Minor Achievements

I am still living with stress at work as nothing has been resolved. I know some thrive on stressful environments. I find them terribly corrosive. My energy levels have plummeted, I am unfocused; lasse is the French word which comes to my mind.

So today, recognising that I was slipping again, I made myself a little list of achievable targets for the afternoon. Nothing grand. A trip to the bank to pay the taxman, a cheque for Mother’s Personal Allowance so she can get her hair and feet done, a few emails, a call to the vet surgery to make an appointment for NotCat’s vaccinations, bake a cake.

Spring Recipe

It is a first draft, but knowing me, it may go no further. For Poetry Day:

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot

This year I have been eating mostly chillies. I’m not sure how it happened, but I ended up with quite a few in the bottom of the fridge and so started adding them to things. My favourite is omelette with mushrooms, spring onions and chillies. Delicious.

However, I seem to be stockpiling cauliflower as well, so tonight’s meal was a version of something some Spanish colleagues used to make years ago when I was in France.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Ready

A River of Stones, Day Twelve, The Breadknife

I am in the kitchen making soup. To the left is the bread board with the breadknife lying on the counter beside it. It is an old knife, but new to me, having been my mother’s, now one of the things of which she has no need in the nursing home. I am looking at it and remembering it in her hands, slicing the nut loaf whose recipe we found in a copy of Family Circle one year between Christmas and New Year. We gathered up the remaining nuts to make it. It was delicious. For years my mother baked it weekly, changing and improving the recipe, never writing it down, and we carried it in sandwich boxes to school and work. I can see the breadknife on the dining room table on Sunday evenings; my mother rugged in grey-blue cords and a ribbed rust coloured jumper after an afternoon of gardening.
When we are all gone, as lost and forgotten as that recipe, the knife will be in someone else’s hands, slicing bread and lying unremarked in a kitchen.

The Breadknife

Official: Mosaics Make You Hungry

Three Quarters Done

I may not be keeping up with NaNoWriMo, but this mosaic is on track to be finished by Christmas. It’s intended as a gift, and not in my usual style. I am far happier when working on something like the Autumn piece http://wp.me/pMKim-Ng that I hope has safely reached Maria in Barcelona. For me, that’s my art, whereas this is craft and I am less absorbed in it, more detached.

So maybe that is why I was susceptible to the food conversation earlier than usual tonight.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Possibility

This morning’s breakfast provided this picture.

Egg for Breakfast

I may come back and check my other pix later, but must leave for work now.

Two Meals

I looked out of the window and saw these pigeons tucking into some stale bread with no little energy.

Pigeon Feast

Then, to the right, I saw the staff from the local deli having lunch al fresco with an improvised barbecue.

Not Like the Movies

Taking a short break from sewing Mother’s new name labels onto her bed linen, towels and the garment that has not been named. The labels are sweet, with a little cat logo on the left, and the writing in a sky blue on a white background.
In the film version I’d be doing this with a smile on my face, by soft light, and the camera would cut away to show Mother tucked up warm and happy in her new home. I’d be played by Tilda Swinton, Mother would be played by Judi Dench.
So much for film versions.

Pictured This Evening in the Garden

Racked