Skip to main content

Marvellous Miscellany

Seven things that you may or may not find interesting.  But first, a picture.

Weekend Cottage 2 by Toby White.  Note the numbers above the doors, the chimney (and are those solar panels?) on the roof, and on the right, a tap with hose attached.  All his houses include this feature.

1.  I have six growbags in the back of my car.  This is the cheap and cheerful approach to starting a vegetable garden.  Once the frost has finished, the plan is to fill them with courgettes, spring onions, rocket, green beans and tomatoes.  Out of all those, tomatoes are the only ones I have grown before, but apparently they are all easy to cultivate.

Shiny seed packets!
And yes, I will take the growbags out of my car first.  Unless the weather is so bad that I need an impromptu greenhouse solution, in which case mine's the vehicle with green beans hanging out the window.

2.  Toby at dinner tonight: "I've tried the fishcakes and they're not good.  And I have nothing to dip in my ketchup.  So... I'll just have a bacon sandwich."

So I'm running a restaurant now?

(Since he actually did try the fishcakes twice, we compromised with a tuna sandwich, as long as he ate his peas.)

3. Recently I saw a man walking along the cold, muddy canal bank - barefoot.  Apart from that, he was fully dressed, had a dog, and looked like any other man walking along the cold, muddy canal bank.  Was he doing it for the health benefits?  And are there any?  I think if I tried that I'd be amputating my frostbitten toes at the end of the walk.

4. My latest recipe trial was peanut butter and orange cookies.  I don't think I'll be sharing that one with you.  They're OK, but as I said to Graham, they lacked something.  He responded, "What, flavour?"  Oh, that'd be it.

You can have a picture.  They looked good.

5. Things that Theo likes doing that we don't like him doing, in order of disgustingness:
   - headbutting his reflection in the mirror
   - investigating the kitchen bin
   - peering into the toilet

6. Things that Theo likes doing that we don't like him doing, but are preferable to those other things so we let him do them anyway:
   - rearranging our carefully ordered boxes of CDs
   - emptying all the plastic boxes out of the kitchen cupboard
   - pressing all the buttons on the TV remote

7. I just found out that we will be able to see a 90% solar eclipse on the 20th of March!  Weather permitting, of course (please please please let it be clear.)  Googling "UK solar eclipse 2015" brings up several links to local newspapers, and I was amused to see that the one for my place of birth carried the heading, "Reading, Bracknell and Wokingham are set to be plunged into gloom on Friday, March 20."  Meanwhile, the rest of the country will be enjoying a spectacular astronomical event.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Drought

Two days into Stage One water restrictions, and I looked out of the window to see the guy over the road washing his car. Admittedly, the restrictions don't actually forbid you to wash your car.  They limit you to using a hand-held bucket (does it count if you put it down on the driveway?) or hand-held hose "for quick rinses".  But they are pretty much "if you don't mind" rules at this stage anyway, with holes large enough to lose whole buckets of water through (hand-held or otherwise).  For example, we are now limited to watering our lawn twice a week, but this only applies to sprinkler systems.  You can still use a hose as much as you like, presumably on the assumption that you will get bored of standing there holding it very quickly.  And besides, everything you read about good watering technique says it's better to water thoroughly just once a week.  Our garden would think Christmas had come early if it got watered every three days! So hopefully...

Jesus came to earth... to reflect God to us

Do you remember playing with a magnifying glass on a sunny day?   That curved piece of glass you held in your hand captured the scattered rays, narrowing them down to a fluttering patch of brightness.   And all the light’s power was held in that one small circle, shrinking and shrinking… until finally you were rewarded with a sudden curl of smoke, and a neat charred hole. Imagine, then, that God, seeking to reveal himself on earth, condensed his essential being through some kind of celestial magnifying glass.   That wavering point became smaller and smaller, losing none of its power… until it became the exact size of a human baby, growing in a womb. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, says the verse in Colossians, the perfect reflection of God’s glory.   This is the first and greatest reason that Jesus came: to show us what God is really like.   Yet sometimes, reflected and refracted through 2000 years of history, the image that Jesus shows...

Making a mess

My friend Ellie writes a blog which I now shamelessly crib ideas from, when I am stuck for something new to do with Toby.  Some time ago she wrote about a substance with the poetic moniker of cloud dough .  It sounded simple to make and fun to play with, so I tucked it away in the back of my mind. The recipe is childishly simple: 8 cups of plain flour, 1 cup of vegetable oil, and mix.  It comes out kind of sandy, although softer and more powdery. Now, Ellie has two gorgeous girls.  Her blog entries were full of photos of them adding pretty objects and creating cute little landscapes.  I, on the other hand, have a full-on hands-on get-stuck-in-as-far-as-possible boy.  This is what happens when you let him loose on a scatterable substance. We make it and it all starts well.  Notice I have prepared for mess with a large tarpaulin and lack of shorts. A few minutes in, and the mess is spreading up the T-shirt.  It's still mostly in the t...