the acid test

I've been on an adventure over the last few days as I said last time I posted. In part, it was meant to help me to get some closure and some solace but in part it was also meant to test my ability to survive on a trip after a year of near-isolation.



So, what did I learn?



Well, the first thing I've learned is that the trip was utterly exhausting. I am amazed regularly at how I managed all of my work commitments on top of that commute. I have come home so tired I feel as though I've been through a mangle. That's with no WORK involved at all. There was a time when I'd have done most of what I did this week, while putting in a twelve-hour working day too.



The second thing is that I am still not completely well in as much as my obsessive, compulsive side showed up when I was travelling to meet people and getting my timings so badly wrong that I spent a total of eight hours sitting around in stations and coffee bars simply waiting for my appointment with either friends or trains - equivalent to a full working day over the three-days of my journey.



Finally, I've worked out that there is so much more to life than dashing around. Even though I've had some "enforced" waits for people, it's actually quite nice to spend an hour drinking a coffee and reading a book without needing to dash off anywhere. I just wish I'd spent that hour in the comfort of my London home-from-home rather than in a relatively uncomfortable coffee bar. So, I reckon that if I can learn to curb my obsession about timings, I can make room in my world for some great me-time......now that's a good lesson learned.



I'm saving my "adventure" story for another day so please bear with me on this one.

Lindiana Jones and the Star of the East

Dear All

Lindiana Jones is my new "personality" - from now on, I'm going to be an intrepid explorer, without fear but with guile, cunning and sheer strength of will.

I'm off to slay a few demons, defeat some enemies (both personal and in a broader context) and, most importantly of all, to go and find myself some buried treasure. On my journey, I expect to find a few lost friends, make some new friends and experience great excitement and thrill, not to mention warmth and solace.

So, I'm climbing aboard a great iron monster and disappearing for a few days, hopefully to emerge after my adventures with a new sense of purpose and some deepfelt satisfaction.

I have on my trusty boots, my big whip is in my pocket and I'm ready for the off.........

Is the world ready for Lindiana? Who knows! We'll see over the next few days.

loving Harry Bluenapp

#Come on come on Hurry up Harry come on We're going down the pub# (Sham 69)

la la la

We went to the pub last night to watch the Spurs play Liverpool because we're too tight to sign up to Setanta.....in fact, we think it's a complete rip-off but that one's a long story and I'm not really telling that tale today.

So, we walk to the pub in near-darkness - a 40 minute walk across the moor, get there just as the match begins and within three minutes we're a goal adrift. Hmmmmmm. The pub's new manager comes out and asks who the two Spurs fans are that had phoned up earlier and to his credit, he didn't crow.

We watch a game where in truth Liverpool could have scored several goals before, in the 70th minute, they did....but in their own net! So 1-1 and game on as they say. In the dying moments of the game, we managed to pop in another to go on to win the game, get off the bottom of the league for the first time this season and find ourselves with a song in our hearts "Harry Redknapp's Blue and White army".

Pub grub, some semi-drunken conversations with some of the regulars and a bit of people watching ensued before we got in a cab and got home with a smile on our faces.

So, Harry Bluenapp, Harry Houdini, Harry Hotspur - whatever you want to call him, he's our hero.

times they are a changing

This week has seen some fairly monumental changes in my world.

Let's face it, when you're a dyed in the wool Spurs fan, things have been a bit gloomy of late so Harry's unexpected and sudden appearance at "the Lane" last Sunday was just what the Doctor ordered. I did comment this time last year that I thought that "Juande we might live to regret firing Martin Jol". Ah well, I'm a bit chuffed to welcome Redknapp senior to WHL, especially if he can keep those points coming in. First eight games, we managed a whole 2 points, the last two games, we've managed to treble our tally!

COYS....let's hope that we can keep it up this Saturday at home to Liverpool. (Especially as we're going out to the pub to watch the game because we're too tight to cough up for Setanta and the landlord is a Liverpool fan.)

Now, as I type, I can also report that I am, for the first time in my adult life, unemployed. I officially left my company today so as of 4pm this afternoon, I have no source of income and I have no idea what tomorrow will bring. I am pretty terrified but I am also hopeful that a clean break is just what I need.

So, I will wake up tomorrow in a new phase of my life......I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Digging a big hole

I apologise for my lack of communication over the last three weeks or so. I have an excuse in as much as after a week of anguish over Archie's well-being, DM and I both went down with the lurgy and it took us a couple of weeks to get over it. Follow that with turmoil/difficulties/uncertainty in my work life and my thoughts have been elsewhere in recent times.

Archie is, for those who are interested, getting on better than he has for some time, albeit with a wobbly head and a distinct lack of balance, which means he now matches his "Mum" (me) and can't stand on his own four feet!

He has been taking cod liver oil and glucosamine for his arthritic joints for a good couple of years now and even so has been increasingly infirm. He's been unable to get over styles or to get into the back of our car for some time and we've had to use ingenuity and cunning to transport him around as he hates being picked up and lets us know that very quickly. Anyway, he's now got himself onto one of the super-dooper new NSAID drugs, especially for arthritis and he's a transformed baby.

He's trotting around the place with a smile on his face, jumping up and down steps with gay abandon and otherwise is perkier than we've seen him in ages. I was digging a big hole in the garden as part of an ongoing project to try to eliminate the need for me to go out murdering slugs by envouraging toads and frogs to our domain. This means putting in a big pond, with plenty of frog-friendly stuff to give them a good reason to come here.

I've got an old bath that was taken out from our bathroom soon after we moved in and have dug a hole deep enough that the bath can be submerged as part of a bigger pond (so you can't see the rectangular shape). This project has taken a whole load of time because our ground is not easy to dig, comprising of a thin-ish layer of top soil then deep shale, so I've taken my time, doing an hour here and another hour there.

While the top soil was on a tarpaulin next to my big hole and the bathtub was behind it yesterday, Arch's attention was on Mo, who was on top of the soil mound, digging around for worms and other bits and bobs. She disappeared down the other side of the mound and Archie took a flying leap to get closer to her. He landed, very bemused, inside the bathtub, then went straight into pogo mode and leapt out the other side. He landed in a sprawl on the lawn, with a look of utter confusion on his face.

So, by digging my big hole, I discovered that my beautiful baby has regained some of his elasticity and bounce. Boy did that make all of the hard work seem like a really GOOD thing!

Coming of age - the adventures of Dusty

OK - I know that some folks will see this pic and think "how has she taken a photo this good of planet Zogg". Others will look at it, and think "huh?". Others will realise what it is and either think it's a miracle of nature or that it's truly gross.

I fall into category three - to me, it's a miracle of nature and one I've been waiting and hoping for over the last three months very anxiously.

It's the first egg from our three new babies - Dusty has been growing a fantastic bright red comb over the last couple of weeks. This is a sure-fire indication that she's about to start laying. On Wednesday, I poked my head into the nest box to find this little beauty - a pale alabaster pink egg, quite small but absolutely perfectly shaped. The egg was smeared with blood as is always the case on the first occasion a hen lays an egg. My little girl is now an elegant and beautiful young woman - she has come of age, biologically speaking.

She's a Blue Andalusian (a rare breed), small, slim, has a terrific long tail and a massive comb compared to our other hens. To be fair, it's a breed thing and she's just got what all Blue Andalusians have, it's simply that we only have one. Her feathers are amazing - dark on her head, then getting lighter along her body, though each individual feather is edged with black, giving her an appearance of being almost scaly. She's named after one of my heroes - Dusty Springfield, because when we picked the three new hens up from the farm where they were born and raised, they sang to us in low voices so they're all named after singers.

To celebrate her journey into womanhood, she decided to go on a "rites of passage" rebellious romp on Thursday. I could hear a commotion that was obviously chicken, coming from up the hill from our home. I thought nothing of it because several of our neighbours also keep chooks. Then I looked up and noticed a lovely Blue Andalusian sitting on top of the six-foot high fence between our next-door neighbour's house and their next-door neighbours on the other side of them. Ooops. There is only one Blue Anderlusian in our village and that's Dusty.

I called for reinforcements (David), got a couple of long sticks and some corn and we set off next door to effect a recapture. She, of course, like every rebellious young woman, was not interested in recapture so she flew over my head, landing in the garden. There followed ten minutes of charging around with us after her while old nimble feet neatly evaded our every lunge. Finally, she flew up onto the shed next to our own boundary and all we needed to do then was to give her a gentle prod in the bottom to get her to fly down into her own territory.

By the time we'd got back round to our own garden, she was in the hen house clucking indignantly and looking a bit "bothered" about her adventure. Let's hope that she has exhausted her wanderlust!

By the way - this is the first time I have taken a new photo for my blog in the six months or so since I left pbase.

For anyone wondering about Archie, his progress is slow but he's certainly showing improvements.

Emotional Weather Forecast

For the last year, there has been a constant fog stretching in every direction from my world, as far as the eye can see and as far as the imagination can contemplate. This fog is now beginning to lift and there are occasional glimpses of blue sky appearing.

From tomorrow onwards, the occasional flashes of blue will become more frequent and the fog will lift over the course of the next few months. This is odd given that we're probably about to go into a period of prolonged fog/cloud/rain in our real world but "it may be winter outside, but in my heart it's spring".

That's the end of today's forecast, I'm going out to look for blue sky!