WOYWW 447

First of all, I am really sorry not to have replied to the lovely comments I had on my blog last time I was on here. I shall endeavour to do so in the next few days. As you can imagine, with my mum dying, and my hubby’s broken leg, and then Christmas, I have had more than enough to cope with and time has been very short. At times I have become quite overwhelmed with everything and have lost the plot on more than one occasion. When things are normal, I can just about cope with what I have to do, but add another raft of problems and things start to go a bit pear-shaped chez Shosh.

However, over the past few days things have generally been better. We have had a quiet couple of days over Christmas with no visitors, and I was able to concentrate on the dinner and just spending time with my hubby and the kitties.

We have loved having everyone dropping in to see us, but it all takes up such a lot of time and I can find my schedule slipping alarmingly, and I begin to get a panicky feeling that things are slipping beyond my control. Sometimes I’ve just had to apologise to people and take myself off and get on with things, and leave them to socialise with my hubby, which has made me feel a bit rude but it was the only way to keep going. Another problem is that most people have no idea about not letting the kittens out into the house from the flat – they stand with the door open, and before we know it, Ruby has dashed off upstairs, or worse, into the kitchen and I’m terrified of her getting outside when people are in and out! I can’t blame them, because they don’t know our arrangements and their aim is to see my hubby and they aren’t concentrating on anything else, but on occasion this has happened when I am at some crucial stage with the cooking or I’m already multi-tasking more than my poor brain can cope with!

Once we are back to normal again and people aren’t in and out all the time, we will be able to give the kitties the run of the house as we were doing before. At the moment they are generally very content in the flat with my hubby – they have loved having him there all the time, with a nice big warm lap for them to sleep on, and I have been spending as much time as possible in there too.

Here is Lily, lying as she so often does these days – shameless hussy, everything exposed!!

She is the most soft, floppy and laid back kitty you could imagine. She’s as bad as my hubby – all she wants to do is sleep!

Here is Ruby being queen of the castle on top of the cat tree. This one’s full of life, and wriggles and fidgets when being cuddled, but purrs her head off the whole time!

Do you remember Beatrice the Computer Queen? Well, it seems that Lily is following in her footsteps! She has been helping my hubby on his laptop.

Ruby, like Phoebe, isn’t a bit interested in the computer – she is more interested in having fun and generally being a really cheerful, enthusiastic kitty with no intellectual bent whatever.

Here are the latest videos of them. Can you believe they are now seven months old?

I have been doing lots of therapeutic cooking! On Christmas Eve I cooked a new recipe after watching Mary Berry on TV and just had to try her fish pie with soufflé topping. Here is the result.

The topping is done with cubed white bread and whipped egg white with a melted butter and cheese mixture. I used a combination of cod and salmon and chucked a few prawns in for good measure, and it was the most delicious fish pie I have ever tasted! This one’s definitely a keeper, and I don’t think Mr. Tesco will be persuading me to buy his “Finest” fish pie again! Thank you Mary!

My Christmas dinner was a triumph. It was the first I had cooked since 2006. That was my swan song, and I managed to prepare everything and did my best table decorations ever, but I didn’t really enjoy eating it because I was going down with a horrible flu-like illness and by tea time on Christmas day I was feeling so rough that I went to bed and didn’t get up for a week. I never bounced back from that, and it developed into the ME which has been with me ever since.

This year I was determined to cook a proper dinner again, with all the trimmings. OK, I did buy a Lidl Christmas pudding, but everything else I cooked from scratch, just for the two of us. I thought my hubby could do with spoiling, having broken his leg and been deprived of going out and doing all the things he wanted over Christmas. Here is the table, just as we were ready to sit down and eat.

Starting top left: crispy bacon and pigs in blankets. Top right: gravy, bread sauce, carafe of the delicious red wine which was given to us by our lovely neighbour. Middle, left to right: roast turkey, carved and ready to serve; three stuffings: chestnut, mealy (a traditional Scottish recipe made from oatmeal, a firm family favourite), and date and walnut; carrots and sprouts with whole chestnuts. Front row – the best roast potatoes I’ve ever cooked, after finding a tip online to par-boil them and then freeze them, and cook them from frozen, having tossed them in semolina. Crisp on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside. I used Maris Piper potatoes, which, like King Edwards, are ideal for roasting. All laid up with my best china and silver on my favourite hand-embroidered tablecloth from my Scottish grandmother.

Here is a close-up of the decoration for the table napkins.

This is the small table centre I made.

These ribbon and paper decorations were made for my swan song Christmas table and I’ve used them on occasion in between. I can mix and match the different elements.

After we’d finished, we settled down to watch the Queen’s Christmas broadcast.

I was delighted a few weeks ago to discover that because I’d lost so much weight, I was able to get into my Afghan Nomad Dress again! I made this many years ago and could never bear to part with it. The whole of the front of the bodice is covered with hand embroidery, and it has a very full skirt, and is made of several different fabrics, all in rich colours.

A bit difficult to photograph as a selfie –here’s an old photo of myself in it when I first made it.

For Christmas this year, I braided my hair with ribbons and added some gold flowers. Here’s a back view.

My hubby was thrilled!

Mum

In view of all our current difficulties, we decided to have Mum cremated privately before Christmas, and then to have a memorial service in mid-January. This means we’ve got more time to plan something really special, and also more people will be able to attend who might have been away at Christmas. There’s still quite a bit to sort out, and plans for the service are coming together nicely now, and once the Christmas dust has settled, I shall be able to get down to producing the order of service as I did for Dad’s funeral.

Health Update

At long last I have an appointment to see my surgeon – on 11th January. I was getting desperate, having been promised an appointment before the end of the year and hearing nothing, so I phoned his secretary, and she passed me on to the appointments department, who immediately referred me back to her! I was spitting tacks after this. Since the return of Miss Piggy, my hernia, things have got more worrying – it is now in the same state it was at the beginning of the year when it caused a blockage, resulting in emergency surgery and me being really poorly for ages, something I am more than anxious to avoid repeating at all costs. I am suffering quite a lot of skin irritation around Kermit, my stoma, and he has not been settled all year really, and things are now worse, not better, which has been very disappointing after having such a good year last year. Hopefully my surgeon will agree to go ahead and do a proper repair in the New Year.

Finally, here is what my hubby gave me for Christmas: a set of Derwent Graphik Line Painter pens. I’d seen some reviews of these on Youtube and was longing to get my hands on a set! They come in a lovely box with a slip cover.

Hopefully in the coming year I shall get more time and energy to do a decent amount of art, after what has been a pretty disappointing year.

My New Buggy, and an Outing to Brunel Woods

Today, after many months’ waiting, the new buggies arrived in the mobility shop. Some time ago, I inherited my uncle’s big buggy which is a very, very good one; very powerful, very comfortable and goes a long way on a single charge.

However, there is a major problem with it, and that is, it is much too big and heavy to go in the car. It is fine for getting to the shops, or to church – launching forth from the garage at home as you can see in the above photo.

However, many of the outings we go on involve going in the car. We belong to the National Trust, for instance, and if we have a day out, visiting one of their properties, the wheelchair is ideal for indoors, and for sitting in the restaurant, but not so good for going around the grounds – despite the power assist wheels, after a fairly short distance, I become too fatigued to self-propel any longer. My hubby has never forgotten (and never lets me forget, lol!) that time we went to the zoo, and he had to push me all the way up the hill to see the tigers! Last time we went to the zoo, the other day, we hired one of the zoo’s buggies and this was ideal.

So what we needed was a smaller, lightweight buggy that could fold up and go in the car, and still leave room for the wheelchair. We visited our local mobility shop, and I tried out quite a few. You really do have to try them – it is too risky to buy a buggy off the Internet, for example, without trying it, because however comfortable it may look, everyone’s body proportions are different, and what suits one will not necessarily suit another. The problem with the ultra-compact foldable buggies is that most of them are not adjustable at all, because this would interfere with the folding mechanism, and most of them were simply not comfortable enough. My arms are too short, which always causes problems, and having to reach further than is comfortable is very fatiguing. Some of them had really uncomfortable seats, and with the small wheels, many of them provided a very bumpy ride.

There was one that was different, though, and this was the SupaScoota. The control column is adjustable for height, and fore and aft angle, so that with it tipped towards me, and the whole thing raised, it was within easy reach and comfort for my arms. The battery is very powerful and it fairly zips along, with a choice of two speeds. With the seat removed, the control column can be folded flat against the base, and even with my adjustment, it still folds OK. Removing the battery makes it lighter for my hubby to lift into the car.

When we first tried it, the only drawback was the awful seat! As you will see from this photo:

The seat is triangular, and very uncomfortable, despite the sprung suspension. I was very disappointed, because apart from that, the rest of the features were ideal for me. The man in the shop told us that the manufacturers were about to bring out a new model with an improved seat, which was rectangular, and with a better back support. The buggy would also have an automatic setting that caused it to slow down when you turn a corner, but there would be a button to override this feature. We were very interested in this new model, and he said they would be getting some in soon. This took months longer than we’d hoped, but they knew we were interested, and let us know as soon as the prototype model arrived in the shop, and we went to try it.

You can see how much better the new seat looks. The foot rests are also larger. This is the four-wheel model (which we chose), but there is also a three-wheel model, and you can also have the extra “training” wheels for the front if you want. The new model is actually gold, not orange, and I much prefer this colour.

Here is a video of the original SupaScoota – the new model is so new that there aren’t any videos yet. (Perhaps we ought to make one!!) The new model is slightly easier to disassemble and fold, but apart from the new seat and suspension, the details are pretty much the same as on the video. I chose this Youtube video from Canada because it seemed to show best how the buggy folds up, and a lot of its features.

I tried the prototype in the shop, and after the control column was adjusted for me, I absolutely loved it! I took it for a good little spin outside, and my hubby practised taking the seat off and folding it up, and if he removes one seat from the back of our car, it will go in beside the wheelchair with no problem at all. He can also use the crane in the back of the car to lift it in. So we paid a deposit, and we then had another long wait, until this morning when the shop phoned to say they were in at last.

We went to collect it, and I am one of the first people in the country to get this new model – apparently there are only two shops that supply the SupaScooter – our local one, which is the importer, and another shop which I think he said was in Hampshire. Afterwards, as it was such a beautiful spring day, my hubby took me on an outing to try it out – this was by way of an experiment for him, too, to see how well he could get it in and out of the car. We went to Brunel Woods, at the entrance of which is a kissing gate to prevent mountain bikers invading the woods. This makes it very disabled unfriendly! There was no way my hubby could get my wheelchair through, but today, he tried the disassembled buggy – it was a bit of an effort but he managed to lift it over. He said afterwards that if he’d removed the motor as well as the battery, it would have been a bit lighter.

Off we went, and it was pretty steep! There was also a thick covering of beech nuts on the ground, and at one time I did lose control a bit and started sliding back! It was only when we got home that my hubby read in the instruction manual that you shouldn’t take it up a slope steeper than a certain number of degrees (and we were sure our path was steeper than that!!) and also that it should be run on a firm surface! So we broke all the rules on Day One lol! Anyway, we put it through its paces, and it was fine.

In Brunel Woods there is an extraordinary collection of wood carvings in honour of our greatest engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the central feature of which is a dead tree trunk which has been carved into a totem pole, depicting all the things that I.K. Brunel constructed. It is surrounded by three more carvings, one of which is a statue of the great man himself.

Here is my hubby with I.K. Brunel, which gives a sense of the scale of the carvings.

Here is the totem pole, a bit closer up.

At the base of the totem pole, the date when it was made has been carved.

After admiring these things, we went for a wander in the woods. The sun was shining through the trees, and all the birds were in full song. There is something about birdsong in a wood – it echoes off the trees, and sounds so full and rich. In a few weeks’ time, these woods will be full of bluebells! To me, there is nothing more beautiful than a beech wood with a carpet of bluebells, with the sun filtering through the translucent, young green leaves of my favourite tree. If the oak is the king of the English wood, then the beech must surely be the queen.

Finally, here are some pictures of me using my new buggy. You can see that there is a bag on the back of the seat – we had hoped that the bag from my big buggy would fit, but it wouldn’t, so we got the one to fit this mini-scooter while we were at it. The basket on the front is actually surprisingly capacious – better than the one on my big buggy, but I shall still need to be able to carry more, especially after my operation when I will need to carry my emergency kit with me, for bag-changing etc. There is also room underneath the seat for another basket if I want it.

You can see from these photos how the control column has been adjusted to suit me. (Note my new hair colours!! Also, the felt poppies hair clip I made last year in the felt class.)

It’s a very nice, zippy little buggy and will do just fine for our outings, enabling us to go further afield and not be tied. It isn’t quite as comfortable as the big one, but with its improved seat and the sprung suspension, it’s not at all bad.

Today was another of what my hubby calls “spoilies” before I go into hospital. We were so pleased that the new buggies arrived before I went in! We have now got it all ready for when I am better enough to go out and about again. Another purpose in the second postponement of my surgery, perhaps?

Talking of which, having had nothing in the post from the hospital today and it being Friday, I thought I would phone them just to see if they had any news, and I spoke to Mr. Pullan’s secretary. She said he would be away until Tuesday. I asked her to phone me as soon as she had a date for my admission, and she said that would be fine. She said I was already at the top of his list, and it looked likely that I would have it done a week today, Friday 27th March, which would be exactly a month after my first scheduled admission on 27th February. (I am getting a bit concerned at the delay now, because that’s another whole month for the cancer to be growing… However, if they were worried about that, they would have got me in urgently and I’d have had another surgeon to do it.) She obviously could not confirm this date in the absence of Mr. Pullan, but hopefully we will get definite confirmation as soon as he returns to work.

Treats and Tigers

Only a few more days to go to my surgery, and today was a day full of treats.

We decided to go out for a meal to one of our favourite restaurants so that I could have a final steak until goodness knows when! We were getting ready to go out when the delightful Indian lady who with her husband owns our local corner shop rang the bell and presented us with some samosas she had just made, still warm from the fryer! How very kind. We were unfortunately not able to eat them while they were so fresh or we’d have had no appetite for lunch, so saved them for this evening.

We had a wonderful meal – we both had steak, my hubby had salad with his, and I had vegetables, and both were served with chips and sauces. My hubby had cheese and biscuits to follow, and I had a crème brulee served with Baileys ice cream, a shortbread biscuit and garnished with three raspberries. It was all exquisitely served, as always, and quite delicious. We always enjoy eating there, and who knows how long it will be before I am fit to eat out again?

They took quite a long time to serve us as the place was busy, it being Saturday, so we didn’t leave till getting on for mid-afternoon. This meant that we had very little time at the zoo, which was our next destination!

I said to my hubby that it would be great to have a tiger fix before I went into hospital. I have always loved tigers. You can read about the pages I made in my Recycled Mini-Album last year on the subject of the tiger cubs my dad operated on, back in the 1950s, here. Here is the tiger picture I painted in my little leather art journal (I used a scanned version of this picture in the mini-album):

After I scanned it, I edited it to remove the fold down the centre:

and this was the finished mini-album page:

We had very little time at the zoo so we went straight past the lions and found the tigers! It was quite a steep climb, and we were glad that we had arranged to hire one of the zoo’s buggies for me – it was  quite similar to my own, which is too big to go in the car. (We have paid the deposit on a small folding one which we will be able to take with us for outings such as this.)

Here are the pictures I took.

Then my hubby took a photo of me looking at the beautiful tigers:

It was amazing being able to get so close to them.

As we went further up, we came across a couple of display boards, the first giving the details of the tigers. They are Sumatran tigers, and in the wild, these magnificent creatures are on the verge of extinction, being trapped in a horrifically cruel fashion by poachers who sell their bodies for Chinese medicine and on the black market.

The work of our zoo, and other zoos around the world, helps to preserve the tigers through breeding programmes, and also through education, and fund-raising to provide wardens in the jungles of Sumatra to fight the battle to save the tigers.

Here is the board with the tiger’s footprint, and a plaque for brass rubbing.

Aren’t they the most beautiful creatures? I have always loved them.

Here is a picture of my own little tiger – sadly no longer with us. She was Phoebe’s sister Chloe. lying flat out and displaying all her beautiful tigeriness. I think she was the most beautiful kitty we’ve ever had.

We had to make a fairly quick dash back to the reception to return the buggy 15 minutes before closing time, but managed to get the following pictures on the way. Here’s my hubby with a peacock.

The peacock made his way towards me.

You can see how nicely the zoo is laid out, with walkways and landscaping and lakes.

Ducks on the lake.

The main zoo buildings. The further one is where the reception and shop are situated, and the nearer one is the restaurant. We have been to a wedding reception here – a really fun place for a wedding! They have excellent facilities inside.

Opposite the buildings is the railway for the little train. After the reception, the wedding guests all had a ride on the little train that goes round the entire zoo complex! You can imagine all the wedding guests in their finery, taking their seats on the train for the tour around the zoo!

Some interesting tangled tree roots.

We had a quick dash through the tropical house – entering this hot and humid atmosphere, our glasses, and my camera lens, instantly steamed up!

No time to take photos in the desert house which led off the tropical house, but I did manage to catch a quick shot of the flamingos on the way back to the reception.

You can see what an overcast and dull day it was today. It was also very cold, but we were fortunate that it didn’t rain. We are going to return to the zoo when the weather is better and hopefully in the sunshine, when I have recovered from my operation, and when we have got my new light-weight buggy. We will spend more time there, and hopefully get lots more photos – we saw very little today but at least I got to see my tigers!

Finally, I have at last managed to get my hubby to take a photo of my new hair colour which I had done at the end of February just before I was originally due to go into hospital!

Altogether we had a brilliant day out together. After a quick cup of tea at home my hubby left to go out for the evening, and I have spent the rest of the evening on the recliner, watching TV and being on the laptop, enjoying my samosas, sorting my photos and thinking about this special little oasis of time that we have been granted, to rest and relax without Mum in the house, and to prepare for Wednesday when I go in for my surgery.