All the Way Home

So I devoured David Giffels' book All the Way Home, and afterwards and in the gaps when meals and the most unavoidable of family responsibilities dictated I stop reading, I talked to those I love most about painting the dining room, changing the colour of almost every surface in the kitchen, turning the garage into a sleepout and making a roofless plastic house with the old poultry palace roofing plastic. Those are the bits I remember, there may have been more.

Somewhere along the day, a little reality seeped in. I did make a start on the dining room, and collected a box full of newspapers and filled a large black rubbish sack just by clearing one cubic metre. Really. I got half of the room done (filled a second black sack) and then the shortest people wanted to eat and I didn't quite get to the other side. Maybe tomorrow. If you didn't believe about my/our bad housekeeping before, you might now. On the aesthetic side (though collecting large volumes of half started craft and weekend newspapers does have an aesthetic consequence too), I rubbed the white marks off the wall and now the wallpaper looks quite pristine beside the fridge. I thought it was chalk but the children, artists you understand, explained that it was the Christmas snow spray. They would know.

Then Favourite Handyman remarked that we should buy the last lot of batts and finish the ceiling. Oh yes. That. I have to admit, coming gently down to earth, that that is a more pressing matter than choosing paint for the dining room (thinking of lime green - first we were joking and now we are not). If I spend money on that, it would start to save us heating money straight away. A very nice man gave me a quote for getting it done with the government energy subsidy earlier in the year and I must find that. I know FH could do it himself like he did the rest, but the very nice quoting man gave me some tips on how it could be done better and there are such a lot of other projects which Favourite Handyman would surely love to do more. We can't afford the floor and the ceiling straight away, but I'd like to see the ceiling finished. We have been buying and installing batts (only one of us installs actually) since Brighid was born...

Tonight we had leek and potato soup. The leeks came from the garden, as did the thyme, and I did make the chicken stock myself. It was very nice, three of us thought. For pudding, we had pieces of chocolate cake, with the exception of a fourth person who gagged on the soup and had no manners at all. I made this cake again, only without the expensive choc chips. I was going to make rhubarb cake, but I had to walk past the zucchini to get to the rhubarb and there were five more zucchini needing to be used. So zucchini chocolate cake it was.

Yesterday I weeded some more, leaving, of course, still more to be done, and I killed a lot of caterpillars. Today I killed more caterpillars, but I was too busy creating actual usable space in the dining room to weed more garden before it began to rain.

That's it. Tomorrow I believe I need to earn some money, about which I do not blog. But there are some things to look forward to. We are going to have a working bee at the local high school to finish the dressups for Christchurch kindies project. It's only one month until May Day and we have an evening in Blackball to look forward to for that. Brighid and I went to a meeting for the Blackball Museum of Working Class History Trust last week and wonderful things are happening and I am not much use to them at all. I've kept clear of the kindy and school fundraising committees to date this year and then yesterday I saw in the newspaper that Fionn's rugby league club has an AGM this week and "needs new members". I really don't think I'm much good at being on committees, but somebody has to do it (them).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

McCalls 7288 & altered Style Arc Barb pants

Livingstone daisies

Heartburn & Paris Etc