Twice burnt...

Apparently I've managed to burn my leg on my hot-water-bottle again. At least there is no blister this time, just a painful red patch, but I suppose I shall have to abstain from bathing for some time, since that turned out to be the fatal mistake previously :(

I can only conclude that it happens because I clench myself so tightly around the bottle in bed!

When I tried to change the batteries on my wall-mounted light I discovered that those had gone rotten as well (explaining why the light had stopped working!), and in fact there was liquid and not just crystals in the bottom of the battery box. Possibly not actual battery acid, because it didn't burn me when I handled the batteries, but I really cannot see why I would be getting condensation on the corridor wall. Because it's next to an unheated room? But I've never noticed the wall itself being damp...

Fatalistically I applied the same lemon juice treatment to the battery light as I did to the clock, and didn't even attempt to clean off the residue afterwards, and oddly enough it didn't seem to cause any problems at all. I must say the (LED) light is incredibly bright with new batteries in it -- it wasn't much more than a nightlight glow before, but then it did get left on all night on a couple of occasions by mistake...

Narcissus

For the record, the dark-leaf chilli is *not* Explosive Ember but Zimbabwe Black. (I asked the owner of the original plant, and she remembered what variety she had planted two seasons ago!)

Apparently they are rated as much milder on the Scoville scale than the Demon Red (circa 20-30,000 ("fairly mild") as versus 50,000 ("moderate to hot")), which explains why biting an unripe purple chilli was really not hot at all...

I have planted the two surviving dwindled narcissus bulbs out again (one of the three that I lifted this summer turned out to have been eaten out from the inside and was quite hollow). I found five of them in total, the other two being rotted, and despite emptying out more pots have no idea what happened to the remainder of the original seven, or which was the "one pot with visible bulb foliage in it" back in July :(
( Red Shoes fic )