The Gym Isn't Working

Back to normal. Ish.

2011-12-05T21:32:00.003Z

Things are slowly returning to normal here at Schloss Loth. Last week was a bit weird, what with Husband's sudden and unexpected flirtation with the NHS in all its forms and Second Born being away from home all week on a school trip to London. SB is home again and seems to have had a great time. So good that it was minutes, MINUTES after getting off the bus before he started bickering with FB.

Given the itinerary for the trip, I am surprised SB didn't sleep round the clock on his return. The group left by train on Monday morning and were back in Edinburgh by 4pm on Friday. In between they managed to cover the Science Museum, a tour of London by World War II amphibious landing vehicle (it drives on the streets and then drives into the Thames), the Tower of London, backstage at The Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern, Houses of Parliament, Imperial War Museum, a trip on the London Eye and Madame Tussaud's. Oh, and a visit to the West End production of "The Wizard of Oz". I kind of wish I had been allowed to go too, to be honest.

The weekend was spent lazing around and recharging various batteries. Second Born did manage to disconnect himself from the XBox and laptop long enough to make soup for us all. Carrot and coriander, and very nice it was too. He even borrowed my favourite pinny for the occasion. Here he is in all his chef-y glory.
I like to wear that pinny while drinking tea from my Tim Horton's mug, for I am strange that way.

And now it is Monday. Husband is back at work, both children are back at school and the cat is still a bit confused by finding all the humans back interfering with his choice of snoozing spot. So no change there.

Well, THAT was fun

2011-11-28T21:25:00.006Z

This weekend started well and sort of went off the rails slightly towards the end. We spent Saturday and the first half of Sunday at the Corbies with a friend of First Born's in tow. We lazed around a lot and I took the boys swimming in the afternoon - it was a bit too windy to do anything outdoors that didn't involve simply grabbing onto something solid and holding on tight and if I borrow someone else's child for the weekend, I usually want to make sure I can hand them back safely again at the end. Also, going swimming meant a brief interruption in the non-stop stream of chat between FB and his pal. Do you know how long two 13 year old boys can spend doing nothing but trading insults? ("Mole snogger." "Bin licker." "Toenail fancier" etc, etc) Hours. Hours and hours and hours. Long enough to make your ears bleed.

Anyway, we came home on Sunday early enough to get Second Born packed for a school trip to London which required him to be deposited at Waverley Station at 7am on Monday morning. All was going well until Husband's cold/cough/chest infection which he had been carefully nurturing for some days decided to stage a takeover bid. And this resulted in Husband and I spending the hours between 8.30pm on Sunday and 3:30am on Monday in the delightful surroundings of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary A&E department.

That period of time was interesting: the clientele changed over the hours from kids with breathing difficulties and University hockey teams bringing in their pal with a broken ankle to weepy/agressive individuals either stagering around clutching their paper mache vomit bowls or passed out cold on trolleys to sleep it off.

Husband and I spent a long time - a LONG time - sitting around waiting to be seen and this gave us the opportunity to chat about all sorts of important things. Like how your children never tell you anything when you ask them what happened at school today. According to our kids, nothing happens at school. Ever. We make them get out of bed, dress them in stupid uniforms and then drop them in front of a building where they sit for 6 hours doing absolutely nothing before we let them come home again.

As a result, Husband and I reckon there is a gap in the market for an add-on to all the Xbox and online games out there: there should be a parental lock on all such games which, when the child tries to log on, requires said child to provide full details of three interesting things that happened at school today. The system then e-mails or texts this to the parent for approval. If the parent is happy with the information provided, he or she texts back an authorisation code and the game is unlocked. If not, no "Minecraft" access for your poor offspring. (If you don't know what Minecraft is, then you should be happy about that. Clearly you do not share your house with teen or pre-teen boys.)

Fortunately after a multitude of tests, Husband was allowed to come home with a shedload of medication to fight the alien life-form trying to colonise his lungs and we got to bed about 4am. I was up again at 6am to make sure that Second Born was successfully packed off to London for the week and First Born was dropped off at school. And then I came home and climbed back into bed for a few hours.

And that is what I did with my St Andrew's day public holiday. Not that much worse than spending it in Ikea really.

What I did on my holidays

2011-11-14T21:01:00.017Z

I have received a perfectly polite and well-mannered, but nonetheless firm, slap on the wrist from Isabelle for not posting. And she is quite correct (she used to teach, you know. She is always correct.) As I said to her in my mumbled apology, the muse has been somewhat absent of late but that is no excuse for spending far too much time on Facebook and not enough time churning out deathless prose. Or something like that. Tonight I find myself alone in the living room (oh the luxury!) as Husband is pottering in his music room, First Born has gone to bed nursing a cough (which could well be The Typhus, such is his air of resigned suffering) and Second Born is doing some work on his recent maths challenge problems. I do not understand the questions in said challenge, so am of limited use in providing any solutions. I therefore have no excuse not to sit down and blog. And here I am.

I seem to remember having promised you an update on the doings of Clan Loth over the past few weeks and, given the passage of time, this will have to be in the form of bullet points.

We spent the half term holiday at the Corbies. And it was great fun. We went to Holy Island for the day and went to York on a different day (and should have been awarded some sort of Museum Endurance Medal for managing to cram the National Railway Museum, York Minster and two Jorvik exhibitions into one day)
With the aid of Sister-in-law we systematically stripped the surrounding countryside of elderberries. We collected bags and bags and bags of them. Fortunately the weather was kind and we were able to sit outside for the fiddly task of getting the wee berries off the twigs and into bowls (the easiest way is to use a fork and sort of tease them off) Doing this outside is advisable as the berries are small, round and prone to escaping. And when squished, they release deep red juice which is very difficult to shift once it has stained its surroundings. The family production line resulted in a bumper crop of berries which I then spent some hours converting into this.
Second Born went to school dressed as Winston Churchill - their year was having a VE day celebration as part of their topic of The Home Front in WWII. I wish I had a photo of that for you, but sadly I don't.
Last weekend we were back down at the Corbies, this time with my mum and dad in tow. We had a wonderfully laid back Saturday, including a wander around the town of Eyemouth (FB was delighted: there is a good ice-cream shop there). We climbed up onto the Coastal Path from where the views were lovely in the unseasonal sunshine
We ended up walking around the little harbour where this little pub is located - the name just tickled me for some reason.
And we also spotted this on one of the fishing boats in the harbour: Makes one wonder how they might spell "fish"!

And now I must go and load the dishwasher and make sure all the lunches are ready for tomorrow before I head off to bed.

Hi! I'm back!

2011-10-23T21:17:00.003+01:00

I have actually been away this time, rather than just too lazy to blog. Half-term holiday was last week and we spent it away from home. I will fill in the details when ~~I can be bothered~~ I have time, promise. There will be photos and everything.

In the meantime, courtesy of First Born we have "The Weird Dream I Had Last Night" (I promise, by the way, that not only do I have FB's permission to blog about this, he actually begged me to. The question of how and to what extent I am warping my children with blog posts is one for another day, thank you.) Anyway, FB's dream went thusly:

"I dreamt that every year in the autumn, anything made of tin and all fresh spinach mutated and joined together to form spider-like creatures about the size of dustbin lids. These tin/spinach tarantulas would run around for a while and then, when it got cold enough, they would all migrate south for the winter (Ed: leaving us with nothing to keep our baked beans in, I presume). They migrated via the pipes in your house. They were harmless unless you bothered them and if you did that, they got very aggressive and dragged you down into the pipes with them. I dreamt that I dropped a shoe on one (Ed: Highly credible. Shoes are only one of the many items dropped on a daily basis by FB.) and it got angry and it and its friends tried to drag me down the pipes. I woke up really scared they were going to get me and had to sleep right against the wall for the rest of the night just in case."

All I can read into that one is that FB has a highly-developed fear of green leafy vegetables. Unless anyone else fancies having a go at interpreting this one?

It's a worry

2011-10-10T21:18:00.006+01:00

The problem with having a young teen and a practising-really-hard-to-be-a-teen around the place is that they have a tendency to hog the laptop. Even worse is when their slightly dodgy friends come round and hog the laptop.

Why yes, that is a plush stuffed toy Face-hugger from "Alien". On my couch. Presumably updating its status on Facebook. Perfectly normal.

I'll be knitting my own yogurt next

2011-09-26T21:16:00.008+01:00

The weekend was lovely in a bittersweet sort of way. My brother and his wife and children are home on a visit from Australia (we still think of the UK as "home" for them, even though they have been Aussie residents for 2 years now). They all came down to the Corbies on Saturday and although Brother and Sister-inLaw had to scoot off early to go socialising with friends in Glasgow, my niece and nephew stayed the night with us along with my parents.

This meant the 4 cousins could run as a feral pack for a few hours. My nephew in particular idolises First Born (they are very alike, both on the same wavelength that few other mortals can tune into) and FB for his part does not object to a little bit of hero worship coming his way. And who wouldn't enjoy a session of chucking boomerangs across the fields of the Borders?

The bittersweet part was that on Sunday morning, the cousins had to leave and my nephew had to be more or less peeled away from FB, such was his resistance to leaving. They will be back off to Sydney in a few days and we have no idea when we will see them again in the flesh. Skype is a wonderful invention, but it is no substitute for actually having your family around your dinner table, choking on their food from laughing so much. Also, Skype does not quite convey the extent to which my eight-year old niece sounds like Danni Minogue now.

We cheered ourselves up by collecting a huge bag of elderberries from the trees around our garden. Then, back in Edinburgh, Second Born, Husband and I spent quite a wee while in our garden teasing the berries off the stalks (getting very crimson fingers in the process). We ended up with quite a haul
which I then turned into this

Tastes pretty good mixed with lemonade and, according to Husband, even better with the addition of crushed ice and a dash of rum! Next step is an attempt at making apple chutney of some sort as I am in possession of a big bag of apples from a friend's trees. I have never made chutney before but am willing to have a go. Anyone have any good recipes they would like to share?

Bah humbug!

2011-09-22T18:00:00.002+01:00

Okay, Sainsbury's, we need to have a little chat. It's bad enough that you irritate me by putting up signs like THIS

(particularly when I am not carrying a convenient red marker pen for correction purposes). (Although luckily I do have my camera phone on me for blogging purposes.)

But Christmas crackers and selection boxes in September??? Really?? That's just cruel.

Very belated roundup

2011-09-21T19:57:00.007+01:00

I think I am affected by the low-level writer's block that seems to be affecting some other bloggers out there. Every time I sit down to write, I end up concluding that I have nothing interesting to say and playing Scrabble on Facebook instead. Which is fine, but not really a constructive way to spend the evening (especially when I am being roundly beaten by my mother. Again.) I started blogging partly as a way to record the mundane events of daily life for future reference because I thought it would be nice to be able to look back on a record of what we were doing, what the children were saying and what was going on in my head at any given time. Of course, the children are less cute than they once were - a sad by-product of the ageing process - but we still do stuff that is worth recording for me, even if it will bore the pants off anyone out there unwise enough to read it.

So, on that basis, I am going to go back to basics: record what Clan Loth has been up to and moan about stuff that bugs me. Sorry in advance.

First up: had to show you the mutant carrot we dug up at the weekend. Second Born has developed a deep fondness for scrubbing carrots (I am, needless to say, pleased about this) and demanded that I take a photo of this beauty for posterity. We actually had quite a lot of similar carrots-entwined-with-other-carrots. I put it down to the fact that my sister-in-law sneezed whenn planting the carrot seeds resulting in a rather denser planting pattern than we had planned. If they have insufficient room to spread, carrots will cuddle, it would appear.

We had a school friend of Husband's (I'll call him S) staying with us at the Corbies over the weekend, together with his Russian girlfriend. A great time was had by all. S is rather a good, if eclectic, cook and he recruited the boys as his sous-chefs on Sunday morning to produce a quite spectacular breakfast which included oatmeal puddings (heavenly!), haggis, Northumbrian sausages, french toast, courgettes, carrots, eggs and potato cakes made from leftover mash from the night before. We should have been embarassed to head out later to the local pub for Sunday lunch after that. But we weren't.

S had also spent part of Saturday making rowan jelly from rowan berries we found on our walk (to eat with our game pie for dinner) and elderberry cordial from elderberries he found at the bottom of our garden. The elderberry cordial was lovely. It was (a) drunk with lemonade by the boys, and (b) turned into a quite lethal cocktail along with some Pimms, coriander from the garden and a bottle of whisky and ginger liqueur we bought at a recent food fair. It sounds awful, it should have been revolting but it wasn't. Apart from having to sieve the bits of coriander leaf out with your teeth, it was lovely.

We had taken S and girlfriend down to the nearest village for some supplies, the nearest village being over the border in England. I have always found this sign on the outskirts of the village amusing. I love the fact that the whole country is signed, but below Ladykirk and Swinton (total combined populations of both places probably about 200)
We went for a walk up to the bridge over the Tweed which forms the border between Scotland and England and the boys amused themselves by jumping back and forward over the mid-line chanting "Tea! Irn-Bru! Tea! Irn-Bru".

We ended up having such a good time that we stayed at the Corbies on Sunday night as well. The boys had a school holiday on Monday anyway, Husband had taken the day off already and I .......played hookey. Or "dogged it" as we used to say at school. (Not that I ever playing truant at school of course. I was far too scared.) Thanks to "Work-Life Balance" (or flexi-time as it used to be known) I can get away with this by working longer hours Tuesday to Friday to make up. Which is not great fun when I have to be in the office for longer, but it was totally worth it. I'm just wondering how to break it to S that the boys would like to come and live with him, please.

I need more recipe ideas

2011-09-13T14:46:00.004+01:00

The first summer of vegetable-growing at the Corbies has been pretty good, all things considered. Okay, we have no cauliflowers because the rabbits ate them all. Ditto pretty much all of the peas. But the courgettes have been lovely, carrots delicious and potatoes prolific and tasty. However, what I really need is a recipe for braised sunflower.
This, as you may recall, is the mystery plant that showed up uninvited and unannounced in our veggie patch. We decided to let it be, see what it grew into and it turned into The Sunflower That Took Over the World. It is by far the biggest success story of the summer (the moral of the story apparently being "The less we do to plants, the more they thrive". I must confess I am encouraged by this.) Now if only we could figure out how to eat it.

Overheard conversation

2011-08-30T19:51:00.002+01:00

Heard from the back seat of our car today:

".....and he said it was the worst thing he had ever smelled and he had to keep smelling it because it was on his face for AGES..........."

I didn't ask.

Sigh

2011-08-29T14:48:00.001+01:00

My children went to bed last night with hot water bottles. In AUGUST.

Edinburgh: Not a tropical holiday destination.

Random stuff

2011-08-12T16:32:00.006+01:00

Do you know what it means to live in Edinburgh during the Festival? It means that even in the rather anonymous suburb in which I live and even when you are just waiting in your car at the lights to go home after getting the weekly shop at Sainsbury's, this sort of thing happens.

He was just crossing the road and stopped to juggle a bit. As you do. Sadly the lights changed before he was able to pass the hat around (if that's what he was planning to do).

To avoid getting caught up in the genuine mayhem that is the centre of Edinburgh at this time (the city is just FULL) the boys and I have tended to meander around near home instead. A few days ago, during a brief lull in the ongoing torrential downpour, we walked the mile or so to our local garden centre. On the way we stopped to chat to the Highland cattle that hang out in a field nearby. A lovely old lady also stopped to chat and told us that the two young bulls in the field were called Dave and Eric. Not sure which one this is trying to hypnotise Second Born into giving him more ear scratches.
Also not sure that Dave and Eric are the right kinds of names for Highland cattle. Shouldn't they be Wallace and Bruce, or Rob and Roy or something?

If I was a grown-up.....

2011-08-06T17:16:00.008+01:00

..........I presume I would have some clue what "eyebrow threading" is. I was offered this the other day (on my way to buy Kilner jars and sugar - chutney doesn't make itself) by a woman lurking in my local shopping centre. I wasn't sure what it was - a new hobby? Some sort of craft? - so I smiled politely, dodged round her and fled into Sainsbury's.

This is my standard method of dealing with those awkward situations, the ones which make me acutely aware that I barely qualify as a grown-up woman. I use it, for example, to get through those intimidating perfume/make-up halls one finds at the entrance to Jenners and Harvey Nicks and John Lewis. Actually, I am guessing about Harvey Nicks. I think I am the only woman left in Edinburgh who has never been in there. Anyway, those places scare the life out of me. They are a sort of over-fragranced minefield one must traverse to reach the good bits of the store (in my case, usually the cookshop). Following that analogy to its logical conclusion, that would make those daunting, immaculately made-up young women in scary white uniforms the ravenous alsatians. They fill me with that level of fear and trepidation. I know if I have to speak to them for any length of time, they will figure out that I Am Not A Real Grown Up and I will be sentenced to wear a bag on my head for all eternity.

I am almost ashamed to say, aged 44, that I don't wear make-up. Ever. Oh, I have been known to put on a bit of mascara and lipstick if forced to get dressed up for some business dinner or other but we hardly ever do that sort of thing these days. And since Jen told me that it is not in fact a good idea to keep using that one ancient tube of mascara I have had since before First Born arrived (it is not electric blue, but given its vintage, it could have been) I am even less likely to do so now. Jen reckons that mascara only keeps for about 6 months, tops, and since we only go out to something that might require a bit of slap about once every 2 years, that means buying a new mascara every time I need to wear it. That's just not going to happen.

I wonder if perhaps I am missing some sort of critical female gene - for example, I hate clothes shopping and shoe shopping in particular. More likely I am just too darn lazy, but for whatever reason, I never got into the make-up habit and doubt I will now.

And since I am in confessional mode here, I must also confess to not using skin care products either. I once went for a spa day with my mother to Stobo Castle - it was a gift for her and I reluctantly agreed to tag along. We both had a French facial (I have no idea what made it French rather than, say, Hungarian, but that's what it said on the itinerary) and as part of the process, the efficient young woman in the lab coat asked me what my skin care routine was.

"I wash it" I mumbled. "In the shower. With shower gel."

I could tell by the angle of her eyebrow that was the wrong answer. After the facial I was presented with a lengthy prescription for precisely the sort of cleansers, toners, moisurisers and little pots of magic I should be applying daily to my criminally under-maintained face. Needless to say, I binned it. Not only would buying that stuff mean interacting with the scary Perfume Droid Girls, but the price of it was astonishing. I couldn't help calculating how many books I could buy for the price of a teeny tiny little pot of Eye Bag Unguent and it frankly didn't seem worth it.

So I am afraid I am going to stick to my shower gel skin care regimen. I am going to wash my hair in whatever shampoo was on offer in the supermarket when I did my weekly shop and if I run out of shampoo, I will probably not be afraid to use washing-up liquid. Again. And I will enjoy my books and console myself with the thought that I am probably more the sort of Earth-mother-y, unglamourous sort of female who may never have plucked an eyebrow, but who can not only bake cookies, but make chutney. Hopefully.

Gardens are great!

2011-08-02T20:46:00.005+01:00

Back at the Corbies over the weekend and we were stopped in our tracks by the garden. There is stuff growing! All over the place! The potatoes have gone completely mad - these are about waist high and flowering fit to burst. The flowers are surprisingly pretty - I'm not sure I expected tattie flowers to look nice but these are vivid purple with bright yellow centres and really quite flashy.

The plants in the photo were part of the second wave of planting. The first wave have already lost their flowers so we gave in to temptation and dug some up to have with dinner. Thankfully our neighbour had warned us that fresh spuds cook more quickly than the ones you buy in Sainsbury's and she was not wrong. They took no longer than the wee pan of frozen peas I was cooking. And they tasted absolutely wonderful, with a little bit of butter and some mint from the garden. I could have eaten an entire plate of those potatoes for dinner with nothing else. I now find myself fantasising about digging up more on our next visit....

What has also been fun with this garden is discovering the stuff hiding in there from before we bought the house. There was a tangled mass of vegetation in one corner of the little flower bed under the kitchen window which we found as we stripped out the mint which had run riot in there. We didn't know what it was but it looked like it had tendril-y things like a climber. So we stuck up some trellis, pulled the triffid off the ground and attached it. Then we forgot about it. When we arrived this weekend, it looked like this:
I still don't know what it is exactly (Isabelle?) but isn't it gorgeous? (Please ignore the dandelions either side. I pulled them out later. Honest.)

And finally, when we dug over one of the vegetable plots and planted our courgettes and rocket and so on, we found a seedling growing that we didn't recognise. It wasn't anything we planted but it didn't look exactly weed-y either. So we decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and let it grow, see what it turned into. It turned into this:

It's a sunflower! Knowledgeable Neighbour tells us that the birds often drop the seeds from feeders and they grow where they fall. It's not interfering with the courgettes and stuff so we are happy to let it do its thing. Amazing that something so tall and sturdy can grown from a seed so small we didn't even see it when we dug the bed over!

Has it really been a week?

2011-07-29T16:44:00.004+01:00

End of the first week back at work after the holiday. It wasn't too bad, actually - particularly as I am now a part-time slacker. I find that you can cope with even the most boring of jobs if you know you are leaving at lunchtime. The post-Canada withdrawal symptoms are manageable for the most part. Although I did see a car drive up to our little corner shop over the road this morning with a Canadian flag sticking out of the window. I pined, slightly.

The boys for their part are enjoying some heavy-duty slobbing. They have re-established their love affair with their XBox and, inexplicably, with watching the odd episode of "Judge Judy" on TV while eating porridge in the morning. Bizarre.

I meant to say before that one of the best parts of this year's holiday was taking the boys to Hennigar's in Greenwich for ice cream. Now, we have been going to Hennigar's for ice cream for years but this is the first year that First Born has been able to truly participate. His dairy allergy is on the retreat now to such an extent that he can eat ice cream. And (on this holiday alone) cheese, pizza, whipped cream from a can, yogurt, chocolate mousse and frozen chocolate mousse (we all had a taste of that when he ordered it and frankly he is lucky the rest of us didn't wrestle him to the ground, sit on him and eat his dessert while ignoring his pleas for mercy. It was THAT GOOD). Oh, and donuts in Tim Hortons.

The joy of being able to take FB into any restaurant we like (except one that serves vegetables, obviously - he still has standards) and let him order whatever he wants off the menu without having to cross examine the staff on the ingredients - it was wonderful. Of course, it means he also wants to try EVERYTHING now and no food in my possession is safe. I used to be able to protect things I wanted to keep to myself by claiming they "may" have milk in them and I wouldn't want him to be ill. But no more. Now if he sees it, he wants to try it. Unless it is green and leafy. Anyone have a recipe for spinach ice cream?

Did you miss me?

2011-07-23T12:54:00.006+01:00

Just back from the wonders of Canada. We had the usual grind of having to negotiate Gatwick and London on our way back so will take a day or two to recover from that (hurry up someone, and reinstate direct flights to Nova Scotia from Glasgow - this is getting tiresome). That said, I would go through a great deal to get to the Maritimes for our annual break. Staying in a cottage with a view like this from its deck is priceless
Those two not-so-little blobs on the beach are First Born and Second Born off to frolic in the surf. I was on the deck coating myself in SPF 60 sunblock and snapped a photo before I left.

Also, wonder of wonders, my curse is broken! I am no longer known as "The Whale Repellant" We went whalewatching from Brier Island and.......I SAW WHALES!!! We encountered a female humpback whale and her calf and they stayed and played around the boat for over an hour. (In fact the captain of the boat tried repeatedly to leave but was thwarted by the whales playing and rolling around the boat - he couldn't start up the engines without risking their injury and they wouldn't leave!!) These photos don't really do justice to how wonderful the whales were and how close they were - we got thoroughly sprayed from their blow-holes every time they surfaced ("Aargh! Whale snot!!!" yelled my children, much to their own amusement.)
More soon once brain is functioning. Meantime, congratulations to Isabelle and K on becoming a grandmother and mother respectively. Pop over to Isabelle's blog for some lovely pictures to coo over.

You know........

2011-06-23T21:29:00.002+01:00

............. that it's Midsummer in Edinburgh when it has been raining without cease for a week, the tourists all look like they want to cry and you have just taken the winter weight duvet out of the cupboard and put it back on your bed.

Oh, hi. You're still there?

2011-06-21T22:43:00.002+01:00

Wow. Almost a month appears to have passed since I last blogged. This is partly due to a certain amount of stuff that was going on that I couldn't really blog about and partly (mostly) due to my laziness/devotion to playing Scrabble with my Mum on Facebook. And now there is so much to talk about that I am reduced to bullet points. So: Stuff That Has Happened Since I last Posted

I turned 44. It wasn't too bad.
We discovered that bunnies and not slugs are munching all our vegetables down at the cottage.
We discovered you cannot buy Bunny Pellets at the garden centre.
Noted that Internet recommends scattering human and/or dog hair all over your garden to discourage the furry munch-monsters without actually harming them. Wondering (a) how much hair will I get if I shave the children? or alternatively, (b) where can I lay my hands on supplies of dog hair without upsetting my dog-owning neighbours?
Went into mourning as our friendly neighbourhood butcher over the road retired and went off to play golf instead of slicing bacon and making steak pies for our delectation. His shop has been taken over by a dog grooming business. Oh, wait.......
Covered a very hilly 6 miles in 1 hour 45 minutes with my Mum as we participated in the Race for Life last Sunday. Enjoyed embarrassing my Mum on Facebook as I told everyone how she left me with the bags after we crossed the finish line and went off to use the loos, and how she then got lost on her way back to me and had to go and ask the nice man on the stage to put a call out for me on the PA to come and get her. Said nice man then announced to the assembled masses (the 5k race was just getting ready to start) that Mum had been claimed by her daughter and suggested I should either put a leash on her next time or get one of those chips put in her ear.
Realised we leave for the annual Loth Family Canadia Jamboree in about a fortnight. That sound you can hear is the entire whale population of the north Atlantic getting ready to decamp the minute I set foot on a whalewatching ship. I don't care! I still can't wait!

I've remembered my name again

2011-05-23T22:00:00.004+01:00

Husband has finally got around to setting up our family e-mail using a groovy domain name he bought a couple of years ago (I presume if you are married to a plumber then your house may be full of cool taps and nice showers. We have cool e-mail addresses.) This has necessitated lots of headscratching on my part as I realise quite how many things (Facebook, Google Reader, Gmail, Blogger....) I run using my e-mail address and which therefore require a bit of tweaking if we are going to start using the new one. It's been like a test on how much I really understand the internet and social networking sites. I suspect I may have failed.

Incidentally, I am told by Husband that he has set up the whole email gubbins using Google Apps. No, I have no idea what that means or how it works. I just know that I can still get my email from the old account even when I log into the new one. It's like alchemy.

I did however forget about Blogger to begin with and then when I remembered and went to log in, I had forgotten which email address I used to access it and which password and then I got distracted by a bit of fluff on the carpet and days passed. However, as you can see, I have now remembered it. Haven't figured out how to move the account over to the new email address but I am going to not think about that for a while because having to remember and manage more than one address is beginning to make my teeth hurt.

On a more positive (if no less mundane) note, I am getting my hair cut tomorrow for the first time in about.......ooooh.............11 months (if you don't count the times I cut my own fringe with nail scissors because it was annoying me). I have for years had a very distinct streak in my hair - an area where all my grey hairs have gathered together, and fortunately it usually lurks underneath the brown hair and is not visible to the casual observer. However as I approach my mid-40s, the grey is spreading slightly and making its presence more obvious. I am therefore considering letting my hairdresser have her wicked way with my wee streak. She has been threatening to dye it for years and Second Born has given me permission to let her. SB is suggesting bright purple. What do you reckon?

How did that happen?

2011-05-11T21:50:00.000+01:00

First Born has exams next week. At school. Something I gave birth to will be sitting proper exams in English and Chinese in just a few days. I spent this afternoon passing on my wisdom about revision schedules and exam techniques. To my baby.

I'm getting old.

2011-05-03T20:21:00.003+01:00

Well thank you for that help with the tree identification. Especially you, Katney. Don't know what I would do without you. No, really.

In other exciting news, some new energy saving lights have been fitted in the quasi-government-y office where I work. They turn themselves off when no-one is around and then turn on when they sense your presence. My office is at the end of a long, long corridor full of said lights, so every morning as I walk down there the lights gradually turn on as I pass them. My question is this: is it okay that I hum myself a little fanfare crescendo as the lights come on? Or is that a bit sad?

More advice needed, please

2011-04-26T22:03:00.008+01:00

Another wonderful weekend at the Corbies. Mum and Dad brought the boys down and we had a lovely couple of days wandering around, drinking beer (not the boys), having barbeques and doing a bit of gardening. The weather was most untypical for Scotland - warm, sunny and lovely. The swallows have returned to the cottage too and are intent on nest-building. We therefore spend any time outdoors with those beautiful birds swooping around our heads as they invade the pig sty with its lovely dark corners, so perfect for raising a family in.

I think we have broken the back of the garden and it is now starting to look a little more respectable.
We spent a lot of time digging and weeding the borders and beds (with much help from my parents) and they are looking pretty good now, even if I do say so myself. Now we just need to decide what to plant in them!

And this is where you talented gardening-type people out there come in. (I know you have nothing better to do than answer my inane questions!) We have lots of lovely plants and trees but no idea of what most of them are. So I have prepared a quiz for you: Identify if you can the following trees from our little Borders garden:

1) From the patio - beautiful deep pink blossom

2) Also from the patio - not in blossom yet, but with little trailing "cat tails" which look like they might become flowers soon

3) From our deck - pretty pale lilac flowers

Apologies for the rotten picture quality - you can click the photies to enlarge if that helps!

We are planning to return to the Corbies to escape the wall-to-wall wedding coverage this Friday (no TV there - what joy!) and hopefully to plant some stuff in those waiting beds. Just have to decide what to plant.

I'm back again

2011-04-17T21:13:00.007+01:00

Back home again, facing a return to work tomorrow after what feels like a really long holiday, even though I've only been away from the office for 7 days.

Prague was lovely. It is always nice but the weather was surprisingly clement, with sunshine and gentle warmth, ideal for wandering about streets and climbing hills. And gazing at light-up yellow plastic penguins.First Born was very enamoured of the penguins. He navigated Prague entirely by reference to where we were in relation to said penguins.

We walked and walked and walked some more, climbed Petrin Hill up to the top and then, when we got there, decided we were too footsore to climb up the replica Eiffel Tower so we sat on a bench drinking Pepsi and telling silly stories instead. We took the boys to our favourite cafe for hot chocolate and soy milk lattes, and to our favourite bar where we ate far more pork than was good for us. We visited the church where Czech resistance fighters were pinned down by Nazi soldiers after the assasination of Reinhard Heydrich and the crypt where they died after being betrayed by one of their own. We visited the zoo and watched tigers having lunch. They have marginally better table manners than our sons, I reckon.
Second Born took that photograph. He is both braver and more determined than I am!

Second Born also celebrated his 11th birthday on our last day in Prague by eating a small vat of Nutella at breakfast and buying himself a couple of puppets with some of his birthday money. Puppets are very popular in Prague and one of his purchases is a traditional marionette, albeit in the form of a chimpanzee. The other one.......defies description. I will try to persuade SB to let me photograph it for a later post. You'll thank me, I promise.

We came home from Prague and almost immediately set off for the Corbies for a few days. We had a few little jobs to do around there and one large one: the freezing cold and very windy winter had not been kind to the roof of our summerhouse. (The bricks are there to stop the felt ripping further!)

Now, Husband and I and Husband's sister are not what you would call handy. We have never re-roofed a shed before, but we decided to have a go. And I think that, given it was done by two lawyers and a training consultant, the result wasn't half bad.

Poor sister-in-law got the job of climbing onto the roof to rip off the old felt and then stick down the new (the roof isn't strong enough to support more than one person at a time). We basically shoved her up there at about 2pm and didn't let her down again until 7pm. She required a lot of beer and mini chocolate rolls to recover. As did we.

Next job: getting the barbecue ready so we can start really enjoying ourselves down there! My mum and dad are having the boys to stay with them at the end of next week and then bringing them down to the Corbies for Easter Weekend. Can't wait.

Ski cake!

2011-04-05T14:37:00.003+01:00

My heartfelt thanks to all of you helpful types out there who assisted with the translation of an unusual Canadian cake recipe into Scottish. I had never made it before, it required an odd sort of method and the aforementioned translation of ingredients and measures, but Second Born had requested Ski Cake for his birthday and Ski Cake he would have. I am of course biased, but I think the results were okay:

(If you want to see what the original looks like, Google "Saltscapes" and "Ski Cake".) The cake went down quite well, with First Born and Second Born both having seconds. Second Born's friend who was with us for the birthday celebrations at the cottage scoffed his one slice but declined a second. I choose to believe that he is just well brought up and disinclined to stuff his face at any opportunity (like my two) rather than that he didn't like it much.

I then outdid myself, of course, when I left the remains of the cake (more than half!!) in the fridge when we left the cottage on Sunday. It is still there now, quietly going stale all on its own. Second Born went into mourning when he found out and was inconsolable until I promised him I would make him another one when we get back from Prague. After all, I speak fluent Canadian Cake Recipe now!

?

2011-03-28T21:17:00.003+01:00

I was idly texting my husband today while I sat in the car and waited for First Born to appear from school (Second Born is away at school camp, charging around in the vicinity of Culloden pretending to be a Jacobite. The house is eerily peaceful.) Anyway, I was texting with Husband and I wanted to type/text/enter/whatever the word "scones".

(Yes, Husband and I have scintillatingly important text conversations about cheese scones. We are just that groovy.)

Anyway, the predictive text thingy was doing its .......thing, and instead of "scones" it insisted that I wanted to say "scoods". It was really quite emphatic about it, to the extent that it was claiming never to have heard of the word "scones" at all. I eventually had to spell it out for the dratted thing.

I have no idea what "scoods" are and am too sensible/scared to Google it*, but I am left shaking my head and wondering: who on earth programmed a phone which knows what "scoods" are but which has never heard of scones? Civilisation is crumbling before our eyes, I tell you.

*Also now slightly worried that "scoods" will turn out to be a very dodgy word indeed andthat I am going to get some very strange hits on the blog for a couple of weeks.

Momentous movements and a cry for help

2011-03-21T20:28:00.002Z

It's Husband's birthday today, but since birthdays on Mondays are no fun, we celebrated it over the weekend at the Corbies instead. His present from us was a "Make yourself at home at The Corbies kit" - gift bags containing an espresso maker, tin of good coffee, bottle of malt whisky, whisky glasses, box of ice cube bags and a Lindt gold chocolate bunny. He was quite happy. He also got to have game pie from our local (to The Corbies) butcher for his dinner which went down very nicely. Tonight he has had a beef curry for dinner (made by me in the slow cooker) and he has bitten the head off his Lindt bunny, so not bad as Monday birthdays go.

On Sunday when we got back to Edinburgh, I helped Second Born finish his move into the former spare bedroom. The boys have shared a bedroom since Second Born was about 4 or 5 months old but it has become increasingly clear over the past few months that the time for separate rooms was upon us. We could no longer put up with the constant arguments over which episode of "Just a Minute" should be playing on the iPod dock.

I offered to paint the spare room prior to the move, and Second Born chose a paint colour which goes by the name "Orange Squash". Those of you who live in Edinburgh and who have been wondering what that strange glow in the sky to the south is need ponder no more: it's just the glow from my son's new bedroom walls. They are a little bit bright.

First Born has served notice that he intends to have the original bedroom painted Lime Green when his time comes. (This may be a good while yet: he has about 700 stickers to peel off the walls before I can paint them and I doubt he has the patience.)

So the boys are now in separate rooms. First Born has his beloved drum kit in his room with him and Second Born, for the time being, has the TV and XBox in with him. Until I can figure out a way for the boys to have access to their electronic entertainments without giving up on my declared "No TVs in bedrooms" stance. Any suggestions gratefully received.

And on the subject of suggestions, I could do with some help from the North American contingent out there: we subscribe to a magazine called Saltscapes which is based in and all about Atlantic Canada (did I ever mention we are fond of Atlantic Canada? No?) Anyway, a recent edition had lots of reader recipes in it, one of which was for a cake called a "ski cake". Second Born has seen this and decided that he wants his birthday cake this year to be a ski cake. Which is fine, I am happy to do that - anything has to be better than producing flaming skull or suicidal bunny cakes. But I do need some help with some recipe conversion details, namely:

What exactly is semi-sweet chocolate in English? Milk chocolate? Plain? 75% cocoa? Or some other form I have not heard of?
And what measure is "3 squares" of said chocolate? I presume there must be a standard measurement that is a "square" - any idea how much that is in weight terms?
And if a recipe says 125ml of butter, how much is that in grammes? Or 500ml flour? (I know I could look that one up pretty easily, but I'm feeling lazy)

Any help very gratefully received. If you're lucky, I'll post a photo of the result, good or bad.

Culture and all that

2011-03-17T21:55:00.004Z

I meant to post about this earlier but, you know, stuff happened and I got distracted when I went online. Mostly spent my laptop time getting free advice from Croila about gardening, to be honest. That and playing stupid Ravenwood Fair on Facebook.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that last week I took my Mum to her first ever ballet. When I learned she had never been I promised her I would find something suitable and we'd make a night of it. I saw that Romeo and Juliet was on, with the wonderful Prokofiev score, so I got tickets for my Mum and myself and for L, a friend of mine I used to work with and with whom I used to go to the ballet quite a lot. Mum was delighted and immediately started fretting over the classic first-time ballet-goer question: What should I wear?

She was reassured to find that jeans and a jumper was fine and no ball gowns would be required.

The ballet itself was.......interesting. A sort of modern-ish take on Romeo and Juliet. Lots of big alien-style headdresses on the Capulet ladies and then a slightly Bucks Fizz moment during the ball scene when they all shed their frocks to reveal virtually painted-on leotards beneath.

Oh, and an odd sub-plot which had Tybalt and Lady Capulet plainly engaged in quite a steamy affair. (There were a couple of holds during their dances that had you asking "Does he realise where his hand is?????") Tybalt ended up killing Mercutio because Mercutio and his mate dressed up as Tybalt and Lady C and did a (very funny) mickey-taking dance in the square. Now, that wasn't in the original play, was it? Or did I miss that in 3rd year English class?

We thoroughly enjoyed it anyway, including the half-time ice creams. The lady sitting next to us had brought her little girl along - she was about 4 years old and clearly a ballet fan, dressed in a sparkly ballerina dress and ballet shoes. My friend L engaged the wee one in conversation during intermission and learned that yes, the ballerina dress was pretty, but the undies that were part of the ensemble were a bit tight and tended to get stuck in one's .......erm......... undercarriage. So that was interesting.

I'm not sure that Romeo & Juliet was a great choice for a 4 year old, as in the final scene, as Juliet went mad with grief over Romeo's body and prepared to stab herself, a tremulous little voice was plainly heard over the silent auditorium: "Mummy, what's she going to do with that knife???" She can't have been too upset by it though, as we saw her performing her own interpretation of the show to the queue for the ladies loos as we left.

A good night was had by all (I frankly consider any night where I am out of the house after dark a success as long as it does not involve Sainsbury's) and we plan to repeat the experience soon. Looking out for tickets for a nice, classical, floaty ballet next. Swan Lake or Giselle maybe.

Before and after

2011-03-08T21:30:00.010Z

We had another nice weekend down at the Corbies - much easier to decamp down there now that we have beds and furniture and such like. Sister-in-law donated some pots and pans she was getting rid of (due to having purchased a groovy new induction hob for her house that doesn't work with some of her old pans) and some plates she had found in a charity shop. Slowly but surely we are completing our kitchen.....

We went down on Friday night so on Saturday morning we were able to make a quick trip over the border to England for provisions. There is a wonderful butcher in the nearest village over the border so we had their fabulous bacon and home-made wild boar sausages for breakfast. With rolls from the local bakery. Yummmm! Our neighbours at the cottage tell us that the game pies from that butcher are so good that when they go to visit relatives in Edinburgh, they aren't allowed in unless they are also bearing one of said pies.

They also make amazing steak and kidney pies and that is what we bought for dinner on Saturday night. I actually cooked dinner (well, heated up the pies, cooked the peas and mashed the tatties) in the cottage kitchen. Woo hoo! Feeling like a home from home at last.

We also have headboards on the beds now, so you don't spend half the night fishing your pillows up off the floor. And Husband and kind neighbour spent an hour or so and much MUCH sweat disposing of a large pile of debris left behind in our garden by the damp proof contractors. We didn't realise they had done this for some time due to the snow - the garden and drive were covered in huge piles of snow, and the pile of bags of broken plaster was masquerading as a snowdrift. Only realised what it was after the thaw!

And although I forgot to take the camera with me (again), I did have my phone AND I have figured out how to get photos off my phone and onto the Interweb. So here you go - The Corbies: Before and After. First the before.....

This is the alcove in our sitting room

And this is the other side of the sitting room, nicely set off by the icy chill of winter daylight.

And the kitchen. Note the feature "radiators left piled against the wall instead of actually installed and heating the house during the coldest winter since records began". Not every house has that, you know.And now the nice bit! The sitting room, decorated by our own fair hands! (Note the laptop. We don't even have broadband yet, but laptops follow us wherever we go.)

That there is the couch that we had to bend the laws of physics to get through the cottage door. I swear there was witchcraft of some sort involved in that process. And finally the kitchen, with the world's most tasteless dishwasher lovingly installed.

And the flagstone floor which I love, but which I will accept is rather cold on the toes when I stop every morning to look out of the kitchen window after visiting the bathroom. But it is worth it when the sort of thing you can see out of the window is this:

Peace at last

2011-03-03T19:40:00.002Z

It has been kind of busy around Casa Loth recently and this is the first time I have had a quiet moment to come on and post. Husband is out - he has a staff meeting this evening and his staff meetings tend to involve beer and pizza, so I may not see him for a while. Bet you wish you worked for my husband, don't you?

The boys are painting Warhammer figures (they are NOT toy soldiers, don't call them that!!!!) in the dining room and miraculously they are not arguing. I have made myself an enormous bowl of bulgur wheat salad which I am eating from a tray in my lap while I blog. The large pile of First Born's new trousers, purchased at the weekend, are eyeing me from the corner of the room as they wait to have their hems taken up but I am ignoring them for now and refusing to feel guilty. FB certainly doesn't care - that boy would wear a bin bag if you told him to. As long as it wasn't pink.

Speaking of FB, he has made the transition to teenager-dom with ease and is showing no Kevin-like tendencies so far. He basically remains the same boy he was when he was 7, just in a bigger body. With smellier feet. Which means that, while he is still perfectly happy to give you spontaneous hugs, you don't always appreciate them as much as you once did.

Tomorrow is Founder's Day at the boys' school which means that SB, who is in the junior school, has the whole day off. However FB, who is now in the Senior School, does not. Nor does he have a normal school day. He has to be in school for 10.20am in time for the remembrance service and then he will be dismissed at 12 noon. I would like to find the genius who decided to present working parents with that little logistical puzzle and shake him warmly by the throat. Fortunately my job is flexible enough these days that I can just work a couple of hours tomorrow and I can do those from home, but I feel sorry for those in more rigid jobs - I certainly would have been struggling back in the days when I was a full-time court solicitor.

In other news, we have finalised our plans for this year's Maritime Canada Extravaganza - all Nova Scotia this year. And I know the following information will mean NOTHING to most of you but I want to write it out anyway and savour the anticipation.......

We are going to spend a couple of days in lovely Liverpool, followed by a week in a cottage on Silver Crescent beach in Lockeport. And I mean on the beach - you step off the deck of the house onto the sand. I am picturing lazy days reading on the deck with a cold drink while the boys run around like maniacs. We may rouse ourselves for a day out in Keji if we feel up to it.

After that, we are going to Brier Island for a bit of whale watching (or if my whale repelling skills are still working, fruitless whale chasing) and staying the night in Westport. After that we are having one night in a B&B in Bear River before heading along the Annapolis Valley to Port Williams and Mary's B&B where we have stayed during every trip to NS since 1996. Hoping to fit a visit to the drive-in cinema in while we are in the neighbourhood of Kentville, Jess, if that is still a possibility?

And to add to all that, we have our little trip to Prague at Easter with the boys. Oh! Oh! And finally, finally - FB is pleased to report that he tasted Cadbury's Dairy Milk buttons for the first time at the weekend, and liked them! And he didn't turn funny colours, swell up or vomit! For the boy who has been allergic to milk in all its myriad forms since he was born, this is a major breakthrough. He really seems to be growing out of his allergy, which is just wonderful. So he now has his beady eyes fixed on ice cream..........

Remind me next time to tell you about the story of my neighbour and the hedgehog in the carrier bag.

Things I wish I had not done

2011-02-24T21:29:00.003Z

I do not wish that I had decided not to visit the charity shop yesterday, as I found 6 quite groovy side plates for £1.40 - score!

I do however wish that I had not decided that I could do with some exercise and that I should therefore get the bus home which leaves me about a mile or so to walk back to the house from the stop.

I do wish I hadn't worn boots with heels, resulting in very sore feet after the aforementioned walk.

I do wish I had not been so keen to get out of those damn boots that I pulled them off in the kitchen before I started to make myself some lunch.

I do wish I hadn't forgotten to take them upstairs when I went up to change. Or on any of the many later occasions when I left the kitchen to go upstairs (shifting laundry, chasing boys into showers etc).

In short, I wish I hadn't left my boots lying on the kitchen floor all afternoon and evening. With the cat. Who was behaving in a suspicious and jumpy manner.

Because then I would not have had to spend the five minutes before bedtime last night emptying a terrified (and surprisingly large) mouse out of my boot into the back garden.

Nearly there....

2011-02-15T21:43:00.004Z

Back from our longest stint yet at The Corbies - 4 whole days and nights. The cottage is nearly finished now - we have carpets, furniture and even beds. No plates and pots to speak of yet, but that's the next thing on the list. When I have more time, I will regale you with tales of how we got a couch that measures a minimum of 30" in each direction through several doorways that measure only 28" wide. (It involved my sister-in-law having to crawl into the house UNDER the couch as three of us held it at an interesting angle). I tell you, if you ever want to move large furniture into an awkwardly small cottage, let me know and I'll ask SIL to lend you her partner. The man is a spatial reasoning genius.

Anyway, more updates and some photos soon. Promise.

PS Found a deep shiny purple toaster in the Argos catalogue. Am seriously tempted.

New stuff!

2011-02-08T21:31:00.002Z

Having bought new beds for at least some rooms of the cottage, Husband and Sister-In-Law surpassed themselves by going on to buy a groovy wee dishwasher (Husband hates washing dishes and I am not complaining). It's a fantastic bargain, delivery is so cheap as to be virtually free and there is a perfect little corner of the kitchen where it will fit.

Did I mention it's also bright yellow? I mean BRIGHT YELLLOW!!!!!! We may not win any interior design awards, but no-one will be able to accuse us of being dull.

Now we just need to find a luminous pink toaster.

We have carpets!

2011-02-06T21:32:00.003Z

Another trip down to the Corbies this weekend, mainly to check if the carpet fitter had been. He had and the downstairs of the cottage is now looking distinctly habitable. We hoovered, dusted and did a little repair work on the paint finish in the living room where it had gone a bit "odd" over the new plaster.

We also did a LOT of measuring as we are now at the stage of being able to move actual furniture into the house - only 5 months or so after we got the keys - and wanted to do a quick check that the various bits and pieces we want to bring down would actually fit! A large van has been booked for next Friday, beds have been both sourced and purchased and a sofa excavated from the depths of my sister-in-law's garage. My father has kindly agreed to drive the van for us, which is helpful as none of the rest of us felt capable of doing so. Dad used to work in container shipping and in his time has driven everything from brand new Rolls Royces destined for Arab princes to straddle carriers used for picking up and shifting entire cargo containers. A Luton van should hold no fears for him. He has agreed to be paid in bacon butties and hero-worship from his grandsons.

So hopefully by Friday night we will not only have proper beds to sleep in, but also proper chairs to sit on. Next task: acquiring plates, pots, pans and other kitchen gubbins.

In which I feel my age. And then some.

2011-02-03T22:01:00.005Z

I have a love/hate relationship with mobile phones. I love being in touch with those I want to be in touch with and the convenience of them (and amusing myself by playing Texas Hold 'Em on the bus in the days before My Baby arrived). On the other hand, I kind of hate mobile phones themselves. And the whole mysterious sub-culture surrounding them.

My mobile phone recently began to play up in an exceedingly annoying fashion (not sure what non-annoying playing up would be, mind you). When it needed charging, I would dutifully plug it in and it would ignore the charger. Simply refuse to acknowledge its presence. At first, I could coax it a little, bring it round by wiggling the plug a bit. Then that stopped working and getting power into the thing was a much more hit-and-miss affair. Sometimes it would taunt me by obediently starting to charge the minute I plugged in, only to change its mind the moment I did something it disapproved of. Like putting it down on the worktop and walking away. I would come back hours later to find a smugly still-uncharged phone whistling nonchalantly in the kitchen. (I might have imagined the whistling. I did not imagine the smug.)

I did eventually go into the mobile phone shop for advice, although it took me a while as I HATE those places. I feel several decades too old to be taken seriously and I genuinely do not understand about 60% of what is said in there. Its an environment which makes me nervous. I finally went in one day with my Mum - not because I thought she could help (she is worse than I am when it comes to mobile technology) - but just for moral support.

I approached the 15 year old work experience chap behind the counter and explained that my phone wouldn't charge, described the symptoms and then braced myself for the inevitable assumptions of idiocy I knew were heading my way. First of all, he tried plugging it in and naturally, the little blighter started to charge.

Him: It seems to be charging fine........

Me: It does that. It's like when you have a headache for a fortnight and it disappears the minute you go to the doctor. It normally doesn't. Honestly. (He looks unconvinced.)

Him: Are you sure it's not the charger?

Me: (Thinks to myself "Well that's sort of WHY I AM HERE!!!") Yes, I'm pretty sure the charger is okay. I can hear it working (for I am not yet deaf, young man) but presumably you can check that for me? (He does so. It is fine.)

Him: Are you plugging the charger into the right socket on the phone?

Me: *ungritting teeth slightly* Ye-e-e-s, I have had that phone for over two years now. During that time I have figured out where the charge-y bit goes. I am not plugging the charger into the headphone jack, promise.

Him: (jovially) Are you sure you've paid your electricity bill?!!!

I smile faintly. I need his assistance, so poking him in the eyes won't help. Meantime my mum is refusing to make eye contact with me in case she dissolves into hysterics.

Him: Oh look! It's stopped charging!

Me: TA-DAH!!!!! (Well I didn't actually say that, but I thought it really loudly.)

Him: Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. I think there's a fault with your phone.

Me: REALLY??????

Him: We'd need to send it away to the manufacturer for repair. Usually takes about 28 days or so.

Me: I'll think about it.

And I did. Inertia took over and I did nothing for a while, except wheedle Husband into working his magic with a can of Servisol every time I needed to charge my phone. Until it finally died - it ran out of power entirely and nothing I did could persuade it to charge.

So now I have a new phone. The phone call to Orange to arrange said new phone was a painful experience as, again, I only understood about 40% of what was said. I eventually managed to get my really important technical questions asked, namely: (1) Can I keep the same number? (yes) and (2) Can I have a less fulsome talk plan as I am no longer a full-time court lawyer and just don't need that many minutes any more? (also yes). I was also assured they could courier the phone to me the next day. At this news, my mind went into Organisation Mode (Can I be in for a courier tomorrow? Do I have any appointments? Do the boys have music lessons tomorrow? Are my neighbours in so they could take a package if I miss it?... etc etc)

Meanwhile the boy on the phone was in full flow about the recommended phone and the package he was offering specially to me because I am such a valued customer. I wasn't really listening as I was still trying to work out whether it would be okay for a courier to stick my new phone in my wheelie bin pending my arrival home. He mistook my middle-aged dithering for hard-headed haggling and promptly knocked £6 per month off the proposed contract price. So humming and hawing comes in useful sometimes. Who knew?

Anyway, my new phone arrived safely and I even managed to get the SIM card in by myself. Only took me 13 minutes, a new personal best. I don't understand how to use it yet (it has a touch screen which keeps surprising me by whizzing around as I try to figure out how to set the time correctly) and it has just occurred to me that I don't know what the ringtone sounds like so may have been ignoring calls for the past 24 hours, but I am sure that I will be a complete genius with it by the time its battery dies or I accidentally drop it into the sink.

One plea for help though: if you know me in real life, could you e-mail your phone number to me? Old Phone had the last laugh: it died with all my numbers in its wizened, bitter little memory and I can't get them out.

Free time? I remember that

2011-01-26T20:30:00.002Z

I have (belatedly) realised that one thing that does seriously interfere with one's blogging capabilities is spending weekends in a cottage with no internet connection of any kind. And no laptop. (No TV for that matter. Or comfy seats. Or proper beds. Or pots and pans. I could go on.)

On the plus side, the living room is now painted in the cottage and the carpets are going back down this week courtesy of a local carpet fitter from the next village. We briefly considered relaying the carpets ourselves, but having stared at the solid concrete floor for a while, and then having pondered how one goes about nailing gripper rod to concrete, and having reached no satisfactory conclusion, we decided to call in an expert. Know your limitations, that's my motto. Next stop: furniture! And plates! We are planning to hire a van during half term in February and basically empty the houses of various friends and relatives of any and all unwanted stuff. Those of you who know me in real life - you have been warned.

Last week was a bit hectic all round, even leaving aside the Corbies decorating session. Second Born has graciously consented to take keyboard lessons (NOT piano lessons, KEYBOARD lessons. We are aiming for Focus organ solos, not Chopin. SB will glare at you if you call them piano lessons.) Unfortunately, the only slot available was on Tuesdays at 4.30 on the other side of town from where we live. And Tuesday is the day when First Born has his after-school social and communications skills group (which he still thinks is his Free Snack and Warhammer discussion forum, which is fine by me) and that doesn't finish until 4.15pm, giving me nowhere near enough time to pick up both boys and take them to the ~~piano~~ keyboard lesson.

A plan was therefore hatched: FB would go to his club and then take the bus, all by himself, down to Husband's office in the city centre. I would pick up SB from school, take him to his lesson and then swoop into town, scoop up Husband and SB and take everyone home.

Monday afternoon therefore involved a dry run on the bus to show FB where to get on and off and how to walk to Husband's office from the bus stop. Which went well, but pretty much accounted for Monday.

Tuesday came and the plan outlined above worked well. FB managed the trip perfectly (he was very pleased with himself, despite being a bit apprehensive beforehand) and the first keyboard lesson went swimmingly (I got a slight fright when the teacher turned out to be a former client of mine from a few years back. This is always a worry as not all clients come out of litigation happy, but he tells me that I sorted out his building dispute to his satisfaction. Fortunately. Otherwise that would have been one very awkward half hour.) Afterwards, I fought my way through rush hour traffic and picked up Husband and FB.

Did I mention that there was also a parents' night at school for FB that night? Well there was, so we headed up to the school to attempt the impossible feat of trying to see all 14 of FB's teachers in the 45 minutes or so available. Yeah, turns out we had to miss some out. We saw the main ones though, and were very pleased to hear how well FB seems to be coping with high school. We worried about this A LOT before he started, but he is managing to find his classrooms and remember where he is supposed to be and when (all those laminated timetables were worth the effort!) and keep up with everything, so that's really good.

Unsurprisingly, we were a bit tired after Tuesday. Wednesday was spent catching up on homework etc from Monday and Tuesday. Thursday is the day SB gets dropped with Husband so I can take FB to drum lessons and then I pick them all up and take them home.

On Friday I picked everyone up straight after the boys got out of school and we headed for the Corbies, paintbrushes in hands. Which is where we came in.

All this is a very long, roundabout way of saying "Sorry for the lack of posting. Again. I sort of have an excuse. Again. Will try harder. (Really this time.)"

Whoops! So much for "More blogging in 2011"!

2011-01-16T19:58:00.004Z

I really am getting worse at posting over here, am I not? Must try harder.

So, the boys are back at school and seem reasonably happy so to be. I have got over my initial dismay at having to return to making packed lunches and nagging boys repeatedly to pack their bags and track down their games kits and Second Born, for Pete's sake ROUND UP YOUR SOCKS!

On the plus side, we have been able to get back down to the Corbies a few times and make a start on addressing the after effects of some pretty full-on damp work. We have fresh, bare plaster on most of the walls on the ground floor up to a height of about 1.2m and above that we have an enticing mixture of nasty old wallpaper, odd textured paint and crumbly old plaster. As a result, we spent last weekend stripping the remaining wallpaper in the dining-room-soon-to-become-another-bedroom and trying not to pull all the plaster off in the process. My aunt had lent us one of those steam-powered wallpaper strippers and whilst it is undoubtedly effective, it is also one of the scariest pieces of equipment I have ever tried to use! It is basically a huge kettle attached to a hose with a square of plastic at the end and it steams and bubbles and drips scalding water all over the place (at one point, memorably, it managed to spray the ceiling!). Second Born was so alarmed, he refused to remain in the room with it. Sensible boy, that one.

This weekend we managed to paint the walls in that room and, if you ignore the dodgy, lumpy old plaster on the top half of the walls, it looks really rather good. Next week: painting the weird scratchy textured walls in the living room.

We have also discovered a really good use for the Kindle: if you once wrote a whole load of stories with your then very young children, and if you saved those stories on your laptop, then you can load those stories onto your Kindle AND you can then make the Kindle's strange alien-like computer voice read them out to you. Judging by reactions around here, this is the funniest thing anyone has EVER done. I recommend it. (Husband tells me it may be possible to create a sound file of one or two of these stories and upload it. You have been warned.)

Should I be worried, do you think?

2011-01-06T20:24:00.003Z

The boys are fortunate enough to still be lazing around at home while we return to work, as they don't go back to school until next week. I get them to phone me when they get up in the morning, just so we can check in. The call with Second Born this morning went like this:

SB: Hi, I'm phoning like you said. We're up.

Me: Okay. Did you sleep well? Everything okay?

SB: Uh-huh.

Me. So, you going to have some breakfast?

SB: Uh-huh.

Me: Then what? Are you planning to watch that film we recorded for you yesterday?

SB: Yeah. Or we might play some roulette.

Oh no!

2011-01-05T17:05:00.002Z

Mick Karn died today. The biggest crush of my teenage years (hey, I never claimed to be normal), his was the face that covered one whole wall of my bedroom - and since not that many people shared my enthusiasm, finding photos with which to do the said covering was a pretty full-time task. I joined his fan club and my membership number was 003. I am not kidding.

Mick could also claim part of the credit for Husband and I getting together: at university, I wanted a copy of an album Husband owned, and since Husband was VERY particular about the equipment on which his precious discs were played (this was the time of vinyl, remember) he offered to record it for me if I gave him a blank tape. So I gave him a tape on one side of which I had already recorded Mick Karn's first solo album - a largely instrumental work heavily featuring boingy fretless bass and lots of oboe. Husband couldn't resist a nosey listen and was sufficiently perplexed by what he heard that he had to ask me about it when he returned the tape. He confessed that he was slightly surprised by my musical tastes since they were not the usual suspects found in our little group - mainly Talking Heads and Paul Simon. He was intrigued, I tell you.

After that it was only a matter of........well, quite a lot of months, actually, before Husband and I were an item. So as well as being the focus of the majority of my difficult teenage years, Mick Karn contributed to getting Husband and I together. I am really rather sad he is gone.

(I was also sad to see that Gerry Rafferty has died too, but I didn't fancy him nearly as much.)

Filling in the gaps

2011-01-03T21:27:00.004Z

As you know, Husband and I got His 'n' Hers Kindles for Christmas and we have had a great deal of pleasure from our new toys. Our children laugh at us as we sit, happily drinking tea and reading our respective Kindles.

Husband has filled his with all sorts of strange stuff. As well as the aforementioned "Memoirs of the Anglo-Boer War" and some fascinating reports on the economic implications of new TLDs in the domain name space, he has stuff like copies of original court reports from the 1500s - trials of people charged with hamesucken and the like.

He has also downloaded Ambrose Bierce's "Write it Right"- a witheringly unforgiving guide to correct English usage which both of us are enjoying greatly (even as we discover that our own use of English is apparently woefully inappropriate).

I, on the other hand, am much more mundane in my tastes. I have been using the Kindle initially to trawl Amazon and the like for books that are free to download and which fill the glaring gaps in my reading history. For example, I have finally got round to reading the original "Frankenstein" (the boys were bored rigid when I read excerpts to them out loud). I have been meaning to read that for ages.

I have read a fair bit of Dickens in my time, but never "Nicholas Nickleby", which is what I am reading now (and wishing, as I tend to do with Dickens, that I could slap half of his female characters, so irritating are they - especially the ones he doesn't mean to be irritating).

Waiting in the wings (or rather in an enticing list on my Kindle's home page) are the Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy novels that I have missed so far. I must confess to never having read "Kidnapped" before, for example. In my defence, it is one of those books that you sort of assume you must have read because you are so familiar with it from other sources - like "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde".

I am almost giddy at the prospect of being able to access so much reading material whenever I want for NO MONEY! It will be interesting to see how long it takes before I feel the need to actually pay for books. (And whether the Kindle will have paid for itself by then!)

Oh wow, it's 2011

2011-01-01T15:18:00.003Z

Happy New Year everyone! We had possibly the least organised Hogmanay in Scotland yesterday. It was really rather enjoyable. We had, at one point, hoped to be down at The Corbies for Hogmanay but late and therefore still drying plaster repairs, no floorcoverings and all the furniture being trapped in the summerhouse behind a six foot high frozen solid snowdrift sort of put a stop to that idea.

So instead, we vegetated at home. Second Born spent his enormous wodge of Christmas cash on an Xbox, an extra controller and a game, all in the sales, for he is smart that way. He had lost hope of it arriving in 2010 but lo! the delivery man from Amazon arrived at lunchtime on 31st bearing computer generated Nirvana. We have barely seen either of our children since. We know they are still living here, though, as I can hear them whooping from here.

I braved the supermarket to buy some odds and ends to keep us fed and happy and then Husband and I spent the day reading, watching some non-boy suitable stuff on TV and drinking tea. We drank a LOT of tea.

The boys emerged to eat and watch some classy TV (Harry Hill, You've Been Framed and an old Christmas episode of The Good Life - which we were pleased to discover the boys really enjoyed!) and then went back to annihilating aliens. (I am assuming that if we let them gorge themselves on computer-generated mayhem for a day or two, they will then be happy enough to cut back on their screen time. That will work, right?)

We headed out at about 11.45pm to a point on the hill upon which we live from where you can see most of the other hills on which Edinburgh is built, and that means you can see the fireworks at midnight without being trampled underfoot by 80,000 slightly tipsy tourists. The boys enjoyed the fireworks (First Born even managed to watch most of them without his ear defenders on - his sensitivity to noise is slowly improving) and we then came home and let Second Born first foot the house. We told him he was being nominated as traditionally it is supposed to be a tall, dark, handsome man who does the honours, but as we didn't have one of those, we would make do with small, dark and stinky instead. He took it surprisingly well.

I told the boys and Husband about Sara's family tradition of having a big book in which to record the memories and high points of the year just gone together with predictions for the new year ahead and they loved the idea. With your permission, Sara, we will be stealing this one (I only wish we had known about it years ago!)

Today we are again doing nothing, and doing it rather well, even if I do say so myself. I got up early-ish and set a beef hotpot going in the slow cooker before going back to bed with tea, shortbread and my Kindle. And Husband. And his Kindle. We then had "Happy New Year!" calls with various relatives from beneath the duvet. Very decadent. The hotpot will be ready in another couple of hours or so. I wonder what I could do to fill in a couple of hours?........

A post in which I barely mention Australia.......

2010-12-26T13:35:00.003Z

.........or at least I only mention it in a good way. Christmas was a bit last minute in many ways, but none the worse for that. The boys got the presents they wanted (or in the case of Second Born, a large wodge of cash over which he could gloat whilst planning what to buy in the sales) and were gratifyingly grateful. Mother-in-law and her husband were uplifted from their house without incident, despite the snow, and Sister-in-law and her partner arrived less than half an hour late, which is something approaching a record for them.

Gifts were exchanged and exclaimed over. (We know we have got it right with MIL's husband when he drops out of the conversation for half an hour after opening his books, so engrossed is he.) Husband got a Kindle of his very own, so he can now stop downloading things like "Memoirs of the Anglo-Boer War" onto mine when I am not looking, Not good for my street cred when I am demonstrating the wonders of Kindle to friends and colleagues and that's what pops up. We are now a two Kindle household. I don't think we can get much more geeky.

Christmas lunch worked, more or less, despite some lower-oven-malfunctioning setbacks. We have enough goose and turkey left over to feed an army, or possibly even a husband and two boys for a day or two.

On Christmas Eve we were finally able to Skype my brother's family in Australia and confirm with our own eyes that Mum and Dad really have reached the other side of planet Earth. It is beyond weird to be chatting to your family at 10pm on Christmas Eve when they have already had Christmas morning, presents have been opened and they are about to have brunch on the balcony. Lovely to see M&D looking well and happy, playing with their other grandchildren.

And now it is Boxing Day and we are slobbing about (there is no other word for it), recharging the batteries and playing with our new toys. Tomorrow, weather permitting, we will head off to sunny Troon to see Husband's Dad and do a version of Christmas all over again.

I hope you all had as happy and chaotic a day as we did here at Chateau Loth.

Can I get a woo hoo?

2010-12-23T14:12:00.003Z

Parents are safely on a flight to Singapore, due to arrive in Sydney at 8.15pm local time on Christmas Eve.

I, on the other hand, need a lie down and some chocolate. (Not necessarily in that order).

Five in a row and not in a good way

2010-12-21T20:50:00.002Z

Mum and Dad arrived at my house two hours ago, ready to leave for the airport at the crack of dawn tomorrow for their flight to Australia. About an hour ago their flight was cancelled. Again. That makes 5 flights booked, 5 flights cancelled. A 100% record they could have entirely done without.

Please send any spare vodka to Livingston. My mother is in dire need.

Deporting one's parents

2010-12-17T22:01:00.003Z

So, I took my parents to the airport for their fourth attempt at getting to Australia today.

A-a-a-a-a-a-nd 6 hours later I went to the airport and brought them back. Flight cancelled.

Again.

Mum is a bit demoralised to say the least, so I sent her home (again) with a chilled bottle of cider and a couple of custard doughnuts. Small compensation but the least I could do.

We're so proud

2010-12-13T21:19:00.002Z

Second Born, at the ripe old age of 10, has just answered his first question on "University Challenge".

The answer was "epiphytes".

I have to confess, I didn't even understand the question.

I wish me a Merry Christmas!

2010-12-12T14:08:00.002Z

The Humpty Jock has been opened, checked for injuries (there were none) and is currently sitting in my kitchen full of chicken and carrots and leeks and squash and thyme from my garden (which survived the snow surprisingly well) and bubbling gently. A full report on the first experiment in slow cooking will follow tomorrow.

In the meantime, I have a confession to make. The slow cooker is not the only Christmas present I already have. I bought myself a present too. You see, Husband and I allow ourselves a little "fun money" each month, cash set aside to buy non-essential fripperies. I have not spent any of that money for absolutely ages because the only thing I tend to buy is books, and since joining www.readitswapit.co.uk I have not had to buy books at all. So I had a little cash to play with and I took the plunge and bought a Kindle.

I know that a certain proportion of those reading this will be appalled. And bizarrely, I sort of understand that. I don't think Kindles and their like will ever replace real books, nor would I want them to. I would miss the tottering piles of dusty books lying around our house and I would miss the excitement of going to a real bookshop when someone is kind enough to give me a book token. I would miss just reading a real book. Indeed, despite having the Kindle, I just finished reading the genuine paper version of Audrey Niffeneger's new book (which I rather liked, despite the fact that it was decidedly odd).

Where the Kindle comes in handy is that it is small and slim and fits in my handbag very snugly. I do a lot of reading on the bus and in the car waiting for the boys to come out of school and the Kindle is handy for that as I don't have to lug the actual books about in my bag along with my other junk.

Also, as it is 3G, I can download books anytime I want so I will never, NEVER run out of things to read. At the moment, all the books on my Kindle are free ones - things like G.K. Chesterton, Mary Shelley and Polidori. Stuff I want to read but have never got round to buying and which is available free from the Kindle shop and from websites like Project Guttenberg. Gotta love free books!

And I know someone will point out that I can get free stuff from the library too, and that is true, I could. Except the nearest library to me is a car drive away with very poor parking around it and whilst I could make the effort, I am honestly unlikely to find the time given the mounds of other things I have to do in an average day. I love libraries in principle (I virtually lived in our local one as I grew up) but I don't frequent them in reality. Sad but true. Happily the boys have access to great libraries at their school and our house is constantly littered with books they have scanned out (which is what they do in libraries now - gone are the days of those little slips of card stuck inside the cover and transferred by hand to your brown library ticket when you took the book out!)

Of course, having bought the Kindle, I have also had to buy myself a Kindle cover to make sure that the aforesaid junk in my handbag does not scratch my new toy. It's at times like this that I wish I was handy like K and could knit my own Kindle Skin!

Humpty Jock time!

2010-12-10T14:26:00.002Z

Tonight, people, I will be getting a Humpty Jock. I know you are all jealous, but you will just have to learn to cope. It is sitting at the moment in a box in the hall, but I will be tearing into it later and having my way with it.

You see, in my Husband's family (and now therefore in our family) a Humpty Jock is the catch-all term for a present which you get in advance of the relevant occasion. I think it dates from Husband as a child once being given a Christmas or birthday present early (I think he was ill? Maybe? He will correct me once he reads this). The present was a Humpty who was named, unsurprisingly, Jock, and that became the term for any gift you get ahead of time.

My kind Husband had ordered an enormous slow cooker for me for Christmas and it was delivered to his office. (Before anyone suggests that this is a dangerous sort of present for a man to buy his wife, or even just a little unromantic, I would like to reassure you that I LOVE this present - I like to cook and have always wanted a slow cooker/crockpot thingy so I am delighted that Husband has done this. This is, let us not forget, the man who moved mountains in order to pimp my Kenwood Chef for me. He knows me well, is what I am saying)

Anyway, the box arrived during the worst of the snow and has taken a serious dunt during transit - heavy enough to cut right through the heavy cardboard external box to the flimsier cardboard inner box. The item itself is apparently unmarked but with an impact that hard, we need to check quickly that it is in working order too. So I am to be allowed to get it out and play with it. Woo hoo!

I am thinking of cooking a whole chicken in it this weekend (it's a BIG slow cooker!) so any crockpot veterans out there with advice on how best to cook chickens in one, speak up now.

Hurray!

2010-12-08T20:37:00.002Z

My parents are back home! So in the space of a mere week and a half, they have managed to transport themselves and several boxes of Lego the 17 miles from Livingston to Edinburgh and back again.

Now if we can just get them onto a plane heading in the general direction of Australia some time this year, that would be grand.

Brief Update

2010-12-07T15:07:00.002Z

Sister in law got away to Kuala Lumpur on Sunday. She e-mailed us this morning to say she was just back from a nice dip in the outdoor pool.

Grrrrrrrrr.

Mum and Dad did not get away on Monday as another few inches of snow were unceremoniously dumped on Edinburgh on Monday morning. They have decided to re-arrange their flights entirely and are now due to fly out on 17th December, returning on 21st January.

Now we just have to get them back to their house in Livingston. It is only 17 miles away but might as well be on the moon at the moment. The M8 (the main highway between Edinburgh and Glasgow for those non-Scots among you) is closed and has been closed since yesterday. The other main-ish road to Livingston is described as "just about passable" but there is no way of knowing what the roads are like once you leave the main drag.

So parents planning to stay one more night and then head home tomorrow. We hope. (By writing that I have, of course, just ensured that an unexpected blizzard will hit tonight with another 3 feet of snow by morning.)

Accidental B&B

2010-12-04T17:36:00.003Z

Yep, 5 days later and my parents are still with us. My brother has phoned a couple of times from Australia and on both occasions he has greeted me with "Hi, is that Sangatte Refugee Camp?"

Mum and Dad's flights on Wednesday were also cancelled, although at least this time it happened before they left for the airport so they didn't end up stranded on a snowy kerbside with their suitcases. They are re-re-booked to leave on Monday, a week later than originally planned, but better than nothing. We are not predicted to have any more snow before then, so the signs are looking good. (They had better get away on Monday: we learned today that their neighbours in Livingston, believing they were away in Australia for 5 weeks, have used their driveway as a repository for all the snow they've cleared from the road. The pile is about 5 feet high. Oh, and the water has gone off for some reason in the entire estate. So there's that.)

Also, my sister-in-law was supposed to fly to Schiphol today and from there to Kuala Lumpur on business and she too has been cancelled due to snow in Holland. Fortunately we had driven her to the airport and were able to turn back and collect her and bring her home. She has been re-booked for tomorrow. Our free Edinburgh Airport shuttle business is working well.

I think the gist of this post is: Britain does not cope well with bad weather. The End.

It's also hard to type with your fingers crossed

2010-11-30T17:55:00.002Z

Well, the parental units left for the airport yesterday at about 3pm. (We used a sledge to take their luggage round to the main road to meet the taxi!). Their flight was cancelled shortly after they arrived and they spent a couple of hours arguing about who was supposed to sort out a rebooking and whether they would have to pay for new flights to Sydney. Then they joined the monumental queue for a taxi. In a blizzard.

We couldn't sit in the house knowing they were standing there so we rounded up some neighbours and with spades and judicious use of elbow grease and cardboard sheets, managed to dig our car out and physically push it the 30 yards or so to the main road. Once there we managed to get to the airport to collect them and bring them home.

They are re-booked to fly out tomorrow (Wednesday 1st) at 16.40. A severe weather warning is out predicting another 10cm of snow falling tomorrow. Fingers firmly crossed again.

It's hard to twiddle your thumbs when your fingers are crossed

2010-11-29T12:17:00.002Z

Well, on the plus side, Edinburgh has never looked lovelier and the two feet of snow means my garden now looks just as good as those of all my neighbours. The boys are delighted because all the schools are closed so they have been out throwing snow around, sledging and burying each other up to the neck in snowdrifts (fortunately we've discovered that we can find the hidden boys by looking for their breath pluming upwards).

On the downside, I kind of feel cheated of my day off for St Andrew's day since I can't actually go anywhere. And worst of all, my parents are supposed to be on the 18.10pm flight to Heathrow this evening to catch their connection to Australia. They are going to spend 5 weeks with my brother. At least, that is the plan.

They sensibly left Livingston early yesterday and came to stay with us in Edinburgh - they were snowed in for about two weeks last winter and didn't want to risk getting stuck again. We live pretty much right on a major road so things have to be very bad indeed if you can't get out of our driveway.

Today, however, the airport is closed, the trains are not really running and the major motorway between Edinburgh and Glasgow is closed as are most of the other major roads in Scotland. Nothing much is moving. We are therefore refreshing the Edinburgh Airport Twitter updates every 5 minutes and keeping our fingers crossed that the runway will open soon. I love my parents but would really rather not have to put them up again tonight!

Yummmm! I think.

2010-11-25T21:27:00.005Z

I bought some Purple Majesty potatoes the other day. Because, although they are rather gimmicky, they were on special offer in Sainsbury's. And they were undeniably purple. So with dinner tonight we had purple mashed potato.

Astonishingly, the boys scoffed them down without complaint. Plates were licked clean. Huh.

So if I understand this correctly, expecting my sons to eat anything green is completely unreasonable. However, offer them something that looks like a Play-Doh meal concocted by an enthusiastic three year old and they're sold. I am now waiting with bated breath for the invention of fluorescent pink cabbage.

Drat those pesky kids

2010-11-20T22:53:00.002Z

I have just spent the evening playing three card brag with the boys. We raided the old Fauchon biscuit tin in the kitchen for pennies and tuppences to gamble with, just like I used to do with my granny when I was little.

The little cardsharps just cleaned me out. So I sent them to bed. (Can't do that in Las Vegas, now can you?!)

Good news

2010-11-04T21:07:00.002Z

Not a proper post today, just two bits of news that made me happy. The first one because I have a dyscalculic son and most people have never even heard of dyscalculia. It is rare to read anything about the condition at all, never mind reading that they might be figuring out how to deal with it.

And the second one just proves that Canadian people really are generally wonderful.

You didn't really want to know about this, did you?

2010-10-31T18:44:00.000Z

So I promised you tales of my scabby finger. Are you sure there isn't something better you could be doing than reading this stuff? Re-arranging your wardrobe in date order? Colour coding your clothes pegs? Staring into space and drooling slightly? No? Huh. Okay then.

I have had slightly dry, scaly and frankly not that attractive skin on my hands for a while. It has got worse recently, to such an extent that my right hand had been christened by my charming sons: "The Scabby Finger of Doom". I sort of ignored it and thought it would sort itself out until whatever-it-was started to affect the nail bed on my right pinky, giving me a nail worthy of the wicked queen in the Snow White cartoon. (The ugly old version, not the glam version at the start. She had fabulous nails.)

So eventually I dragged myself off to see the doctor. Our old family doctor has now retired so I saw one of the new ones. He was approximately 7 feet tall and about, ooh, 12 or 13 years old I reckon. Slightly older than the local policemen but not by much. He took one look at my hand claw and declared "Pompholyx!"

Which, as well as being an excellent word to remember for Scrabble, is what I have. It's the official term for dry, horrid, sometimes weepy and scaly scabbiness. It is also, my children and dear Husband have decided, the new name for my right hand. They reckon it sounds like a previously unknown character from Asterix. I imagine him in the background in a big black cloak, shedding fingernails and skin cells all over the place.

On the plus side, I now have ointments and moisturisers and advice on taming the pompholyx. I also have confirmation that, as I suspected, I also have vitiligo on my hands. (This causes patchy white areas where my skin won't tan and is referred to by my sympathetic family as "giraffeyness"). Combine all that with my tendency to scald, burn and otherwise scar myself when I am cooking, and I reckon I have very little chance of a career as a hand model.

Which is why I don't mind wielding very sharp knives of a Sunday afternoon in order to preare props for my children before they go out guising (which is where they are now).

And to finish, a snap taken from outside our cottage first thing this morning. This is why we keep going back (and why we can't wait for the hacking off of plaster and re-damp proofing to be finished so we can move in properly.)

Home again

2010-10-24T15:43:00.012+01:00

Hmmm, yes, that last post - perfect example of what happens when you are interrupted mid-ponder and decide to save the post and finish it later and then hit "Publish" by mistake and think to yourself "I'd better come back and sort that out later" and then you go on holiday instead. Honestly, I had a stunningly witty ending to give you involving ruminations on why companion sets are so called but I have forgotten most of it and since we have been to the cottage (twice) and Geneva (once) since I last posted, I can't be bothered to try to remember what I was going to say. Let's all agree it would have been hilarious and move on, shall we?

So anyway, yes we went back to the cottage for a quick visit before we left to go on holiday. This wasn't as obsessive as it sounds since we had to let a man in to look at the damp work that needs doing, but it did also give us a nice little break before our....slightly bigger break. It also let us formally christen the cottage "The Corbies" by installing some permanent residents to keep an eye on the place.

These are primarily Husband's fault. They are hunting lures he found on the internet and since that little shelf above the stairs was crying out for a big stuffed fish or similar, he bought them. The addition of the googly eyes was a joint effort. We think they add a certain je ne sais quoi. My mother thinks they're creepy.

Geneva was lovely if cold and a bit blowy. Husband went off to his judgely conference on Monday and the boys and I pottered about Geneva. We discovered a lovely little zoo in a suburban park (free! There wasn't even a box where you could make a donation to the upkeep and I was actively looking for one!). We also found a little artificial beach festooned with swings made out of old tyres. I had to use a crowbar to get the boys away from this place

and the next day they dragged Husband and me back for another go. We also decided to spend ridiculous amounts of money (when they say Switzerland is expensive, they are really not kidding) on train tickets for a day trip to Montreux. It was worth it though - the scenery is fantastic, even if you have a constant soundtrack of "Smoke on the Water" running through your head the entire time you are there.

We visited the 11th century Chateau de Chillon and it was just lovely. Being October, it wasn't too busy so at times we had parts of it all to ourselves.
The boys were particularly fond of the dungeons, where legend has it a monk called Bonivard was chained to a pillar for 6 years. Lord Byron later visited the castle and heard the legend and it prompted him to write "The Prisoner of Chillon" and also to carve his name in the pillar to which Bonivard was supposed to have been chained. Fortunate for Byron that he was famous so his scratched name in the stone is now a tourist attraction in itself, rather than just a bit of rather arrogant vandalism!

We decided to walk back to Montreux rather than take the bus and took a lovely lakeside path all the way back - it follows the edge of the lake in the picture below which was taken from the top of the Chateau keep.

Apart from the lakeside, Montreux is pretty much vertical and we clambered up to the top of the old town for dinner, finding a fantastic little restaurant serving game of all descriptions. "Madame" in charge was lovely, very French and chatty (I am glad Husband's french remains in better nick than mine!) and she really took to the boys. It helped that both FB and SB were being very co-operative during the trip and were happily ordering their dinners and drinks in French. FB opted to try horse, much to Madame's approval. Husband and I had venison in different forms and it was heavenly. If only that restaurant wasn't a two hour flight, a one hour train journey and a stiff 20 minute climb away, I swear I would eat there every day.

And now we are home again. The washing is done, the boys' bags are packed to go back to school tomorrow and I just have to prepare the makings of Husband's lunches for the coming week. Back to earth with a slight bump. But if you are very lucky, next time I will tell the tale of my horrendously scabby finger.

Well, you learn something new every day

2010-10-14T17:44:00.000+01:00

So, whaddaya know, there are autumn flowering crocuses which aren't really crocuses but look like them and are called bare naked wimmin, or something. I must say I am very grateful to my knowledgeable readers for putting me right and also relieved that Mother Nature has not decided to amuse herself by messing with my head for no good reason.

Bellus is now not only on the road to full recovery, but allowed outside again. He is insured now (we weren't going to let him out of our sight again until that was sorted) and he is verging on the delirious at being allowed out to chase stuff and climb our straggly buddleia and hide in the grass (black and white being such a good colour scheme for camouflage in the grass).

We had another good trip down to the cottage last weekend, a trip which included all 6 of us (the Loth Clan plus Sister-in-Law and her other half) scrubbing the summerhouse and then slapping a coat of wood preservative on it. It looks pretty good. We then loaded up the car(s) with bags and bags and bags of garden rubbish for dropping off at the dump and then went for a wander round the local builders' merchant-come-garden centre- come - woodstove merchant

Confused

2010-10-06T21:53:00.002+01:00

There are crocuses flowering in the centre of Edinburgh. Right outside my office. Purple ones. I find their presence unsettling. Are they late for this spring or early for next? Or have I been mistaken all my life in believing that crocus flowers are a sign of spring? I am also slightly worried that they will invoke Murphy's Law and we will have a sudden three foot deep snowfall.

And... breathe.

2010-10-04T21:02:00.002+01:00

Thank you all so much for your kind thoughts after our loss of Zyra. We are all okay, even Second Born who takes these things so much to heart. It is very odd when we come home not to be greeted by the Tortoiseshell Terror, tail aloft, miaowing her disapproval of our absence but in due course we will get used to being, once again, a one-cat family.

Bellus goes from strength to strength. SB and I took him to the vet today for a check-up. He is something of a celebrity at our vet's surgery - all the staff come out to see him when we arrive, fussing over him and marvelling at how perky he is when, only a week ago or so, they were all holding various bits of him in place as the vet reconstituted him more or less from scratch. They have all seen parts of my cat that I, hopefully, will never see, and they are delighted to see him now looking so well.

The vet's verdict is that Bellus is fine, his breathing sounds absolutely fine and his stitches will dissolve on their own. He does not need to go back until his jabs are due in December (unless we see anything to worry us) and he can be allowed out again by the weekend. For our part, we are absolutely positive that we will not be letting him over the door until he is insured up to his furry little eyebrows.

SB was a great help at the vet, keeping Bellus entertained in his cat carrier (Bellus dislikes his cat carrier. He dislikes the cat carrier in the car even more. In fact he dislikes it so much, he took his revenge at the weekend when he was halfway to the Borders by pooing most odoriferously in his cat carrier. That was a fun car journey. He did it again on the way back.) On the way home from the vet, SB piped up out of the blue "Do you think I would be a good vet?"

"I am sure you would make an excellent vet" I replied.

"Because I am good with animals," he said, "but you also have to be good with people to be a vet, and I can be good with people."

"That you can"

Perceptive, my son.

Not a good week, all things considered

2010-10-01T14:38:00.002+01:00

Bellus continues to recover well from his surgery and is very obviously looking forward to getting out of solitary confinement. Sadly, however, we have lost Zyra.

Husband and I were out at Ikea last night doing a bit of shopping while my mother looked after the boys. While we were gone, Zyra was hit by a couple of cars. A neighbour round the corner saw what happened and called us to let us know. He also kindly moved her off the road (the drivers of the cars involved hadn't stopped). She must have died instantly and there was nothing we could do for her.

Second Born is pretty upset - he and Zyra were very close and the Empress of Death and Destruction was often to be found asleep on SB's bed, buried among the stuffed rats and guinea pigs. Coming after the trauma with Bellus last weekend, this has been a bit of a shock to the system for all of us but particularly for SB. I am planning to feed him junk food and let him watch wall-to-wall DVDs all weekend if that is what he feels like doing.

In the meantime we will be trying to figure out how many mirrors we must have inadvertently broken to give us two such accidents in under a week.

Squished Cat Update and photos as promised (not photos of squished cat though)

2010-09-29T21:41:00.002+01:00

Thank you for all the good wishes for Bellus. The reconstituted kitty is doing very well. The biggest problem now is the enforced isolation in the dining room as he is not allowed out and is supposed to be resting for a week. He is not happy about this and has already made a break for the catflap. Clearly nobody has told him that he had his entire insides rearranged on Saturday and he's not supposed to jump around. It does look like he will make a complete recovery, thanks to a LOT of effort on the part of our vet and a LOT of money. Unsurprisingly we have been spending some time this evening getting pet insurance quotes. Better late than never, as they say.

On a more enjoyable and less stressful note, I managed to take some photos at The Corbies last weekend when we went down for Round 2 of "Battle of the Garden". I think we did okay too.

Here we have the slightly aged summerhouse - this is the next task on the list: get some timber preservative onto that wood pronto! The low white brick building is the back of the pigsty/kennels/boys' clubhouse.

Then we have the holding cells. Least said about them the better, I think.

And this is the view from the holding cells out across the fields. This patio area faces sort of south-west so gets the afternoon and evening sun (if there is any). It is a lovely spot and we are already planning tables, chairs, barbeques, lazy bottles of beer.....

I have just realised I did not take any pictures inside the house (mainly because we spent most of our time outside). I will try to remedy that next time. If we go this weekend and need to take Bellus with us, you may even get photos of Irate and Not At All Sickly Cat Trying to Escape from Empty Cottage Bedroom.

Eventful, I think they'd call it

2010-09-26T22:09:00.003+01:00

So I had planned a cheery photo-filled post all about what we were up to this weekend. The celebration of Husband's step-father's 87th birthday followed by a trip to the new cottage (tentatively named "The Corbies") with details of all the work we were planning to do there this weekend. I will still do that, I promise, but not tonight. Our weekend was knocked off kilter slightly when Bellus (the quieter black and white one of the cats - not the one that chases squirrels up the house walls) got himself hit by a car on Friday.

We didn't know he had been hit by a car at first, of course. The boys and I came home on Friday afternoon to find that Bellus had done his doings on the kitchen floor and was, even more unusually, covered in the said messy and unpleasant doings. I pinned him down to scrub him clean and he barely complained. He was subdued, breathing rather heavily and did not want to eat. We could see he was not himself and decided we would monitor him overnight and figure out what to do in the morning. By Saturday morning he was no better (Zyra sleeping on his head won't have helped) and I managed to wangle an emergency appointment first thing at the vet.

Where it was confirmed that he had almost certainly been hit by a car and suffered either a pneumothorax or a ruptured diaphragm, hence the laboured breathing. Either his lungs were collapsing or they were being compressed by all his internal organs which normally reside in his abdomen suddenly and traumatically being relocated to his chest.

I left him with the vet for x-rays and we went off to my mother-in-law's for a wee celebration of her husband's 87th birthday (he always wins at those "I remember when we didn't have colour TV!" type conversations. He can remember when they didn't even have radio. Shuts the rest of us up instantly.) We were then phoned with the bad news: it was indeed a ruptured diaphragm and full-on surgery was required. So to cut a long story short, a few hours and several hundred pounds later, Bellus had been opened up and re-arranged in his proper form like a furry Rubik's Cube and sent off to a 24 hour clinic for post-op care and observation.

We picked him up this afternoon, expecting a wan, long-suffering, slightly pathetic cat. Instead he is almost unbelievably perky. He has a very odd haircut indeed as various parts of him had to be shaved for incisions, drips, anaesthetics and so on but he is pretty much himself otherwise. We have him quarantined in the dining room with his favourite blanket, a litter tray (oh the luxury!) and food that Zyra can't steal when our backs are turned. We need to take him back to the vet for a check up tomorrow but he is looking pretty good considering all he has been through in the past 36 hours or so. Better than we are, to be honest. We are kicking ourselves for not having insured the cats in the first place (Hey Isabelle, want to compare cat versus guinea pig vet fees?) and feeling slightly guilty at feeling short-changed by how not-ill he looks!

We are relieved to still have him with us, nervous about how or whether we can stop him doing the same thing again and wondering whether you have to declare previous near-death experiences on pet insurance proposal forms.

Please send gin.

I'm a plutocrat!

2010-09-20T20:28:00.006+01:00

At least that's what Isabelle called me in a recent e-mail. She meant it fondly. I think.

This name calling was in response to my telling her that Husband and I have clubbed together with his sister and father and bought a wee cottage in the country. We are of course pretending to be grown up and responsible and claiming that this is primarily a long term capital investment, sensible in these days of non-existent interest rates, but in reality it is the realisation of a long held desire to own, like The Broons, a but n' ben.

Our version is in the Borders rather than the Highlands and has a few more bedrooms (where did all 9 Broons sleep in the but n' ben? Shelves? Some side-by-side arrangement like a big cutlery drawer?). We also have a summerhouse, where the boys plan to sleep out if the weather ever allows, and a former pig sty (make up your own punchline to that one). The pig sty was converted into kennels a while back and sports very impressive metal barred gates on the individual runs. These have been christened "the holding cells" by the boys and claimed by them as part of their "clubhouse". Not quite sure what kind of club they are planning on forming that requires holding cells, but sort of hoping that I will at least get good blogging material out of it. And that the neighbours aren't too traumatised by the goings-on.

We got the keys on Friday so all trooped down for a glorified camp out on Saturday morning. There is no furniture yet as we have some damp work to do that will require plaster removal and the resulting mess and we didn't see the point of moving in furnishings that will just require to be taken out again or cleaned of layers of plaster dust . So we slept on an assortment of folding beds, camping mats and mattresses borrowed from bed settees.

We haven't had to sleep in a room with the children for a while and had forgotten how "entertaining" that can be, what with First Born's very impressive snoring and Second Born's vivid dreams and talking/fighting in his sleep. Hardly a dull moment, I tell you. I would have filmed them if I hadn't been fully engaged wondering why, when I have so much padding around my rear, it seems to do nothing to actually offset the effects of a hard floor and a camping mat with the cushioning properties of Kleenex.

Fortunately we had spent the afternoon trying to wrestle the cottage's garden into submission, so we were pretty tired to start with. The house has been unoccupied since June 2009 so the lawn was a hayfield and the weeds had taken over everywhere else. There is a wee patio at the bottom of the garden beside the holding cells and the nettles there were taller than I am and very reluctant to move. But move they eventually did - 8 full sacks of garden debris are now lined up and awaiting disposal. The garden still could not be described as tidy, but is also less likely to be described as "Oh my God, what HAPPENED??????" So that's good.

Next weekend we plan to buy some creosote. Then we'll cover the boys in clingfilm, hand them a couple of paintbrushes and point them at the decking. If you are very lucky, I'll take photos.

They don't know they're born

2010-09-16T14:35:00.001+01:00

I have a little schoolday morning routine with Second Born. While I am in the shower, he charges upstairs after he has eaten but before he is dressed and tries to get into our bed and hide without me noticing. Usually he fails (he is getting a tad big these days to be convincingly camouflaged by a mere duvet) but we have a little chat for a while before I turf him out and send him to get dressed. It's quite a nice little interlude before the day starts in earnest.

The other day SB was complaining about being a bit cold and was using this as his excuse for staying under my duvet and not going to his own room to get dressed. I suggested he might want to consider wearing something more than a t shirt and a pair of boxers if he was feeling a bit chilly in the morning. He looked slightly taken aback by the suggestion, as if the idea of putting on more clothing in order not to feel cold was a distinctly alien one.

And it dawned on me that it actually was. Our children have always lived in a centrally-heated pretty much draught-free house. They can (and do) wander around in t-shirts and boxers in the depths of winter and don't give it a second thought. So to much eye-rolling from SB I told him at length how we didn't have central heating in the house I grew up in (or in the first house Husband and I bought together, for that matter) and how you sometimes woke in the morning to find ice on the inside of your window. How you had to wear several layers around the house anytime after September and how you would lie in bed in the morning watching your breath rise in little steamy puffs, putting off the dread moment when you had to throw back the blankets and run for the bathroom.

And that reminded me too of getting "fireside tartan" or "corned beef legs" as my Granny used to call them - that mottled red itchiness on the skin caused by sitting too close to a source of direct heat. SB refused to believe such a condition existed - again, proof that he has never had to jostle with his younger brother for a spot in front of the two-bar electric fire that is the only heating in the entire house. In fact as I told these tales, I realised that he was looking at me in exactly the same way I used to look at my Dad when he told me stories as a child - how he had no bathroom in his house until he was in his twenties and how as a young lad he used to deliver milk round the streets of Leith from a handcart with an oil lamp tied to the front. An oil lamp! It sounded virtually Dickensian to me and I suppose that's what no central heating sounds like to a modern 10 year old.

It's an interesting thought, isn't it, that the twentieth century was such a time of rapid social change that my family went from oil lamps and no plumbing to central heating, laptops and PVRs in two generations. Maybe I don't know I'm born either.

It's a miracle!

2010-09-11T19:27:00.005+01:00

Those of you who know me on Facebook will also know that here in Casa Loth we have had some toilet trouble recently. (Now, aren't you sorry you don't follow me on Facebook? Toilet problems - who doesn't want to read about that on a more or less daily basis?) More specifically, our downstairs loo (sometimes referred to as "the cloakroom" if we are feeling particularly elegant) gave up the ghost about 10 days ago. It just refused to flush. Nothing I did - you know, taking the lid off the cistern and peering in, poking the various components, bobbing the float up and down - made any difference. It was broken.

I carried out the limited diagnostic tests of which I am capable. Is there water in there? Check. Is the handle connected to the wee metal hooky bit? Check. Does the plunger-y bit go up and down when you pull the handle? Check.

At the limits of my limited expertise, I resorted to the all-knowing Dr Google who promptly diagnosed a faulty siphon. Not only diagnosed, but provided photos of the part in question and little video clips of how to remove and replace it. Husband and I conferred. He also tried the float-bobbing and handle-wiggling tests (just in case I had done them wrong) and he too could not get the flush to do its thing. It did appear that a new siphon was needed. We agreed that we are, ostensibly, grown-ups and should be able to tackle such a task ourselves.

We needed a new siphon, of course, which I went out and purchased. It turned out that we also needed a pipe wrench - a seriously efficient looking implement for removing and fitting......well, pipes. I even ventured forth to a proper tool shop (ie not one of those big warehouse-type chains but a proper shop with a bloke in overalls who goes and fetches what you want from the back of the shop) to buy said wrench. Husband agreed that it was something we would almost certainly need again at some point so we should just buy one.

I must tell you that when I bought the pipe wrench, I popped it into my handbag to carry it home. I have a large handbag as I tend to carry around a lot of junk (by which I mean books) and I put all sorts of stuff in it (today for example, it contained at one point a pair of slippers and two pairs of gloves as well as the usual purse, umbrella, notebook, diary etc). The man in the overalls looked mildly impressed and said "That's a rare big handbag." I nodded. "A girl's gotta have somewhere to carry her pipe wrench" I said.

Now I am slightly worried that he thinks I was buying a pipe wrench to carry around with me as some sort of offensive weapon ("Yeah, the claw hammer is okay for brute force but you can get a much better grip on the extremities with an adjustable pipe wrench")

Anyway, we were now all kitted up and the Great Siphon Replacement Project was pencilled in for this weekend. Until Husband went in to the loo to check we really did know where to turn the water off. He pulled the flush experimentally. And it worked. Repeatedly. It is still working now, hours later.

So I can only conclude that in fact we have a miracle on our hands: the Self-Healing Toilet of Edinburgh. Admission will be charged and I am, as we speak, working on my range of souvenir knitted toilet roll cosies. Place your orders now.

Important question

2010-09-10T14:03:00.002+01:00

Our wireless router has apparently decided that it does know me after all and has stopped cutting me dead and refusing to recognise my existence (or at least that of my laptop). This may have had something to do with the dire threats I am sure Husband was muttering under his breath as he wrestled with the settings in order to get the printer back onto the network (router also didn't like printer so pretended it wasn't there either).

Anyway I am back now, albeit briefly, to ask a very important question: when you go to the hairdresser, do you tip him/her? This is obviously a question for the non-North Americans among you as the whole tipping culture is completely different over there.

As a British person I find the whole subject of tips excruciating. I hate not knowing whether to tip, how much to tip etc. I squirmed with awkwardness when the duty manager showed us to our hotel room in Prague. Are you supposed to tip him or is a duty manager above that? If you should tip, how much? What if you only have the equivalent of a £20 note in local currency? You can't ask for change, surely? This sort of agonising is the main reason I avoid full service gas stations in Canada: I am pretty sure one is expected to tip the guy who fills your tank and wipes your windscreen but I never NEVER have change on me in gas stations and I always pay by credit card and you can't tip when you pay that way and I don't know whether it is better to actually say "I'm sorry, I'd tip you but I have no change" or to say nothing so I always end up slinking away in an embarassed fashion, sure that the poor guy is muttering about stingy Scottish people behind my back.

So, back to my question. It has never in all the years I have been an adult occurred to me that my hairdresser might expect a tip. Am I wrong in this? Do I not in fact have an awkward cow's lick in the front of my hair, just successive hairdressers over the years cutting it funny to punish me for my lack of gratuity-giving? And if I am wrong, again, I always pay by card and there is no option for a tip on the wee machine. What do I do? And what is the acceptable amount of a hairdresser's tip?

Or am I worrying about nothing? Please tell me I am worrying about nothing or I may have to change hairdressers again.

The sun is shining and I have just finished a plate of haggis

2010-08-29T19:05:00.013+01:00

In other words, feeling quite chirpy just now! The boys voluntarily offered to help in the garden today, for a modest financial reward, and they actually did the work they were retained to do without whingeing, and they didn't even complain when the rain came on and cut the work short, resulting in less cash than they were anticipating. They then got their waterproofs on and headed off to spend their earnings on a DVD, which they are now watching upstairs (hence I can get hold of the laptop to blog in peace).

The garden badly needs some attention now as the constant rain and warm days have led to the weeds running riot. I have not managed to deal with all the weeds, but at least the grass is cut. I will have to get round to that task soon though, as the sight of the encroaching weediness is bugging me. I tend to see it more nowadays as I have been wandering about my garden on a regular basis recently, partly to see what the cats are up to and partly to marvel at the fact that the seeds I planted earlier this year actually grew. Into stuff. Stuff you can actually EAT.

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I tend to be the kiss of death to all plant life. Houseplants curl up their leaves and die in my presence, even (or especially) the ones people tell me are impossible to kill. Hence I have never gone in much for gardening - if I can't grow plants in a sheltered atmosphere, what chance do I have when I am also competing with the elements, cats, snails and birds? But I do like to eat, so always wanted to grow veggies. You may remember, therefore that back in May I decided to plant some dead easy lettuce and some courgettes (zucchini for you North American types).

Well, to my utter astonishment, those little specks of green turned into these:

"Oak leaf" salad bowl lettuce, and

Courgettes! Yellow ones (they are supposed to be yellow. I checked.) I harvested one teeny tiny one today because the rain had gathered in its flower and the very end was starting to rot a bit. So I cut that part off, sliced it lengthwise and stuck it on the barbeque when I was cooking some chicken earlier. Husband and I then shared the most wonderful morsels of courgette ever tasted by mortal man. Seriously, they were fabulous. We are considering having a barbeque tomorrow purely so we can pick the rest of what is there, douse it in olive oil, lemon zest and thyme, grill it and gorge ourselves. (That being "gorge" in the sense of "eat the entire harvest in one go". I doubt there are enough courgettes there to constitute an entire meal!)

So I am converted to home grown veggies. Suggestions for other low maintenance crops gratefully received. (Croila, your photos of your produce make me drool, but I suspect I don't even look after my kids as well as you care for your tomatoes!)

In other news, the cats' occupation of any cardboard box left lying about continues. We have started saving any odd-shaped boxes we come across just to see if there is any sort of box they won't sleep in. So far, there isn't. Even the long, high-sided and narrow box that FB's drumkit pedal came in is acceptable. Bit of a squeeze mind you.

That photo makes both cats look much more angelic and well-behaved than they really are. Zyra (the tortoiseshell minx) in particular has been bringing in a steady supply of mice and birds throughout the summer. Nowadays, however, she is finding that small rodents and fledgling blackbirds no longer pose enough of a challenge and is moving on to bigger game.

I wish I had had the video camera ready that day, as the racket that squirrel was making was unbelievable. I am now keeping my fingers crossed that Zyra never manages to actually catch a squirrel. Can you imagine what my kitchen will look like if she ever does?

One down, one to go

2010-08-25T21:28:00.005+01:00

Ah, the end of the summer holidays. Hasn't come a day too soon. Much as I love my children, they have just been........here a lot recently. It is on perfectly pleasant summer days when your children stubbornly remain indoors that you begin to wish you lived out in the country with a huge area of wilderness for them to explore, rather than in a large city with a major traffic route on the doorstep.

But today, today was Day Zero. Day Zero is exactly what it sounds like: the day at the end of a long countdown. In this case, the countdown to my baby boy, my First Born, starting senior school. All the new S1 pupils went into school for a half day today before school proper starts tomorrow (Oh the howls of anguish when FB first discovered that he would be in school and SB would not!). The idea is to give the new kids in the senior school a day to acclimatise, find their form room, get their timetable, locker key etc, all before the building fills up with huge 6 feet tall blokes in blazers masquerading as school pupils.

FB seemed to enjoy the experience - he has made a friend, a boy who did not attend the Junior school but has joined from an outside school, and said friend is also "into" Warhammer, so that's good. (Have you heard of Warhammer? Chances are if you are at all familiar with a boy child between the ages of, say, 10 and 15, then you do. If you don't, then consider yourself lucky.)

I must confess that Husband and I fretted a bit when FB began to get interested in Warhammer. It smacked to us of Dungeons & Dragons and the slightly geeky, uncool image that went with that when we were young(er). However as a hobby among young teen boys, it seems to be quite widespread so we have decided to unclench a little. Given FB's problems making friends at all (as an Asperger's child, social interaction is a bit of a mystery to him) it would be a little unfair of us to deny him the opportunity of getting into a subject about which he knows EVERYTHING (as an Asperger's child, when he gets interested in something, he gets REALLY interested, REALLY quickly). So we will let him collect small and essentially pointless plastic figures and talk endlessly with other small boys about the powers of said small, pointless plastic figures and hopefully it will make him happy and give him the chance to interact with other small boys of like mind. My fingers, they are firmly crossed.

But what of SB? He is still in the junior school, entering primary 6 but that is, in itself, a little milestone. For tomorrow is his first day at school IN LONG TROUSERS! You have no idea how happy he is about this. Honestly, to hear him talk, you would think that for the last 5 years we have routinely forced him out into blizzards and ice storms with his knees uncovered, risking terminal frostbite of the kneecaps. He is pleased to be getting into proper trousers at last. I am pleased that I can now clothe his lower half for school from Asda or similar at a cost of about £4 rather than spending £25 on a pair of regulation shorts at the school outfitters. However I am also slightly scared.

You see, SB spends every moment of free time at school playing football. And when doing so, he falls over. A lot. Part of the coming-home-from-school ritual with SB has always been an examination of the new cuts and bruises sustained during some cutthroat game of 19-a-side at playtime. He often came home with full-blown dressings applied by matron during injury time. I did not worry overly much about this. Knees are blessedly self-repairing. Trousers, however, are not. And I am no use whatsoever with a needle and thread. I suspect I may end up giving all the money that used to go on shorts to Asda anyway. Unless anyone out there has a reasonably-priced trouser-knee repair service I should know about?

I am worried my blogging license may have been revoked

2010-08-22T20:31:00.003+01:00

Yes, so, it would appear that during the school holidays, when I have the pleasure of the boys' company during every hour when I am not at work, I find it more difficult to sit down and write about what is going on Chez Loth. There is, you see, too much going on Chez Loth for me to be able to sit down and describe it. Admittedly, what is going on is mostly arguments about who gets to play the Penguin on Lego Batman on the Wii, so it is probably just as well that I have not felt the need to post on this subject in any detail. You lot don't really need to hear my well worn speech on "If you can't agree on who is doing what, then I am TURNING THE WII OFF!!!".

Anyway, the boys have gone to Camp Granny and Grandad for a couple of nights before they go back to school on Wednesday (First Born) and Thursday (Second Born), and I am therefore free to hog the laptop for a while. So how have you all been? I have still been reading some blogs, albeit not commenting much. I must confess I had to take a deep breath a wee while ago and hit "mark all as read" on a few. There were over 450 entries in my reader and there was just no way I was going to manage to read all those with the care they deserved and still, you know, eat and shower occasionally. Please forgive me, therefore, if I have been noticeable by my absence over at your place recently. I'll be around shortly.

In the meantime I have about 3 dozen name labels to sew onto various items of schoolwear before Wednesday. Anyone who knows me and my sewing skills knows this will take me until about 4pm on Tuesday if I start now, so I had better get started......

You know you're in Edinburgh during the Festival when......

2010-08-17T20:49:00.001+01:00

.............you find yourself behind Zorro in the queue for the cash machine.

Newsflash!

2010-08-14T19:43:00.003+01:00

"Local council radically extends recycling scheme in Edinburgh"

"Representatives of the small rodent and bird communities welcome the initiative."

Canada Retrospective

2010-07-26T21:08:00.012+01:00

So, yeah, Canada. Did I tell you we really like it there? We are so sad we even love Halifax Airport. They have people employed to stand at the top of the stairs leading to immigration control purely to smile at you and welcome you to Canada. How could you not like a country like that? And anyone who has entered the UK recently, particularly through one of the big London airports, may like to compare that description with the ubiquitous scowl and monosyllabic grunt employed by all staff at Heathrow, Gatwick etc.

We spent a couple of days down in Liverpool on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, including Canada Day when we met Jess and she stupified my children. The weather was glorious and we took a picnic down to the Keji National Park Seaside Adjunct where we had a walk and then found a little cove where we could stuff our faces with sandwiches. A cove which we had all to ourselves. If you need any persuading that NS is a good vacation destination, how's this?

In the background are rocks covered with seals, all suffering from eye strain inflicted by my sons' fashion choices.

From Liverpool, we headed off to Prince Edward Island where we had rented a cottage on the beach for a week. We stayed there once before in 2007 and thus were able to justify spending most of our days lazing around in the cottage and on the beach rather than seeing the sights. (In other words, we managed to avoid seeing Anne of Green Gables merchandise for most of the week!)

We did however go into Charlottetown on the day we arrived in order to see Great Big Sea in concert, and they were absolutely fantastic. FB and SB have been GBS fans since they could talk, if not before, and they enjoyed it too. SB in particular had a whale of a time - if we had been allowed to take a video camera in we would have been tempted to film SB instead of the band. He bounced and danced and sang at the top of his voice for the entire concert. The lady standing just to our right spent much of the gig watching my son's performance rather than the band! Just a brilliant evening.

From PEI we went to Sackville, New Brunswick. We stayed there one night because (1) we needed to stay somewhere for one night and (2) we had never been to Sackville before. It turned out to be a nice little university town, although it was pouring with rain the entire time we were there so I would quite like to go back sometime when the weather is better. One little unexpected bonus was discovering that Alex Colville had taught at the University there and that his house was now open to the public as a little gallery. Husband is very partial to Alex Colville, as is SB (we were lucky enough to see an exhibition of his work in Wolfville last year) and we spent a very enjoyable half hour wandering round his house and looking at some great prints.

We finished up with a few days at our regular haunt in Port Williams in the Annapolis Valley. It is always wonderful to see our favourite view of the valley from the window of our usual room in our favourite B&B on the planet.
That's the view I want to gaze at every day when I retire. We did pretty much what we always do. We pottered around the bookshops in Wolfville, visited the cats in the local shelter, went to Tim Horton's (it's the law) and wandered around a selection of the little towns that dot the coast of the Bay of Fundy. We visited Hall's Harbour, home of the famous lobster pound and Husband and I reminisced about how, when we first went there, it was little more than a shed on the quayside where a couple of blokes would sell you the lobster of your choice, cook it in a dustbin full of boiling seawater and then serve it to you out of a hatch in said shed for you to eat, hot and dipped in melted butter, as you sat on the side of the harbour and watched the boats and the fog rolling in. Now there is a proper restaurant and a gift shop and stuff, and that's great because it means jobs and money coming in to the area, but it is somehow less fun.

So instead of eating lobster in the restaurant, we nipped across to the general store for some bags of chips and something to drink while sitting on the harbourside and that was definitely the right choice. The store was like something from a time warp. It sold just about everything and the bottles of water etc were kept in an old domestic fridge - the kind with a big, thick door and a handle you had to pull to open it. The lovely old lady behind the counter calculated our bill using a pen and a scrap of brown paper, and then gave us our change from a cash register that went "ker-ching!!!" when she opened the drawer. Husband would willingly have stood there all day, just listening to that sound.

We were, as always, sorry to leave. The story of how long it actually took to leave the country, I will thrill you with next time.

We're back!

2010-07-21T21:07:00.000+01:00

The Loth clan has successfully returned to its den after the annual Canadian Extravaganza. The lack of posting since we got back on Friday is due to (1) the 2 days it took us to get home and (2) the monster pile of laundry which has been squatting in our upstairs hall threatening to eat the children unless I did something about it.

The laundry has now been beaten into submission and our sleep patterns have just about recovered so I will be regaling you with tales of our travels shortly. I apologise in advance for the level of tedious detail I will be going into - this blog serves as my memory these days so I need to record the events of the holiday for my own benefit. Feel free to skip through the posts if descriptions of my younger son eating fish and chips for 9 days straight don't thrill you to the bone.

Just before I go off to try to cut my grass (it grew three feet in the two weeks we were away) I have to tell you the best bit from the holiday. We were in Liverpool NS for Canada day and managed (this time) to meet up with Jessica from Daysgoby. This was very exciting for me, and Jess, Husband and I spent a lovely half hour or so laughing and chatting. Second Born joined in initially to claim responsibility for stealing crops from Jessica's farm on Facebook and then wandered off. First Born isn't fond of chat unless it revolves around Dr Who and other forms of science fiction, so he too wandered off.

Realising it had gone quiet, we looked around and found this

Yup, the excitement of meeting Jess in the flesh was so great, it sent my children to sleep. On park benches, no less. Jess tells me she is willing to repeat this feat on any other children, for a small fee. Form an orderly queue now.

Testing, testing.....

2010-06-22T21:24:00.002+01:00

No, Isabelle, I am not dead, but thanks for checking up on me. It's nice to know that someone cares and worries about whether I have collapsed in a heap over my laptop, exhausted by the production of mindless wittering.

But no, I am here, I just haven't been able to get near the computer (other than for brief Scrabble battles with my mother) due to small boys spiriting it away and watching Top Gear on Youtube (because there is not enough Top Gear on Dave apparently). There has also been quite a lot going on, none of which I can remember at present, but I promise I will come back again shortly and thrill you with the wondrous goings-on at Chateau Loth.

PS Only a week till we leave for Canada. Are you ready, Liverpool? Are ya?

Distractions

2010-06-07T20:45:00.006+01:00

Second Born just appeared at our living room door wearing pyjamas and a straw boater. Things like that happen all the time in the Loth Clan Headquarters, and I invariably think "Ha! I must blog that." and then something else happens to distract me and I forget, for I am now 43 and Getting On A Bit and my memory is not what it was. In fact, I don't think it was ever what it was. If you know what I mean.

Anyway, I managed to write about the straw boater outfit purely because I actually had the laptop on my lap at the time. SB has now gone upstairs to his bedroom. His parting comment was "I had better remember to give Big Nick his hat back or he will be angry..". Big Nick is the King of the Cotton Humpties and he lives on our landing. Have I told you about the warring Humpty clans which occupy our house? No? Must remember to do that sometime.

So what else has been happening in our little corner of Edinburgh? Well, Husband and I have a new hobby. I am so pleased that the lettuce and courgette seeds I planted continue to grow that I have declared war on the snails. We have a lot of snails in our garden. Seriously. A lot. I don't know whether they just really like all the dense undergrowth or if they like the old stone wall that surrounds the garden (there are always a lot of snails asleep on the wall), but whatever the reason, there are loads of the little critters hanging around. Especially when it is wet outside. And since this is Edinburgh, it is pretty much always wet outside. A couple of nights ago I looked out of our kitchen window and counted over 20 snails on our little patch of lawn - a lawn you can cross in about 10 paces. They were advancing across the grass in a line like a little synchronised munching team. If they only ate the grass I would be delighted - save me cutting it for one thing - but they don't. They like my little herb garden (particularly the lovage which strikes me as an odd taste preference but there you go) and I am of course now fretting about my baby lettuce leaves.

So Husband and I now go out in the cool and damp of the Edinburgh dusk, hunt down the snails and chuck them over the garden wall. I hasten to add there is a nice grassy border with trees and everything on the other side of the wall and I checked first thing in the morning and found no snail corpses lying crushed in the street, so they presumably survived their flight. It is a strangely satisfying and relaxing pastime and it's nice for Husband and me to have a hobby we can share. I do slightly worry that at some point we will be mid-fling when a neighbour passes by outside and is caught in a shower of flying molluscs. But not worried enough to leave the little terrors to do their worst.

In other news, First Born has not been able to pluck up the courage to invite a girl to the end of year dance but he is pretty laid back about that and happy to go solo, so that's okay. He has however, just been told that he has won the school Poetry Trophy for the year so will actually get to go up on stage at Prizegiving this year and collect a prize. "An actual silver trophy!" as he has told everyone he could find on speed dial today (the chinese takeaway were surprised but very supportive). We couldn't be more pleased for him as we had sort of resigned ourselves to the fact that his particular strengths were not of the kind to result in prizes from his very traditional school. That he has won something for poetry that he wrote is just fanastic. I have not seen the poem which won, but FB tells us it was inspired by Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream". I will confess to being equal parts proud, intrigued and scared by that information.

There is almost certainly more to tell you but my cup of tea and square(s) of Green & Black's are calling to me so I will leave you with another photograph. This demonstrates what always happens if you leave a box lying around in a house where cats live. ANY box, no matter how small.

PS: Hey XUP/Alison! Husband is on the other laptop (yes, we are somewhat geeky, what of it?) and has just found a Sequential Circuits synthesizer on sale on Ebay for some ridiculous sum of money. It is in Ontario. He says I can come and visit you provided he comes too and is allowed to buy the synthesizer. I suspect the ridiculous sum of money is truly monumental if he is willing to do that deal, what do you reckon?

There is life after death!

2010-05-27T21:32:00.005+01:00

Long term readers may remember the tear-stained post I wrote when my beloved 1970s orange-and-chocolate-brown Kenwood Chef died in the line of duty. That was in October 2008. Grays of George Street, that venerable Edinburgh institution is no more and I didn't know of anywhere else I could go for help with a disabled Chef. Despite this, I kept his body in the garage. I just couldn't bring myself to throw Kenwood away.

This morning however, I came downstairs to a (tuneless) chorus of Happy Birthday from Husband and Boys and look what was waiting for me!

They pimped my Chef! Kenwood had been smuggled out of the house (apparently I actually helped with this operation in the mistaken belief that Husband was taking an amplifier into his office. If you knew Husband, you would completely understand why I accepted this ruse without question) and then sent off to the Hospital for Geriatric Kenwood Chefs where they gave him a brand spanking new motor, a groovy new control knob, new rubber feet and all sorts of wonderful new attachments (not the sausage stuffing one though - I may have to wait until Christmas before I get that). He lives! He even has a pulse (function)!

Isn't he lovely? I suddenly feel the urge to make bread. Or drink tea and eat chocolate while admiring him. One or the other.

Wow! It's like Barn Buddy in real life!

2010-05-17T21:39:00.007+01:00

That's what Second Born exclaimed when I told him I planned to break the habit of a lifetime and actually try to grow some vegetables this year. (If you don't know what Barn Buddy is, then good for you! I strongly recommend you keep it that way. And Jess? I chased away some raccoons and squirted some bugs for you. You're welcome.)

Anyway, I decided to take a gamble that we had seen the last of the frost in Edinburgh and I planted some lettuce seeds and some courgette seeds. I was slightly concerned that the cats might just follow me round the garden and dig them right back up again - you know how cats can't resist freshly dug soil. However, some of the seeds appear to be actually, you know, growing! Look!

Those miniscule little spots of green are going to be lettuce when they grow up. Provided Zyra doesn't roll on them. Again. I also planted garlic a while back and it seems to be holding up reasonably well too,......

........given it is kind of in the cats' regular route from the area where they lie around in the sun outdoors to the area where they lie around out of the sun indoors. It is a hard life being a cat. So much territory to cover, defend and sleep on. (PS Do you think I need to cut the grass out there?)

When I was out taking these photos, Bellus came out onto the back doorstep to supervise operations and assumed his most regal position, sitting upright on the step with his tail tucked neatly around his paws, nose in the air and eyes half-closed, the embodiment of inscrutable wisdom. I took a photo of that too. See?

Cats. Motto: Never cooperate when you can scarper and ruin a good photo instead.

In other news, First Born has decided, entirely off his own bat, that he will attend the Primary 7 end of year dance. This is the social event that had me choking on my tea when I read the letter about it from school. The letter that asked us very nicely not to send our children to the dance in stretch limos, as they cause traffic jams.

Stretch.

Limos.

Seriously??????!!! FB is 12. He has to be marched at gunpoint to the bathroom to take a shower and his idea of fun is four hours of building Lego empires followed by chasing his brother round the garden with a water pistol. I had been thinking of maybe buying him new trousers for the occasion. I was no more thinking of hiring a stretch limo than I was of sending FB to the ball in a pink tutu. I clearly need a bit of a reality adjustment. But oh how I wish I didn't.

In any event, he is going, and of his own free will which is good. FB, with all of his issues, finds social situations a bit tricky and I would not have wanted to force him to go. That he wants to go is a relief. Mind you, I think the main reason he wants to go is that he gets a new bow tie. FB is a sucker for bow ties. If I would let him, he'd wear the new tie (black silk with geometric-y purple and white pattern, since you ask) AND carry the very realistic fake pipe he bought with his pocket money. He took some persuading that this might be a wee bit over the top. As would braces and a tweed jacket. He basically wants to go to his dance dressed as Doctor Who. This is not going to get him a date.

Did I mention they all ask girls to be their partners to the dance? My insides turned over when I heard this. Husband and I have spent 12 years protecting FB from aspects of the big wide world he finds difficult. We are trying very hard to teach him now how to deal with the tricksy, slippery field of human social interaction by himself. This development however is a biggie. Ideally what Husband and I would like is to be made invisible so we can stand behind the girl in question and, as FB asks the question, whisper menacingly into her ear "Be NICE to our little boy!!" So if any of you have managed to invent invisibility over the weekend and haven't announced it yet, please let me know. There could be macaroon bars in it for you.

What else? Saturday was scorching hot and we had a barbeque in the garden which was lovely. Sunday started out grey, cloudy, misty and rainy as I headed off in the early(ish) morning to Musselburgh to volunteer at the Edinburgh Marathon. I had to take refuge from one of those sudden cloudbursts which are so heavy you are convinced the rain is going to leave little dents in your skull. And then it cleared up again and was scorching all over again. I realised that whilst I had remembered sunscreen, I had forgotten a hat so ended up with a sunburned scalp where the parting of my hair is. That really hurts, in case you have never done it.

Volunteering was as much fun and just as exhausting as ever. I was on my feet and on the go from 8am until after 4pm. The latter part of the day was spent manning the part of the finish line where the last member of the 4 person relay teams came through. The runner of the last leg had to collect 4 medals, one for each team member, and 4 goodie bags. With t-shirts in them for each team member. Ever tried to ask an exhausted, sweaty, dehydrated, disorientated bloke what size of shirts he thinks his three female team mates take? The look of desparate panic was heart-rending. I think he would rather I had poked him in the eye than try to answer that question. I took pity: "Take 3 mediums. You can't go wrong with mediums". He just about fainted in gratitude. Or it might have been heat exhaustion. Hard to tell.

It was great fun and I will almost certainly do it again next year. I'll just remember the hat next time.

Harumble! The sofas are back!

2010-05-17T20:57:00.004+01:00

And so am I! A double whammy of circumstances kept me from the beloved laptop for quite a few days. First, I caught a cold. One of those sneezy, tickly, drippy, red flaky nose-y, "I'll just lie down for a moment or two and rest my eyes oh dear where has the day gone?" sort of colds. I was pathetic. Still am, only now it's a "taken-up-residence-in-my-chest,-horking-up-all-sorts-of-unpleasantness-that-reminds-me-uncomfortably-of-putty" sort of a cold. That moment a half hour ago when your windows rattled for no apparent reason? That was me. Coughing. Sorry.

Secondly of course, our lack of living room furniture. I discovered very quickly after the sofas were packed off to Furniture Infirmary that (a) I am not very good at sitting on hard chairs for extended periods (I would have failed deportment lessons at finishing school. Good job I was never sent for finishing) and (b) you can't easily use a laptop while sitting in such a chair. As a result I have not been online at all since some time last week and my mother is biting her nails in frustration waiting for my next Scrabble move (she still hasn't forgiven me for quern and is plotting her revenge).

But today! Oh, today! Today, the couches came back and I am once again enthroned on only slightly ripped and scuffed leather wonderfulness, with my laptop on my lap. Wondering how on earth I am supposed to get through 375 entries on Google reader without giving up work entirely. (I know, "mark all as read", but I hate doing that - it feels like throwing books out unread - books written by friends at that - and I am pathologically incapable of throwing away a book without at least peeking inside for a wee look and then reading on a wee bit to see how it develops and then.....well, you can work out the rest. I think I am going to have to be strong and drastically cull my Google reader subscriptions. Soon. My, this is a long passage in parenthesis isn't it? Or should that be "parentheses"? Isabelle?)

I seem to have wittered on a fair bit already, and I haven't even started on my thoughts on the forthcoming Primary 7 end of year school dance to which FB may be going. I'll save that for later and just leave you with the observation that this global warming thing is very odd, if what it does is give us snow in May.

This is the opposite of an update

2010-05-11T21:45:00.005+01:00

I don't have anything terribly interesting to say, really. I promised myself I would try to post more often on here and reassured myself that once I had a blank window open, fingers poised over the keyboard, inspiration would strike.

Well, I think we can all agree that hasn't happened. I blame the election myself. I have spent so much time watching no-one actually being elected on television that every last atom of creativity has leached away into the sofa.

Actually talking of the sofa, both of our sofas are going into furniture hospital this weekend for a bit of reconstructive surgery. This is long overdue and I can't wait to have seats that don't make an ominous "boing" noise every time you sit down. I am not however looking forward to a few days of sitting on green plastic garden furniture. I made the mistake of telling the boys we would just have to bring all the duvets downstairs and have a sort of hippy commune set-up on the living room carpet. They didn't appreciate my brand of subtle sarcasm and are now happily looking forward to a weekend of lolling on duvets while eating Frosties and watching Top Gear. Do you think it's better to risk their wrath by telling them I was kidding, or go along with it?

Anyway, as compensation for this rambling brain dump, have a cat photo. Proof of how delicate and ladylike our Zyra is. And how Bellus, the ultimate opportunist, will never pass up the chance of a free pillow.

Fame at last

2010-05-10T22:53:00.002+01:00

My dear Husband has informed me that if one Googles the term "crunchy little mouse" (and why wouldn't you?) this fine blog is the number one result. I'm so proud.

Also slightly on edge as the boys have typed said phrase into a text-to- speech programme and now the laptop intones "Crunchy little mouse" at me in clipped RP tones.

Miscellaneous

2010-05-09T22:09:00.002+01:00

Miscellaneous number one:
Having just spent an obscene amount of money on filling up our car, I commented to the boys in the back seat on how expensive diesel is these days. Without looking up from his Nintendo DS, Second Born observed that diesel was still cheaper than running the car on bull sperm. No, I didn't ask. Scared to, frankly.

Miscellaneous number two:
Another in the series of "Sentences You Never Thought You'd Say" from Husband (he was in the living room with the boys, I overheard as I was lurking in the kitchen): "No, it's not realistic, it's a stuffed monkey firing a gun."

Miscellaneous number three:
Do you have any idea how mind-bendingly annoying it is when your Husband decides to play "Tijuana Taxi" (again, no idea why) and then adds lyrics as if sung by our cats, which go "Crunchy little mouse, it's a crunchy little mouse, it's a crunchy little mouse, and you eat it......for your break-time sna-ha-hack!" If you don't, would you like me to come round to your house and sing it for you? Then you too can have it in your head FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY. (Clue: no, you almost certainly don't)

Excuses

2010-04-30T14:48:00.003+01:00

I had every intention of getting out into the garden and doing some serious weeding in preparation for the planting of some vegetables. But my good intentions were thwarted.

Someone is holding my tools hostage.

I don't get snack, you don't get fork.

Ah well, back to playing Word Twist.

Boys are different. #2

2010-04-27T21:15:00.000+01:00

Another morning, another wrangle. This time the.....

"Have you got your waterproof jacket in your schoolbag?"

"It's not raining"

"You live in Scotland. It can rain AT ANY TIME ON ANY DAY. Get your waterproof"......

routine. The culprit this time was Second Born who steadfastly maintained that he did indeed have his waterproof in his bag. Call me cynical but I checked. I did not find his waterproof but I did find a bag of apple slices left over from his lunch. Now, my forensic science skills derive entirely from my voracious reading of Kathy Reichs and Jeffrey Deaver books, but I reckon the lunch from which the apple was left over happened about 3 weeks ago. The bag was full of brown squishiness. I really only knew it was once apple because I recognised the bag.

SB, needless to say, was unfazed by my initial yelp of surprise and the subsequent expressions of disgust from the rest of the family. "I must have forgotten to eat my apple," he shrugged.

Boys. Girls wouldn't do that, would they? And, hypothetically, say if I had girls and I were to climb up on to the top bunk of the bed in the spare bedroom to change the sheets, I probably wouldn't find a plate strewn with crumbs and the dessicated remnants of a piece of ham hard enough to cut wood with, would I? Thought not.

(Note to self: my mum is coming to stay tomorrow and will be sleeping in that bed. Carry out emergency reconnaissance as soon as this post is published.)

Boys are different. They just are.

2010-04-25T21:14:00.004+01:00

So, Friday was interesting. I spent a chunk of the morning before we set off for work/school mopping blood off the bathroom floor.

The boys had been engaging in their customary pre-school skirmishing ("It's my turn to have music on!" "No it's not, and I don't want to listen to "Firestarter" in the morning anyway!") and I was studiously ignoring them while getting dressed. Then the level of wailing coming from FB rose a couple of octaves and a couple of hundred decibels - a sure sign that physical hurt of some sort had occurred. This was confirmed shortly by SB dashing into my room and breathlessly announcing that "FB has hurt himself"

I sauntered into their bedroom with very little in the way of concern - FB's idea of what constitutes grave injury does not exactly tally with the rest of humanity's. I am quite accustomed to having to utilise a magnifying glass to locate the wound from which FB claims to be "almost bleeding to death and you're not even bothered!!!!!!".

However on this occasion I was greeted by the sight of FB literally dripping blood. It was running down his forehead and dripping rather dramatically off the end of his nose. He was practically hysterical. I manouevred him into the bathroom and eventually calmed him down enough to get him to stand with his head over the sink. I am no nurse but I am familiar enough with head wounds to know that any scratch on the scalp bleeds like billy-o and looks like something from a Hammer horror movie circa 1973, and that therefore this probably looked a lot worse than it was. It did. A gentle rinse under the tap disclosed a small cut on his head which stopped bleeding with a little bit of pressure. FB started to breathe normally after about 10 minutes.

I asked how this had happened. "I was putting my belt on and it hit my head." It is a mark of how far I have come in my understanding of boys that this did not phase me in the slightest. I just nodded.

"Need to be a bit more careful next time, eh?"

It was only when I got into work and was regaling my co-workers with this tale that some light was shed. Most of the other people in the room where I work responded with "What? How on earth did he manage that?" A significant proportion however (all male, aged 25-40) nodded sagely.

"Indiana Jones moment"

I am an idiot

2010-04-20T21:26:00.002+01:00

Sunshine over the weekend? Was I seriously hoping for more sunshine? That is the very definition of "triumph of hope over experience". Today we got hail. HAIL! The newly arrived, fragile and lovely blossom on the trees was battered into wilted submission by little pellets of ice falling from the sky. (No volcanic dust in it though - I checked.) Spring this year is weird.

In other news, FB passed two great childhood milestones in the last few days. On Saturday he travelled by bus from outside our house to our nearest bookshop (a journey of about half a mile) and back, all by himself. This is quite a big deal for our First Born with all his various developmental and other issues and his father and I nearly hyperventilated ourselves into early graves waiting for him to return. Which he did, grinning, proud of himself and bearing the new Skulduggery Pleasant book which he had found and purchased all by himself.

Then, yesterday, he jumped over a small stream in a park near my parents' house, landed in mud, got stuck in mud, lost his right shoe in mud and then finally fell over into mud as he struggled to pull his said shoe from said mud. Not something one would normally consider a huge achievement, I know, but it's the most typical "messy small boy" thing he has ever done and, more importantly, he allowed his grandparents and his brother to tease him about it without having a complete meltdown. He even laughed a little himself about how stinky he was and the fact that he had to travel back in Grandad's car wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a t-shirt. Coping with and joking about a situation where he lost his dignity as well as his shoe? Big step for FB. I am proud. (And glad that my mum got the job of washing the clothes and stinky shoes.)

Greetings from under the cloud!

2010-04-15T19:48:00.003+01:00

I write from dusty Edinburgh, draped in a delicate layer of volcanic ash. Personally I am delighted by this development as it means that the whole city is soon going to look remarkably like my living room. My (lack of) housekeeping skills are, as you all know, legendary, and I knew I could drag everyone down to my level eventually!

Having said that, my garden is looking, if not exactly pristine, certainly better than it was. I have cut the grass for the first time this year and by a careful application of (1) promises of ice cream and (2) cold hard cash, persuaded the boys to assist with a bit of weeding. SB was game but FB after a bit of desultory poking around with a fork, declared that there were too many beasties around and retreated to the house.

Zyra and Bellus, on the other hand, thoroughly approve of the beasties. They are particularly enamoured of the big fat bumble bees which have been tempted out into the spring sunshine. The bees stoat drunkenly about roughly twelve inches above the ground - a distance otherwise known as "perfect cat attack height". I am curious to see what will happen if either of them actually manages to catch one. A bee sting might be suitable karmic payback for the small crowd of deceased mice which have, one by one, been brought into our house over the past couple of weeks. I suppose we should be grateful that the said mice had been quickly despatched and were not brought in alive and then toyed with on our carpets.

Praying now that this lovely sunshine will continue through the weekend when we can actually enjoy it.

I must be getting on a bit

2010-04-11T21:28:00.004+01:00

Astonishing. My younger son is 10. Both of my children are in double digits. I can hardly believe that. It seems like only a few months ago that we brought SB home from hospital, a bouncing, healthy, hungry and chubby boy who was nicknamed "Humpty SB" for ages due to his generous proportions. That said, he now has the physique of a fitness-mad whippet (although that may not last long given he blew £5 of his birthday money on an absolute mountain of cut price Easter chocolate today - big Lindt Easter gold bunnies for £1!)

I think I have been irritating SB just a little bit this last week, repeatedly grabbing hold of him and wailing "My baby! My baby is going to be 10! Don't leave me, my baby!" His eye-roll is now worthy of the most jaded teenager, but at least he still lets me hug him. For now.

SB was given the option of where to have his celebration dinner on Friday and he chose a little italian restaurant close to where Husband and I work. Despite being a petite soon-to-be-10-year-old with the aforementioned pipecleaner physique, he managed to pack away calamari, followed by pepperoni pizza followed by vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate sauce. The boy must have hollow legs or a Tardis stomach or something. Even FB, the dairy allergic boy, enjoyed the outing - the kind staff spirited away the lump of dairy-free cheese substitute I brought along and produced a creditable milk product-less pizza for him. Dessert stumped them, but then desserts always stump restaurants when faced with someone who cannot partake of the juice of the cow, and I can't blame them for that. Fortunately I had come prepared with a bag of jelly babies in my handbag.

On Saturday, the day of The Birthday itself, Granny and Grandad came to visit and partake of tea and cake. SB had requested that his cake this year bear a "flaming skull" motif. Which is why I spent part of Friday night searching Google Images for "flaming skulls: how to draw". The list of my talents grows ever longer, and slightly weirder. I would post a photograph of the finished item but I don't really want to risk attracting that sort of traffic.

The cake went down well and SB enjoyed forcing his grandparents to play him at various Wii games including golf and boxing. In a memorable boxing match, SB and his granny managed to simultaneously knock each other out. We decided to declare that one a draw.

SB is now enjoying the aftermath of his birthday revels, contemplating what he is going to spend all his newly-acquired cash on. I hope to goodness he comes up with something other than chocolate.

Did you miss me?

2010-04-06T21:55:00.001+01:00

I'm back! What do you mean, you didn't know I was away? Did I not mention that Husband and I were off to Prague for a wee trip sans children? Whoops, sorry. And then we got back and there was stuff to do, hospital appointments, last week of school..........

So! Husband and I were in Prague a couple of weekends ago! Husband's annual Czech-based judgely huddle was taking place on a Friday so we decided to extend the trip a little and leave the children to look after Granny and Grandad for a few days. Last time we went to Prague we flew out on a Monday and back on a Thursday and I have to say that is preferable by far to the arrangement this time whereby we flew out on Thursday and back on Sunday. Why is that, you may ask?

Two words: stag weekends. We found ourselves sitting on a plane in the middle of a group of very loud Scottish blokes wearing wigs. And one of them (the groom, presumably) was also wearing a dress. And a string of orange wooden beads. The sight of anyone's cleavage looming over one is a bit hard to take first thing on a Thursday morning. When that cleavage is pasty white and hairy to boot, off-putting doesn't begin to describe it.

Prague was lovely as ever. We stay in an absolutely wonderful hotel - this one - which is located right in the centre of the city, a couple of minutes on foot from the Charles Bridge. Our room this time had two huge windows which opened out onto a view of the river, the Bridge, Prague Castle and a row of yellow light-up penguins. I would show you all a photograph but we didn't bother to take the camera with us, a decision whichwas curiously liberating - there is something rather nice about just enjoying a scene rather than fretting about trying to capture the perfect photo of it.

We did take one photo. I insisted that Husband take a snap on his phone of one of the many market stalls selling Prague ham - huge lumps of pig roasting over open wood fires. I suspected that First Born, the World's Greatest Carnivore, would be drooling at the sight and I was right.

Prague is a carnivore's playground. In addition to the aforementioned Prague ham, in the course of 4 days Husband and I also managed to consume duck (and duck liver), venison, smoked pork knuckle, smoked pork sausage and wild boar. And dumplings. Lots of dumplings. Which aren't technically meat but since they are often served with a gravy boat full of the roasting juices from the accompanying meat to pour over, they soon become pretty meat-ish. I am getting hungry just writing this.

So Prague was great and we enjoyed the child-less nature of the days, being able to wander down a street because we felt like it without a chorus of "Where are we going? Why are we going down here? What's down this street? What are we going to do when we get down this street? I'm hungry/thirsty/bored" Not that we don't love our children, but it is nice to behave in an unadulteratedly adult manner once in a while.

And since we got back we have had the usual whirl of work, school run and so on. The Easter holidays began on 2 April so we have the pleasure of the boys' company for more of the time. As I type, Husband is upstairs completing the putting-to-bed ritual, which in his case seems to involve a lot of prodding, tickling, screaming and general mayhem. The kids are almost as bad.

I will try to do a little more updating soon. Promise.

Vampires beware

2010-03-20T12:37:00.006Z

The Loth clan are trying an experiment this year in preparation for the annual Canadian Hoopla. Whilst we love Canada dearly, and the Maritimes in particular (that noise you can hear is XUP and the Ottowa Tourist Board collectively grinding their teeth) there is one aspect of our holidays that tends to be less than ideal.

The wildlife. Specifically the winged, bite-y, "Oh look! Scottish food!" wildlife. SB, Husband and I tend to get repeatedly nibbled upon by hordes of invisible and sometimes not-so-invisible-but-I-sort-of-wish-I-HADN'T-seen-that-actually insects. The bites would be bad enough but our tender Scottish systems are unprepared for the onslaught and go into complete allergic overdrive leaving us with angry, red itchy lumps the size of soup plates all over us. Combined with the pasty white Scottish skin, it's not an attractive look.

Oddly, FB doesn't tend to get bitten. The only explanation we can come up with for this is that he doesn't taste nice. He is the dairy allergic member of the family, which leads us to suspect that mosquitos must really like the taste of butter, cheese and chocolate ice cream.

Anyway, my mother used to also be the sort of person who only had to bare a tiny part of her skin for hordes of flesh-eating midgies to descend and chase her indoors. But no longer. She can now brazenly walk abroad in summer (or the closest Scottish approximation thereto) without being eaten alive.

And she puts this down to...........garlic. She started taking those odourless garlic capsules a few years ago and since then she swears she does not get bitten by mosquitos. It sounds a bit unlikely, I know but if mozzies are fond of the taste of milk, who is to say they don't recoil at the tang of garlic? They are bloodsuckers after all, and since we would look a bit odd trying to fend them off with teeny-tiny crosses, garlic it is. I'll let you know how we get on.

On being obstructed by random popstars

2010-03-19T18:18:00.003Z

My to-do list was interfered with by Lulu yesterday. I was in Waterstones (SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE MARRIED TO ME AND ARE ABOUT TO HAVE A BIRTHDAY: Don't read this until after Sunday). Ahem. I was in Waterstones looking for a particular book for Husband's birthday and as I walked up to the first floor, I wondered why there were quite so many people milling about on a Thursday afternoon. A sudden passion kindled in the bosom of the Scottish populace for Politics, Psychology and Military History? No. I soon discovered that the reason was Lulu doing a signing session for her new book "Secrets to Looking Good" (Hint: have no money worries and access to professional hairdressers, stylists and make-up artists 7 days a week).

Annoyingly, she was sitting right in front of the section I wanted. There was a Waterstones employee standing by the stairs, directing the crowds. I automatically went into mildly outraged Edinburgh wifie mode. "Does that (gesturing towards Lulu and adoring fans) mean I can't get to the Biography section?"

The boy smiled wanly. "Not today, I'm afraid". I turned on my heel, muttering to myself. But not before I had a wee peek to see if she really looked that young in real life (she does but in a sort of plastic not-quite-real sort of way) and to check which version of her accent she was using today (the Glasgow keelie version, for the home fanbase).

I went back today and got my book in peace.

That was the weekend that was

2010-03-15T22:50:00.001Z

It warms the cockles of my heart, it really does, to see how righteously irate my dear readers become in the presence of a misplaced apostrophe. I like to think that in an ideal world we could all get together at a carefully selected restaurant (the kind that describes its vegetables as "dew-picked"), get pleasantly tipsy and annihilate the menu with a red biro. That would be pretty darn close to a perfect social event in my book.

Rest assured I will bring to your attention any further massacres of the English language which I happen to spot. (Isabelle has already seen the photo I carry around in my phone of the maintenance department sign in my office which asks "Do you know of anything in the office that need's fixed?" I think I may have shoved said phone in her face when we were in the audience waiting for a Fringe show to start, such was my outrage.)

Anyway, how are you all? Did you have a nice weekend? For those of us in the UK, Sunday was Mothering Sunday - I don't think you North American types celebrate this until later in the year. I was awakened by two small boys and one slightly larger, bearded one, bearing a large mug of tea and a plate of buttered toast. Proper toast, thank you very much, allowed to cool slightly and then thickly buttered. I also received a card which, according to the hand-crafted labels on the envelope had been all over the place, including "Baron Fronkensteen's Castle", "Punxsutawney" and "Lionel Twain's Manor House". There may be some clues there as to which films we have been watching with our children recently.

I would write more but my laptop just freaked out as I attempted to beat XUP at Word Twist and this is a sure sign that it is time for bed. Night all.

Words fail me. Almost.

2010-03-11T16:11:00.005Z

Just had to pop in to vent some spleen. I was driving home with FB this afternoon when we drew up alongside a van owned by one of those companies that walks your dog for you when you are at work. I can't remember its name, but I do remember its strapline:

"We can be their for your pet's when you can't"

Painted! On the van! By a (presumably) professional signwriter!

I am proud to say that I pointed this out to FB and he snorted in disgust. "A superfluous apostrophe! Those really annoy you, Mum".

Too right, son of mine. (He spotted the other error too, but his Superfluous Apostrophe Alarm had gone off first.)

Oh, and did I mention that Every Word Had A Capital Letter Too? Grrrrrrrr..............

Reassurance

2010-03-09T22:19:00.002Z

Just in case you are worried that I am deliberately neglecting you, dear readers, I waft in to tell you that my Google reader currently has 442 unread entries. 442!!! I'll have to give up housework (that will save 2 minutes a day) and feeding my children to give myself enough time to work through those!

So sorry if I have not been round to yours to comment on your words of wisdom. I have been playing Petville on Facebook with my niece and nephew in Australia instead. Oh and removing dead and dying mice from my house. But that is another story.

I'm losing the knack of this blogging lark

2010-02-26T22:09:00.008Z

I have meant to sit down and post about First Born's birthday, really I have but for some reason I just haven't. Not feeling very creative or communicative or something like that. Also, have been quite busy during the day when blog posts sort of crystallise (or congeal) in my brain as I wait for the boys to come out of school, or wait for buses.

So, what do I have to tell you about? Hmmm, let me think. Well, FB's birthday this year was a firmly Ghostbusters-themed event - he discovered the movies recently (if you are my age, don't work out how old they are - it will only depress you) and has been obsessed ever since. As a result, most of his birthday presents were Ghostbusters merchandise and came from Amazon-type suppliers. As a further result, I found myself at our local postal depot at 6am in the dark and cold two mornings running in order to pick up parcels which would not fit through our door. One of which turned out to be a keyring. A keyring, packed in a jiffy bag, then packed into a box too large to fit through our letterbox. I deserve mother of the year award, I really do. The ordeal was tempered somewhat when I stumbled into the little customer office and as I rang the bell for service, the postie jumped out from behind his door and went "Ta-da!!!!!" Nice to meet someone capable of humour at five past sparrow fart in the morning.

FB requested steak and chips for his birthday dinner last Thursday (for he is turning into a bloke) and then on Friday his friend came to stay and we took them all to the Mongolian Barbeque for dinner. This is the perfect dinner venue for small boys as it allows them to NOT stay seated and to mill about in the restaurant to their hearts' content as they collect a weird assortment of ingredients which are then cooked on a hotplate by a bloke in a big hat. Cooked WITH SWORDS. Small boy heaven. FB on his first trip to collect some food was examining the containers of raw meat (zebra! ostrich! springbok!) and wisely noted that we should be careful when handling it, as raw meat can give you semolina.

I had produced the requested Ghostbusters cake which the restaurant had kindly confirmed they would produce on cue with a sparkler in it. It turned up with something in it which looked for all the world like a distress flare - flames and sparks shooting all over the place. FB was entranced. He and his friend subsequently dismantled the corpse of the sparkler and spread "dead gunpowder" all over the table.

And then the weekend was over and we were back at work. A friend of mine has been unwell and in hospital so I popped in to see her a couple of times this week. I wasn't sure what to take in for her so settled for a carefully selected range of magazines including Woman's Weekly, People's Friend and - a lucky find - Margaret Thatcher: Her Life in Pictures. She nearly hit me with the last one.

And that's about it, really. Oh, apart from the fun moment yesterday at our big scary monthly meeting at work where I somehow managed to accidentally throw my pen across the table at the Chief Executive. He then got down on his hands and knees and crawled under the boardroom table to pick it up for me. I was too busy giggling to get it myself.

Finally, I have to tell you this quick story to illustrate one of the many reasons I married Husband: he was flicking through the channels and came to QVC. I wasn't looking at the time but knew it was QVC because he went "Eurgh!!!" and that's a noise he only really makes at QVC. They were selling a pair of teddies (horrid ones, naturally) called Rhubarb and Crumble. The annoying woman explained that they were so named because they were trying to think of names of things that went really well together.

"Gin and tonic!" I shouted.

"Arse and elbow!" shouted Husband. He wins.

In which I am distracted.

2010-02-21T22:00:00.000Z

I settled down this evening with every intention of filling you in on this past week, including, as it did, First Born's 12th birthday bonanza. Unfortunately, Husband and I had the TV on and I was distracted by the latest advert to attract my scorn. So the proper bloggy update and celebration of the fact that we have managed to raise a human being to age 12 without killing or seriously maiming it will have to wait.

The advert that has me quivering with indignation is that one for Perle du Lait yogurt. Do you know the one I mean? The one where the plain, dowdy woman with no make-up and a couple of stainless steel clips stuck randomly in her hair grimaces her way through a pot of SOUR YOGURT OH THE HUMANITY! Her life is clearly devoid of joy and meaning.

Then she discovers Perle du Lait, a nice yogurt that is specially manufactured to be .........not sour, and she smiles her way through a pot. And lo! She is happy and content and all is right with her world through the miracle of coconut flavoured yogurt (incidentally: eugh. Yogurt should not be coconut flavoured. Ever). Or could it be because meantime someone has sneakily done her hair and make-up for her and improved the lighting and turned up the colour saturation? Do advertisers really think we are that dim? That we don't notice this stuff? Whatever they paid their advertising company, it was way too much.

Unless of course, eating this particular yogurt will indeed miraculously turn my hair into something worthy of the description "style" and apply make-up in the subtle and skillful way I have failed to learn over the last thirty-odd years. But I doubt it. I learned that lesson the hard way when I dutifully scoffed bowl after bowl of Ready Brek as a child and entirely failed to emit a warm orange glow on the way to school.

And frankly, if eating coconut flavoured yogurt is the price I would have to pay for perfect hair and make-up, then dishevelled and frumpy I shall remain.

A-a-a-a-nd they're out!

2010-02-10T18:45:00.003Z

Harumble! The cats are "going" outside. I don't know where, exactly, and don't really care. I no longer have to deal with the litter tray and a slightly crunchy kitchen floor. I am content.

The cats have however learned a few new tricks. In particular, they have discovered how warm it is up on top of our fridge. We have one of those disgustingly indulgent American-style plumbed-into-the-mains-so-it-dispenses-ice-and-water-like-we-don't-have-TAPS-that-do-that fridges (which I love to distraction. It is huge, and I don't have to load our weekly shop into it with a crowbar like I did with our old fridge. When you have a dairy allergic son you have a minimum of two different kinds of milk, spread, cheese, yogurt etc, so a big fridge really helps.) Anyway, the cats have discovered they can climb up there via the washing machine and lurk. Scared the bejasus out of me the other night when I went in to top up my glass of water, didn't bother switching on the light (the water dispenser bit has a light of its own doncha know) and Zyra decided to swipe at my head in the dark. That got the old blood pressure dancing a bit.

I was also greeted the other morning by the two boys who had been down for breakfast while I came to in the shower. They breathlessly announced that Zyra was clearly missing her litter tray and had pooped on the dining table (not sure how they ascertained that it was the work of Zyra rather than Bellus. Some questions are better not asked.) "But we cleaned it up with kitchen roll and Febreze" they assured me.

"Are you sure it was poo?" I asked. "Cats, if they are going to do that, normally pick a secluded corner, not in full view on top of the dining table."

"We're sure. We checked. It smelled like poo."

I was skeptical and checked the kitchen bin when I went down. It was a fragment of steak pie from the boys' dinner the night before. So now I know (1) the boys are not being particularly scrupulous when they wipe the table down after they have eaten, and (2) I serve them steak pie that smells like poo.

Good to know.

More cat stuff and other stuff.

2010-02-06T14:25:00.004Z

It seems like having two new cats around the house seriously interferes with one's blogging time. Partly this is due to the fact that I am again having to deal with The Litter Tray. Our old cat didn't use a litter tray - she was an outdoor girl and used a quiet corner of the garden. The new arrivals still prefer the fun of throwing gravel around my kitchen.

I don't know why, but the cats seem to consider watching me cleaning out their lavatorial facility to be the highest form of entertainment. I have only to start work with the scoop and both kitties appear as if by magic to watch. And to get in the way. And sometimes to climb into the tray for a REALLY GOOD LOOK while I am trying to remove.......stuff. Despite the fact that they produced said stuff themselves, it seems that everything must be thoroughly examined and approved before removal.

And then the clean litter tray, raked to the perfect, pristine precision of a Japanese Zen garden, must be christened. Immediately. Ideally before I have even managed to get the bag of litter back into the garage. The sooner we can persuade them that the great outdoors is a better location for such activities, the better.

Suggestions please

2010-01-28T19:33:00.002Z

This is a shameless plea for help from those of you out there who are either Nova Scotian or familiar with the area. The Loth clan will be making their annual pilgrimage to Canada in July this year. We are spending some time in Liverpool (I'll get you this time, Jess!), then a week on PEI. We finish up with a few days in our favourite B&B in the Annapolis Valley. Between PEI and Port Williams, we have a spare night to spend and no particular views on where to spend it.

So. Do any of you have any suggestions for a place to stay or something to do while we are en route? Any hidden gems to point us towards? Sneak up to Shediac for some lobster? Go and watch some birds in Sackville? Get tidal bored in Truro? What do you reckon? All suggestions gratefully received.

PS I know Ottowa isn't between PEI and Port Williams. Sorry about that.

Cat news - well, what were you expecting?

2010-01-26T20:16:00.006Z

I have very strict instructions from Isabelle to post about the cats. And, as I have said before, I am very obedient and Isabelle is a teacher and therefore very authoritative, so here you go.

Bellus and Zyra have settled in amazingly well. They don't seem to mind being confined to the kitchen/utility room during the day, they eat like little furry pigs (Zyra still watches Bellus intently as she eats and then, just as he is about to finish his, she shoulders him out of the way and cleans his dish for him. Bellus has now got wise to this and he just walks around behind her and cleans her dish. She is evil, calculating and yet not so bright.) and they greet us with great enthusiasm when we come home or down the stairs in the morning.

They like to sleep in their tartan basket in the kitchen, cuddled up together. Like this

and also in other parts of the house, most notably the big old blanket box in our upstairs hall, which is known as the Humpty Box. Because most of the Humpties live on it. (Except the Humpty royal entourage which has moved and taken up residence on a former telephone table on our landing - you have to maintain a certain station in life, you know. I really must tell you about the Humpty genealogy one day.) They have even been known to join us in the living room of an evening.

What is noticeable in both of those photos is that Bellus is being pinned down by Zyra and is wearing his long-suffering sat-upon cat expression. He wears that quite a lot.

I took the catlets to the vet today to have them micro-chipped. The cat rescue shelter has a deal with a local vet whereby you get 50% off the cost of micro-chipping, and since we intend to let the kitties out into the garden soon, we decided to go ahead and get it done. And anyway, chipping totally means our cats are now cyborgs.

Both cats went reasonably happily into the carrier for the short car trip to the vet. During the journey I made the happy discovery that you can apparently hypnotise cats with windscreen wipers. The pair of them were rivetted by the wipers going back and forward - they looked like very intent spectators at a particularly mechanical tennis match. If I could have, I would have taken a video of them. But I assumed that if talking on a mobile phone while driving is an offence, then turning round and filming your cats staring at the windscreen wipers is probably frowned on too.

Next step is to actually introduce The Furry Ones to the back garden. I will report in due course.