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Not so sure about that shade of green….

I’ve just got back from another long day at our Hampshire offices, where I’ve been helping to brief our customers about last week’s equipment trials. While I was away, Rob seems to have pretty much finished, and has put quite a lot of the kitchen contents back – but not necessarily where they came from. I’m going to have to hunt for a chopping board before I can cook dinner as I can’t find any of them! I think he may have put them on top of the cabinets, which will mean using a stepladder…….

I’m not too sure about the shade of green that he’s painted the woodwork. It’s definitely the colour I chose, and I deliberately went for a shade slightly brighter than the one that we had before, which I found a bit gloomy. But in large quantities it really is quite vibrant! However, I’m sure I’ll get used to it, eventually.

31 01 2012 icyjumbo house Comments (4) Permalink

Sorting out the kitchen

While Chris was in partial remission, in late Spring 2010,  we accepted a quote from Rob for decorating the kitchen and dining room and re-tiling the bathroom. The earliest he could fit us in was September, but by then Chris was already dead. I simply couldn’t face the disruption of having the kitchen out of action on top of everything else I was going through, so asked Rob just to do the dining room and bathroom.

Since then, I’ve had Rob back here on numerous occasions, and each time he’s asked whether I want him to do the kitchen – even offering to honour the original quote which is now over 18 months out of date. My answer was always the same – I really wanted to have it done, but I couldn’t cope with living through the actual doing. The most recent occasion was before Christmas, when he was repainting the hall ceiling after the incident with the leaking hot water system.  But then I had  sudden brainwave. I was at the time bidding at work for a project which would require me to participate in some equipment trials at our Hampshire offices, which would mean staying at a hotel down there for at least a week and a half at the end of January.  I said to Rob that if (i) I won the bid and got on contract, (ii) his diary was free over the dates of the trial, (iii) he was prepared to do absolutely everything himself – I was intending to keep right out of the way, so he’d have to clear the kitchen and put it back the way he’d found it, and (iv) I would be unable to take calls during the day as I’d be with my customers, so he’d have to use his own judgement on any issues he came across and just update me over the phone in the evenings if necessary – then we would have a deal. He agreed to those terms, and we pencilled the dates in subject to final confirmation if and when I won the contract.

The contract did come through in time, so for the last week and a bit I’ve been living out of a suitcase in Hampshire. Meanwhile, Rob has had a key to the house and has been getting on with the kitchen. It’s not quite finished – he thinks there’s about two days left doing the woodwork – but it’s looking good so far.  And I’ve escaped almost all of the disruption! I will be so pleased when it is done – another thing to cross off the to-do list.

28 01 2012 Gillian house Comments (1) Permalink

The neglected kitchen

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to get the kitchen redecorated. We moved in to this house over 14 years ago, and the first thing we did was to get it re-wired throughout. That made a right mess, which meant that the whole house needed to be redecorated. But we couldn’t afford to do it all at once, so did each room as and when we had the time and money. The kitchen, however, was always a problem. We simply couldn’t face the disruption of having the kitchen out of action for an extended period. So it’s had a few face-lifts of the more visible parts, but hasn’t ever been properly decorated. There is also the issue that when we had the extension built a few years ago, we needed to bash through an external wall in the kitchen, which led to further desultory redecorating efforts in the vicinity of the new doorway.

The upshot of all this is that, for the past few years the kitchen has four different colours of skirting board (dark green, light green, white and brown), two different colour walls (cream and magnolia), two different colours on the ceiling (cream and white), the doors are either dark green or white, and I absolutely loathe the tiles on the splash-back! Plus the walls and ceiling are covered in two different patterns of wood-chip paper, both hideous. The rest of the house is so much better, and the kitchen really does look grotty in comparison.  I’ve had a number of quotes over the past ten years to do the work, which is actually surprisingly affordable as I don’t want to change the kitchen cabinets or work-surfaces. But I still can’t face the disruption of not having a usable kitchen for nearly two weeks – which is what Rob my trusty decorator has estimated it will take.

I have however recently come up with a cunning plan, so I hope that I may be able to square the circle and get it done with minimum disruption.

21 01 2012 Gillian house Comments (4) Permalink

Mystery solved – it was the District Nurse

No, not in the Library with the Lead Piping, but rather skewing the search results for my blog. My sister did a bit of investigation following my recent post, and indeed her colleague’s husband has been telling people about how to get a comfortable post-operative night’s sleep using an old-fashioned method of arranging pillows he “found on the internet”. But the only person he mentioned this blog by name to was his District Nurse. Presumably, she is of a generation far too young too have been taught the “pillow method” in nursing training. It looks to me as though she has been passing the message on during her rounds of north Kent.

16 01 2012 Gillian Uncategorized Comments Off on Mystery solved – it was the District Nurse Permalink

A big bunch of tulips

Yesterday was Christopher’s birthday. He would have been 48. It was also, coincidentally, the second anniversary of him starting chemotherapy. I slept very badly – but it wasn’t until 6am that I realised why. My subconscious is clearly better at significant dates than my conscious mind! Fortunately, work is so frantically busy at the moment that I didn’t have time during the day to mope. I had to go food shopping after work, and decided to treat myself to a big bunch of red tulips. They are now in a vase on the dining room table and look really cheerful, which is a help.

13 01 2012 icyjumbo status Comments (1) Permalink

Peeking behind the statistics

When Chris set up this blog he subscribed to Google Analytics, which allowed him to see some basic statistics about how the blog is viewed. Not at the level of individual people – everything is totally anonymous unless you choose to send a comment – but aggregations and top-level statistics. I can’t actually make use of the full power of Google Analytics, because the account is in his name, and (like so many other things) I don’t know the password. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t at the top of his list of things to tell me before he died. But what I can see on the blog dashboard is often interesting.

It tells me how often pages are viewed (about 30-40 page views per day, over the past month, on average, and even on Christmas Day about a dozen of you checked up on me, which was nice of you!), and who the top referrers are (Frosty Intervals by a wide margin, but also Kevin/Joan’s and Ryan’s blogs usually feature). One stat which I found interesting this week is the record of the top-five search terms that people use to find the blog:  “icyjumbo blog” and “A mammoth undertaking Chris Booth” are both fairly obvious ones which I would expect. But this week a new search term has appeared on the top five list – “icyjumbo pillows” which is leading people to this post about a way of arranging pillows that my Gran learned as a trainee nurse before the second world war.

There was clearly a story behind this spike in interest in an obscure blog page written over 18 months ago. It turns out that my sister has a colleague whose husband is recovering from a fairly significant operation.  He slept pretty badly in hospital, as he couldn’t get comfortable even with the fully-adjustable hospital bed, and his wife was concerned about how he would cope back home in an ordinary bed. So my sister told her about our family’s way of arranging pillows, and said that I’d blogged about it with detailed photographic instructions when Chris had a bad back. She did a search for “icyjumbo pillows”, found the photos, and printed off the page for her colleague. It was subsequently reported back that the colleague’s husband had slept so much better using “the pillows” than he had in hospital, and was really pleased to learn the method. It looks to me as if he’s been recommending it onwards, possibly to other patients at the outpatients clinic, and telling them how to search for it.

That’s really nice to know – that complete strangers are getting a better night’s sleep as a result of a throw-away blog post which has taken on a life of its own since I posted it. My mother is rather annoyed though – she says that if she’d known I was going to post the photos, she’d have ironed the sheets first!

10 01 2012 Gillian Uncategorized Comments (5) Permalink

Cross with myself

It was back to work this week, after two very interesting and rather eventful weeks off over Christmas and New Year. Monday was a Bank Holiday, but I was up bright and early on Tuesday morning ready for work. Not because of any New Years resolutions about getting into work earlier – more a case of the remnants of the jet-lag disturbing my sleep.

Anyway, I was in work earlier than usual, logged on to my computer and looked at my on-line calendar to see what meetings people had booked for me while I was off. It was then that I made the horrid discovery. I had booked Tuesday off as annual leave and forgotten all about it! With all the stress of meetings and milestones before Christmas, I had forgotten to synchronise my work and home diaries, and the booked leave hadn’t made it into my 2012 diary.  There was no point in going home at that stage – since I was in work I might as well make the most of it and do something useful. Oh I was cross with myself!

08 01 2012 Gillian status Comments (1) Permalink

More trees devouring temples

Several friends have commented about how interesting they found the picture of the tree roots devouring the temple at Ta Prohm. So here are a few more pictures of that temple, and the neighbouring Banteay Kdei, both being assailed by jungle.

Ta Prohm - hard to tell which is temple tower and which is tree trunk

You can see the damage that the tree roots are doing – the walls are just collapsing under the relentless weight and pressure of the trees.

Ta Prohm doorway

This picture was taken about 5 seconds after a large party of Koreans finally moved out of the way. I love the way the tree roots are framing the doorway.

Banteay Kdei emerging from the undergrowth

Finally, this is the neighbouring temple of Banteay Kdei. This one is smaller and less visited than the previous ones, and my guide and I virtually had it to ourselves. You can see how quickly it would be swallowed up again by the jungle if the authorities stop trying to maintain it.

04 01 2012 Gillian Day out
Photo Comments (4) Permalink

New Year – taking stock

I wrote in several of my Christmas cards that I had survived another year. One of my friends (hello Lucy!) called me up on that, saying that it looks from this blog as though I’ve more than survived. Well, perhaps she’s right. It’s difficult when one is concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other to see just how far one’s come. But looking back I would say that I’m certainly in a better place now that I was a year ago, and overall I think I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made – though I’m still finding things still far from easy.

My resolutions/plans for the coming year, in no particular order, include

  • Fixing the leak in the porch roof, which drips every time it rains
  • Getting the kitchen decorated
  • Starting to plant some interesting climbers on the terraces in the garden
  • Increasing my hours at work – but in a sustainable way, so that I avoid an exhaustion-triggered collapse
  • Scattering some more of Christopher’s ashes somewhere interesting
  • Keeping on blogging

On that last point. Christopher and I originally started this blog as an account of living with (and subsequently dying from) cancer. I then kept it up as a diary of coming to terms with being widowed, and putting my life back together again. My sister tells me that it now reads like a blog about maintaining and renovating an old house, and there is certainly that aspect to it too – though I think that’s partly a coping mechanism / displacement activity on my part. I can’t bring Chris back, but I can make this house more comfortable.

I find blogging helps me – as indeed it helped Chris. And I keep going with it, even though it’s sometimes an effort, because I can see from the stats that people read it, and some of you comment. That makes it all worthwhile. So please do keep on reading and commenting – it is really helpful to me even if it doesn’t seem so to you!

02 01 2012 Gillian status Comments (1) Permalink

Pomegranate Lamb

I’ve had some requests for the recipe for pomegranate lamb, which I cooked before Christmas. Now that I’m back home, and within reach of my cookbooks, here it is. The recipe is taken from The Book of North African Cooking by Lesley Mackley which seems to be out of print but available secondhand from Amazon [I’ll put my comments in square brackets]

Serves 4-6 [but it scales down well for 1 or 2. I made enough for 2 then reheated the leftovers the next day]

  • 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 large onion, sliced
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 2.5cm piece root ginger, peeled and finely chopped
  • 1kg lean lamb e.g. shoulder or leg, cubed
  • salt & freshly ground pepper
  • juice of 2 pomegranates, about 300ml
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin [I leave this out]
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
  • 3 cardamom pods, lightly crushed [I leave these out too]
  • 85ml greek yogurt
  • pomegranate seeds to garnish
  • fresh mint to garnish [I leave this out as well]

Heat the oil in a large flameproof casserole [or a tagine]. Add the onion, garlic and ginger and cook for 10 minutes. Remove from the pan and set aside. In the same pan, brown the lamb on all sides, in batches and set aside. Return the onion, garlic, ginger and lamb to the pan. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper. Gradually stir in the pomegranate juice, allowing each addition to be absorbed before adding more. There should be very little liquid left. [This bit never seems to work for me. I always end up with quite a lot of liquid left. But I just keep going, and cook the lamb in whatever liquid is left, and boil it off at the end if it looks too sloppy]

Add the cumin, cinnamon, nutmeg and cardamom to the pan [or if you are a wuss with spices like me, then just the cinnamon and nutmeg] and stir for 1 minute. Stir in the yogurt [I usually have so much pomegranate juice left over at this point that I don’t need any more liquid to cook the lamb in. So I add the yogurt right at the end of the cooking] Cover the pan tightly and cook very gently for 30-40 minutes until the lamb is tender [It will also happily keep simmering away very gently for at least another hour if your guests turn up late. I speak from experience!] Check from time to time that the meat is not sticking and drying out too much. Add  little water if necessary. [At this point I add the yogurt]  Garnish with pomegranate seeds and chopped mint [or leave out the mint] and serve with rice [or it’s nice with couscous]

01 01 2012 Gillian recipe Comments (3) Permalink