May …ing

I am not wearing socks. Noteworthy because it means we have a period of summer. Which in itself is noteworthy. This baring of feet required a bit of foot maintenance because sandals don’t look nice on gnarly feet. Unfortunately my monthly pocket money allocation for beauty stretches to one treatment and I used that for my hands, so a home pedicure it was. But you are here for my usual end of month post, I am sure of it, not the minutiae of reviving neglected winter feet. I have no further soap opera episodes to report either. In fact on the second last day of May, Iris came volunteering with me. I declare this a miracle.

:: Enjoying (at long last) a few days of warm weather at the end of the month. The rest of May was terrible. There was one night last week when temperatures were down at around 2 degrees. 

:: Cooking the usual simple (boring?) meals, but always from scratch, which makes me happy. I have been upping my tofu game whenever Richard and/or James are not around. Iris and I love this source of protein.

:: Eating the above and lots of berries and asparagus. The asparagus season is almost over but the berries will last all summer and indeed get better. At the moment, a local corner shop sells the sweetest possible strawberries, at a price of a small piece of gold jewellery, but a really tasty strawberry is worth its price in gold. We eat them for pudding, one by one, hulled carefully and sometimes with a swirl of squirty cream. 

:: Sewing daily, sometimes just for ten minutes but I am fine with that because 10 minutes a day add up quickly to something finished. I am working on a quilt that was brewing in the back of my head for years. It consists of circles made of quarter circles. The little quarter circle blocks you can see on the photo are just under 9 cm, which means tight curves. This translates into fiddly but this is good to focus my mind. I also started sewing up a blouse I cut out earlier in the month. Having projects ready to sew is useful and time spent tracing patterns and cutting fabric is well worth the effort. 

:: Staying healthy. I am walking a lot, and running a bit, to stay fit. For strength and balance I do a variety of random bits and bobs. Planks and somewhat pathetic push-ups (with trembling arms), and of course ballet. Sometimes I do squats while cleaning my teeth. When out volunteering, I make sure to use tools with both my dominant and weaker arm/hand. Spending a two hours sawing up wood is a good workout and I am looking forward to some scything soon. I looked into gym memberships but building exercise into daily activities is more time effective and for me, more meaningful. 

:: Listening to what my friend Karen calls magazine radio. Talking radio essentially with different features. A bit of culture, a bit of sport, a bit of politics etc. I am taking a break from my favourite kind of podcast, the science variety. I don’t have the mental space to focus on these. 

:: Also listening to audiobooks. I recently finished “This bright life” by Karen Campbell (set in Glasgow, always a bonus) and “Upward bound” by Woody Brown. The former kept me company on my drive to Peebles earlier this months, to give a talk at a small conference at Peebles Hydro. I’d like to go back for a weekend, to enjoy the spa and the beautiful area. The latter I enjoyed less because it had too many voices and for me felt like a collection of lonely connected short stories. I abandoned “Last one out” by Jane Harper with less than an hour to go because I didn’t care enough about the characters to finish. 

:: Discovering that my AirPods suddenly sense when I am asleep after a hard reset. It is pure magic. Now I don’t have t rewind radio programmes or books when I wake up in the night and can’t get back to sleep. I thought I was hallucinating but there is indeed a toggle on the AirPods settings that activates this feature. I only explored the settings because on two occasions, my programme stopped when I was not quite asleep and I thought my Airpods were faulty. Magic and a bit creepy, too. 

:: Watching Hide & Seek on the Netflix. This is a gritty Danish crime drama, not for the faint hearted. I am still watching Brokenhill Mysteries, silly as it is. Cosy crime at its best.

:: Making a batch of soap from olive and coconut oil, water and sodium hydroxide. I used up my lily of the valley scent, my all time favourite soap scent. I love a bit of kitchen chemistry and it really just takes about 10 minutes to make: heat the oils, dissolve the sodium hydroxide in water, wait for both to cool do about 40 degrees, mix together with a stick blender. The trick is to watch the temperature. As soon as this starts to increase, the chemical reaction is under way and all will convert to soap. I have a silicon cake mould, which works perfectly for soap making. 

:: Loving the bird early morning chorus, most of all the blackbird song. I am learning to recognise bird songs, slowly. I can recognise robins, great tits, gold finches and wrens.

:: Looking forward to my holidays (not until 3 July, but never too soon to be excited).

Thanks for visiting 😊