Sunday 22nd June

Hello there!
I've a nice cup of ginger tea steaming gently beside me, and whilst I wait for it to steep, I thought I might blog... I've been watching the football - Spain have just beaten Italy in one of the more boring games of the tournament, ended up in penalty shoot out, but in personal terms I'm still devastated by the exit of Holland, who I thought played wonderfully well and I had real hopes of this time round. Alas for the curse of being picked as the Guardian's team of the tournament! Anyhow since Holland have bitten the dust I now have to pick a new favourite, but this becomes problematic as I've no real favourites left. We'll see.. perhaps in a day or so I might be able to bring myself to go for the Russians.
Right now we're experiencing another bout of bad weather - I know it's a La Nina year, with the currents going counter clockwise or some such, rather than an El Nino, but you'd think what with yesterday being midsummer day and the longest day of the year that we'd have a bit of continuous sunshine to say, yep it actually is summer! No such luck. However, in preparation for my summer holiday I've been attending to my sunhat, which was in need of a bit of care - it has a wire running through the brim to make it go in whichever way I push it to keep the sun off my face, and the wire needed replacing. To be honest, even as I was doing this, I thought why am I bothering, but then, don't do it and we'll have a month of continuous blazing sunshine, so best to get it done. We've been threatened with some kind of high wind storms or some such, so I think it'll be safe to say I'll be leaving the sunhat at home, but heck you never know.
At some time over the next week, the council's coming to attend to the trees in the park over the road. I love those old trees, they're really big and spreading - and probably do need attention if we're going to have high winds - but got to admit that I'm a bit concerned about what's going to happen. For the most part, the letter says, they're going to be pruning, but apparently a few of them are to go. Fingers crossed these are the trees at the back, and not the ones I look straight out to.
I've been working 4 - 9's for the past week or so, it's a bit of a funny shift. I get hungry when I come home, so I've been making myself lunch, and keeping a bit on one side to heat up and have when I get in - today's was burger & salad - ok, chips as well, but only a small potato's worth! Let me tell you, burger doesn't reheat well. Avoid it is my tip of the day. Overcooked, dry and pretty tasteless was my experience, and that's from home made burger. Tomorrow, I shall choose something else to have for dinner. Beans on toast maybe, haven't had beans on toast for ages. See, that's the funny thing about this weather. You find yourself wanting winter style food in June.

Weds 18th June

Ooh time for a quick blog...
I'm just back from work tonight, we've been really busy and rushed off our feet. Luckily I'd planned dinner before I left, so I was able to get home to a nice salad, a proper dinner. If I'm working late in the evening, I need to think about dinner or I fall prey to the Burgerking I have to go past to get home - fatal, and frankly, this month fatal to my bank balance. Happily I had a box full of salad stuff in the fridge, including a couple of carrots and an apple - grated them up and mixed with a bit of mayo, and hey prest, carrot and apple slaw. I can remember Mum making bowls full of this stuff when I was a kid, and it's just as tasty now. And it keeps quite well I find, although you have to give it a good toss if you've made it a while before you eat it. I find a ratio of two carrots for every apple is good, and I like a crisp apple for this - although Coxes are very good in season.
I had a pack of cold meat to add to this - one of those mixed salami packs. Has anyone else noticed the near total disappearance of garlic sausage? Have I missed some dreadful announcement of some apalling health scare over this? Or has it just simply disappeared for some unkown reason? Whatever, I do miss it, I like a bit of garlic sausage.
Anyhow MOTD has just started so bye...!

Saturday 14th June

Gosh I can't believe it's Saturday already! And what's more, looking outside, it's a hot sunny day - according to our weather forecasts it's supposed to be overcast or raining or something. Mind you it's only 12 midday, frankly that's enough time left for the downpour to end all downpours! There are actually people out lying down in the park, reading, sunning themselves - you may be wondering why I don't join them. To be honest, if I did I'd be in for one of the more unpleasant nights of my recent experience. I've always characterised it as an allergy to sunshine, but it's more of a low threshold for sunstroke really. Ever since I was a kid, sunshine has made me feel very upset - my temperature seems to go through the roof, I get migrainous type headaches and terrible patches of prickly heat. And if I don't get out of it or cover up at that point, I start to feel very nauseous. So to be honest, whilst everyone else goes round saying isn't the weather wonderful, I just either nod or make a joke about how I wish it was the middle of winter. In all seriousness, one of the things that most appealed to me about going to Glasgow Uni was the idea (which I have no idea where I got, because it's utterly untrue) that it might be colder up there. It was - in winter, nice real snowfalls and all of that kind of thing, but come the summer it's every bit as hot in Glasgow as it is anywhere else in the country. And they do have the most beautiful early autumns up there, hot and sunny, with the leaves starting to turn - and the tang of bonfires in the air. Lovely city.

Anyhow it's been a busy week. Work, of course, got to do the old work thing, although I managed to pick up a stomach bug from somewhere - do excuse my apparent fascination with illness, it's becoming a theme! But you know what it's like if you've not been well, it becomes a sort of state of mind! I'm well on the way to recovery anyhow, so no more sickness mentions!

I've done my usual post office bit this week - had a bagcharm to send off airmail to Australia as well, always a bit of a thrill. I do love sending things off abroad, you get a feeling of real wow, they want me to send my little thing all that way, they must really like it! And to contrast with this, I'm just back from the post office having dispatched a little something to Trowbridge, a town I know well, not 35 miles away. I even lived there for a while, and I feel deeply guilty about posting it, I feel I should rush round there with it and deliver it in person! If I'd been going over to Winsley I probably would have, but alas, I'm not so in the post it goes.

Recently I've been making some necklaces. I've got some in the shop on Ebay now if you're looking for something nice - have a look!

The top one is a turquoise coin bead, hung on red copper chain, with Swarovski crystal bicone beads in a deep oceanic blue, and copper flower charm, - both of these necklaces are on auction and starting off at £6.99 - a real bargain if you ask me! The one underneath is also on red copper chain (both of them have stick and toggle clasps) and has a huge citrine quartz facetted bead, with two smalller smooth round beads in smoky quartz, and a copper plated flower bead. If you want to go and look at the listing, there's a link to the shop - Sunspark Sparks Jewels, on the left hand side of the top of this page.

One other thing I was going to mention. This morning I was woken up by a convoy of lorries going past the front of the house - these barmy fuel protesters were having one of their slow drives through Bristol. These people are absolutely a joke. The racket they made was unbelievable, and they think by breaking the sound barrier they are attracting sympathy for their cause. They've just been on the midday news with a spokesman claiming they're doing this on behalf of all motorists. When will motorists realise the world doesn't revolve around them? When will they get a grip on the idea that they're actually really, really lucky to be living in an age when they can drive a car or a lorry at all? And above all when will they understand that the cost of all this is actually the planet, not the tax on the petrol?? I sympathise with them on one level, it's very expensive to fill up a tank. But the answer is quite simple - either you brush up on your chemistry and physics, and engineering skills and go out there and invent a better engine, preferably one that runs on water, or you leave the car in the garage every other day and get the bus like the rest of us. I have a brother who's one of these mad personal driving obsessed individuals, who won't even contemplate the idea of getting a bus. Whenever I've suggested to him that it might benefit him to catch a bus or a train, and that personal ownership of cars isn't a practical way to organise transport, he complains the bus won't take him to the doorstep of his office. This, mind you, from a man who's hobby is walking! What does he do? He takes his car to wherever he's going walking, parks it and sets off for his recreational walk - he'll go considerable distances mind, I'm not talking about a stroll in the park. Yet the idea that he might walk half a mile from a bus stop to an office - ridiculous!