Not too Scottish me

When I had the Great Craft Room Clearout several months ago I came across a bunch of blank books. I stopped writing a journal about a month before I got married but continued to purchase them anyway. One I used for keeping a tally during my two senbazuras, another for notes when I was studying runes and four (five?) for a simple daily record of what we got up to during two years in Hong Kong and the travels during that time so that we would have an easier time of it when labelling the photos. We haven’t started that job yet….

 

This one has been chosen for a new garden journal. What got planted when and for how much – that sort of thing.

The half trays of herbs are all planted up – basil, chives, oregano, mint (x2: Himself loves mojitos), coriander and rosemary. Half lids are 98P each down at B&Q but I can think of better things on which to use 21.56GBP. The dozens of shower caps pinched from hotels these past two years were supposed to be used as a sort of cloche for six or eight inch pots but the larger caps fit perfectly on the half trays. More money for seeds and bulbs I say.

Not much to do now but keep one eye out for sprouting and the other on the temperatures in case the little paraffin heater needs to come into play.

 

My Response to My Response to The Good Wife Guide

My Response to My Response to The Good Wife Guide

Sigh. Smarty-pants disorganized housewives with attitude. Aren’t you just sick of them and their complaining? On occasion I after blogging I’ll read the featured blog on WordPress. Today’s just p***ed me off so I am taking valuable housework time to get it all out before I get an ulcer. Maybe it was written to be funny but I just found it sad, given that yet another of my gender seems to be bashing away at an institution that just needs to be recognized as a viable life choice or, better yet, left alone so we can get on with it.

NB: Bold face is the paraphrased start of each rule of the ‘Guide’ (of questionable origins).

Have dinner ready. Plan ahead Stop right there – plan the meals together the weekend before  — this takes ten minutes tops and can be done at breakfast. Have a few fast/Plan B meals always in reserve for when he is going to be late. Give him steak every night if he wants. After a week, it’ll be back to once a week. Problem sorted.

Prepare yourself. Well, I don’t wear makeup (waste of money and time) but do hit the shower at 3:30-4PM every weekday after doing all my house, garden, writing, DIY work. No different that doing it in the morning after he leaves.

Be…more interesting. Good jokes, interesting factoids picked up online or in the news work well. Tomorrow’s weather report also a good one to relay so he knows if he’ll need to leave early for work the next day. How much skin has you lost of your nose for doing this?

Clear away the clutter. This is good housekeeping, not good wife practice per se. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Gather up schoolbooks, etc. See above. Lay out his work clothes and cufflinks for the next day so you can have an extra few minutes in bed together at 6AM and have casual clothes ready to change into at the end of the day. Help with the latter. Make sure you haven’t started the supper lest it burn on the stove/in the oven. (FYI – coming up for 18 years of wedded bliss. On that note, never say no. It won’t kill you).

Prepare and light fire…. In absence of fireplace, turn up heat in house fifteen minutes before he gets home because you have turned it down and worn a sweater during the day because you do not like a warm house. Since you have trained him to call before he leaves work and checked traffic conditions online you will know when to do this.

Prepare children. N/A, but when we get a puppy I will make sure he or she is clean so he or she can be cuddled right away. That’s the best I can do.

Be happy to see him. Sit on the front step in the warmer months and keep an eye out for him in the colder months (easy to do, since you’ve trained him to call and checked the traffic conditions and know roughly when he’ll arrive) so you can open the garage door. Of course, if I had a salary I could buy him a garage door opener, but then I’d have to move my car out of the drive anyway since I’d have to buy a car to get to work. I’d need to work to afford a car….

Warm smile, etc on return. Are there women who don’t do this? What absolute cows!

Listen. Or just leave him alone for fifteen or twenty minutes so he can decompress.

Make evening his. You get the house to yourself ALL DAY LONG. Don’t like sports or reality telly? Sit with him anyway with a basket of handwork. Don’t do handwork? Learn something or surf ridiculous WordPress blogs.

Your goal: try to make sure your home is a place of peace, order and tranquillity where husband can renew himself body and spirit. And you want a chaotic, shambling mess of a house WHY?

Don’t greet him with complaints or problems. Same reply as warm smile above. Sheesh.

Don’t complain when he is late for dinner. See first tip. And be glad he is not pasted to a telephone pole at the side of the road. RIP Nick.

…take off his shoes. Or train him to take then off when he enters the house. (Not necessary to spend two years in Hong Kong and assorted Asian locations to achieve this).

Asking questions and questioning judgements. He makes and handles the money because that’s what he is an expert at. I do everything else, including spending it. Simple division of labour, which so-called modern couples always seem to fecht over.

 A good wife always knows her place. Right by the side of a good husband.

Now, go shine his shoes or bake him some brownies. But first, read the (faux) Guide online and adapt it to make YOUR marriage and house the wonderful place it can be if you lose the attitude and buy a book on organizing your life (and another, if you need it,  for child control. A good swat worked for my — lipstick-less — Mom and she has three very successful, reasonably happy children not permanently damaged by some discipline).

I’m going to go dig in my frozen garden now. No, I need to assemble a lasagne first (which can be frozen for tomorrow if he works late tonight).

 

Daffodil action

The back bed is showing signs of life. And the greenhouse is so much happier for being half full of trays of seed: so far there’s dianthus, sweet peas, nasturtiums, dahlia, delphinium, cosmos and Bells of Ireland.

Four trays fit on each of the four shelves and there is a metal rack system that holds half trays up above – 22 all together if I remember correctly. More seed trays and pots can sit on the slab base on strips of 2×4. All the January seeds are planted up (five days into February, not too bad all things considered). Next week we’ll get stuck into the February seeds: chamomile, aquilegia, lobelia and about six different herbs. Summer flowering bulbs need to wait until the ground thaws, which could be a good while longer.

 

Only seven months to go

Himself is determined to get the N-gauge layout finished before the nephew (five going on fifty, also known as Mini Himself) visits at the end of August. He went to the driving range Sunday to work on his swing, which led me to suggest stepping up the train work before the Saturday competitions begin at his club.

Over the weekend some terraforming got underway. I suggested hard floral styrofoam as the base for hills and rock faces when we popped into an AC Moore in December. He says he really likes how it works so I am glad I persuaded him to get a fair amount, not just a small piece to test.

In Sham Shui Po we laid our hands on black, brown, green and beige handmade paper (among many other craft supplies good for this project) which will be layered over the final shapes. He returned from London last night with yet another wee building from a model shop near Holborn. Last week he brought me a bottle of Cloudy Bay from Duty Free so it’s only fair he gets a treat this time.

 

Herbs, sweet peas and…er…

You know that episode of The Simpsons where Bart brings a frog to Australia and the fool thing takes over the native species?

I got these on the street in Seoul — a lovely wee girl with a big smile handed them to me and bowed. Whatcha gonna do? They look like they need a soak before planting up, but the back

hasn’t been much help when it comes to identifying what these seeds will become. Edible? Decorative? No clue. I could be on the verge of creating an environmental catastrophe, but I just have to see what comes up.

I organized my seeds last night while Himself was away. My re-ward once the spring cleaning is over will be to get stuck in. The back is still all mud so I’ll need to set up in the garage after Himself leaves for work. I can get to the greenhouse but the path is perilous. I’m not kidding. I had to wear my wellies just to get to the compost bin and sank six inches in some places.

FYI - Cute, simple, somewhat silly yet useful project due to be posted over on fabricleftovers.wordpress.com tomorrow. It’s a favorite from my days as a teacher at Liberty’s Sewing School (the one that folded in 2000 on the instruction of the shop’s new owners, not what they have/had in place now. Haven’t popped in there since my last friend who worked there left for pastures new). It was never a serious contender for my book and isn’t going to be in any of the sequels so why not? It’s a great kids project as well as adults. You can’t say that about a lot of my designs!

 

The Expat Expat, or

The Third Anniversary of The Face

When you have been with somebody long enough, you just know when something is up. Sometimes you know just what that is before they let on. Once Himself started to travel more for The Bank he would apologetically deliver the news as soon as possible and appropriate arrangements would be made. I’d pack little treats in his case and leave all sorts of notes for him to find (still do).  I’d save up lots of fun things to do while he was away or spend the time taking care of jobs I don’t like such as spring cleaning (which I’m starting tomorrow when he’s off to London for a few days). It was pretty rotten in the beginning but became part of the grand scheme of things before too long. The trips grew more frequent and he had to go further for longer. It wasn’t long before I could spot the look on his face that predicated this sort of news. ‘You are wearing The Face’ I’d say. Or I’d simply come out and ask ‘where are you going?’.

Three years ago tonight, Himself came home with The Face. He’d been to London the week before on one of his frequent day trips. It was the NYC offices for a week not long before that. He had been going on some sort of management training courses for two or three days at a time, which I certainly hadn’t been suspicious of because it was quite normal for him to attend all sorts of continuing development days. However, those were to keep up his professional qualifications and these sounded kinda like goofy HR/people management stuff that a guy like my sensible, straight-talking honest husband didn’t need. Since he’d done interview training with his Big Six firm after qualifying, I figured these touchy-feely exercises (always amusing to hear or read about once he was home) were perhaps setting him up to do a similar job or, more likely, just to help him as he moved up the totem pole of The Bank.

We’d been in our brand spanking new house not 15 months. My first book had been out for about four months but I was in no rush to start the next one. We were in a rather pleasant holding pattern with the house now that we had downstairs floors and the majority of the large purchases paid off — despite the pay cut Himself had to take when leaving London. Most people are downsizing when they leave London: we had to upsize. My garden was underway and Himself happily possessed a rapidly improving golf game. The stresses of living smack in the center of a major international city had faded, especially that whole living-behind-a-police-cordon-for-three-weeks-because-a-bus-was-blown-up-steps-from-our-building’s-front-door thing. Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be on the horizon of our (at long last) simple and quiet life.

Himself decided to make me guess where he was headed, so I ran through the usual suspects ending with ‘Asia again so soon?’ (He’d been the previous September/October on one of his three or four Asian country jaunts).

He nodded, then said with dead-perfect comic timing ‘You might want to come with me’.

I replied: ‘When do we leave?’.

Even if I hadn’t wanted to go, he’d have never known. That’s not what a real marriage is about folks. However you decided to word your vows, it’s for better or worse. You’ve already completed negotiations. Ya get married, ya gotta (*intransitive verb usage alert*) cleave.

A mere seven months before, Hong Kong had been the first stop on our round the world trip, taken to celebrate the publication of my first book and use up a good half million of Himself’s airmiles. I was given the choice of the SAR or Singapore for the start of nearly four weeks of some top flight livin’. For almost all of our four full days in Hong Kong it rained – except on the day Himself took me to The Peak when we had a couple lovely clear hours. I still hold a strong memory of sitting in my first class Qantas seat on the plane to Melbourne watching Hong Kong disappear under the clouds. ‘I hope we can come back someday’ I said to Himself. (FYI: Melbourne to Cairns to Sydney to Hawai’i to Chicago back to the UK with the One World Alliance that trip, arriving everywhere before the pilots).

In the beginning it was to be a six to nine month assignment. The Bank was sensible enough to realize Himself’s contract needed to include provisions for me – none if this ‘home visit every few months’ nonsense. We kept everything to ourselves for well over a month and by then ‘nine months with the possibility of a whole year’ was heard by the IWOM more than once. Even an introvert like me had trouble keeping this news under wraps so I got to tell PeppyPilotGirl a few weeks before we let the rest of the world in on it.

I think The Bank would have been happy for us to get out of Dodge ASAP but we’d already booked a three week trip to the States for late May/early June so it was decided that we would leave soon after returning to the UK. By the time we did leave for parts known, it was pretty much looking like a year-long assignment. It wasn’t on paper when the wheels left the tarmac, but the year stay was firmed up within a few weeks of us arriving. The job: set up a tax department in Asia for The Bank. Then The Bank went and bought ‘im a tax department. Should have just let Himself interview and hire as planned, but there you go….

The Face became irrelevant for a good eight months, for where Himself went, so went the IWOM (Beijing, Singapore and Tokyo in the first five weeks). However, the day before we left to spend the start of the Year of the Rat in Bangkok, Himself came home to Peel Street clearly wearing The Face. And that’s a story for Chinese New Year.

(Happy Australia Day!).

 

And so it begins….

If it is mid January, there is no getting around it: weekends at the set building workshop, which looks every bit the movie set for a nasty horror film. Remote former factory, colder inside that out (really), low ceilings and pipes which cause a real danger to Himself’s noggin. If you stand still the cold seeps up through your feet, regardless of how many pair of socks you wear. Constant movement is key. The IWOM got out of duty today but there will be no avoiding it tomorrow. Eat, drink and knot, for tomorrow we play with large machinery.

The International Couple of Mystery hasn’t been around for the building of the last two sets. Popping back here from HK each weekend was not an option, but we did get back in time each March to help move the set from the warehouse to the theatre, put it together, work at the show each night, take it apart and move it back to the warehouse with about three hours rest before catching a shuttle flight down to LHR to get us on an evening flight back to HKG.

This year the amateur musical group with whom we hang is doing ‘Chess’. We both know that one backwards and forwards – all versions. (You’ve gotta admit, ‘Chess’ is a bit of a tinker toy musical: the songs and scenes get moved around, songs switch from one character to another and even the time period shunts about). In May 2008 we flew to London from HK for the (woefully miscast) Chess 25^th Anniversary concert. The last line in the last song of Act I sort of sums up my life. Not many amateur groups can pull off this show in the manner which the lyrics and music require.

We are Honorary Members in that we do not attend weekly rehearsals but a show can’t run without PLU. (I always maintain that a cast needs months to get it right but a good stage crew needs but one proper tech rehearsal). For years I just hung out in the tea room then in 2003 it was discovered that I am a very good dresser so no more sitting around drinking tea and eating cakes (thanks a lot, DH!). I was part of the costume crew for a few years but switched to stage work so I could actually spend some of this often hellish week and a half with Himself. By hellish I mean the days are terribly long, the weekends bookending the show are physically exhausting and at the end of it all, I tend to have broken nails and plenty of bruises. What some people do for fun, eh?

 

(Not so) mystery package

I’ve been waiting for a package from NJ but I did not know the content. Arranging my daily life around the no-longer-regular UK post hasn’t been easy but it was worth the wait for my belated Christmas present.

Unfortunately, unless you can slap a hand over the customs label before your eyes dart toward it, you know what your present is going to be before you go looking for your box cutter.

I’d asked my sister to keep an eye out for a metal base/plastic lid cake/pie/donut stand for me. Over on my side of the pond I could only find all glass stands. I found one in the States but while the base was metal, the lid was glass, which was too heavy and was not fitting for my fifties diner style kitchen. I told her to acquire one at any cost and I would collect it next trip. I was emailed a week ago and told a belated Christmas present was on the way.

The question now is: cupcakes or a pie?

 

Paintin’ Fool

If it stands still these days, it gets painted. It was Jazzberry for the entertainment unit in my craft room and another coat of white on the ceiling of the guest room bathroom this morning.

There’s a drawstring bag project over on fabricleftovers.wordpress.com that took up a part of this afternoon. It was cut from Fabric Leftovers: Simple, adaptable ways to use up scraps and is destined for one of the new books, but that’s the nice thing about self-publishing: you can give away projects if you fancy it. You can use just about any scraps you have to hand, so go take a look.

 

As usual,

the packaging is more fun/useful than the object it contained!

Styrofoam and sturdy card bits for the N-gauge railway layout, 16 tiny bubblewrap bags and six wee boxes for shipping the Chinese Knot items I’ve been selling lately and a good sturdy box that everything came in which is just the right width for some new garage shelves. And I (at last) have a spice rack, which de-clutters one of my kitchen cupboards.

Oooo! The OST Tribbles episode at noon today! I can get the herb and spice transfer done then.

(It’s not all First Class lounges and exotic locations, this IWOM business).