transport questions I went back and improved my fuel economy up two marks and I got the result of 1.8 planets, or 3.3 global hectares.

Earth Day 2006

Do the Footprint Quiz.

Find stuff to do on Kid’s Domain.

Ask the BBC why the only reference to it on their website is dated April 2000. Although I did find this on our Ecological Debt Day. The little planet graphic is fairly disturbing.

Finally got around to doing the word cloud thing that Merry showed me a while back. I never did read her blog about it - first I heard of it was when I popped down to her’s for the day and found her wearing this amazing t-shirt…

So I did mine. Actually, though, I cheated slightly and used the old Mud & Mischief blog over on Blogger, as when I used this one on Blogsome, I got a lot of depressing words. The Blogger blog, however, gave me a lovely word cloud. Maybe I should go do one for Muddy Musings…

(snipped from the end of the last entry, as I feel this needs a post of its own).

I need to start reading again, need to get my brain back in gear and working at something that approximates it’s old speed. Even half its old speed would be good. I feel like my IQ has been slowly dribbling out of the back of my head, one point a month for the past 7 years and somedays I can’t follow a thought from one end to the other. Only, I know I’m not as stupid as I must come across on occasion, and it drives me insane. This is what it must be like to go senile. Your true personality just drizzles away, with just the odd flash that something isn’t right, until you end up in a world of daytime TV and gossip magazines and think it’s normal.

Argh. Enough of that drivel.

Carpe diem - time to take control of this aimless life of mine, I think. This term, we have structure, form and a fairly rigid timescale to follow. We have a set number of weekends that we’re going to be doing DOC stuff and 4x4 shows, and in between the kids have got pre-/school, ballet, spanish club, swimming at Grandma’s and the idiot box; whilst I have the school run, the allotment, my garden, the idiot builders and a new relationship with the local gym to foster. I got on the scales yesterday for the first time in about 3 weeks (the battery was dead until last night) and scared the crap out of myself. I have put on a lot of weight since I started this school nonsense. It’s a case of spending too much time sat on my butt in the car. At least when we were homeschooling, we’d walk down to the library and go walking round town, markets, visiting places, etc. So, I’ve found a Pilates class, and I think a few free weights my help reduce the bingo wings and give the abs a helping hand. In theory.

That and I’m going to concoct myself some sort of diet from the various GI and You Are What You Eat books I’ve got kicking around. James and I both need to shift at least a stone each. I know some of you will be rolling your eyes at us, thinking that you’ve got more to shift that that, but we’re both very unhealthy in that all the extra weight is gathered around our middles. Jolly paunch - bollocks. It’s a health hazard. And with the various unfortunate health crises that have been affecting our families, we’ve decided that it’s time we did something about it. Watch this space.