Igenlode Wordsmith

Sowed my two precious pink Swan River daisy seeds, being careful not to drop them when I opened the packet! Also a pot of dill. I was tempted to sow more coreopsis since the pot seems to have been sitting there forever without doing anything, but in fact it has only been a week...

( Lettuce, rudbeckia, sage, honesty )

The pot-marigolds (the over-wintered ones) are now in full flower in the sunshine and looking almost glowingly golden :-)


And the mystery Linaria (so-called by me) is still flourishing with blooms, as it has been doing I think ever since last July(!)
Although these ones are pink, as opposed to the pure white ones we had in June.

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The bathroom clock has kept getting stuck at around 11am (failing to get its minute hand past its hour hand against the force of gravity, I think) ever since I put the clocks on, so I gave it a new battery -- the problem is that it was continuing to *tick*, but the hands just quivered instead of actually advancing. It sounded as if it was working but wasn't!
(I suspect there is still quite a bit of juice left in that battery, though -- certainly enough for torchlight...)

And... again my alarm failed to go off in time for me to get to market, after successfully ringing every time for a couple of weeks (but alas, the market was closed last week). I'd started to think that whatever-it-was had stopped happening :-(

My heating has been coming on all this week, and I was finally stung into completing the Great Changeover, having as usual been making do for several weeks with just the thermal underwear, by the sight of a hard white frost all over the roofs! So I am currently wearing my really warm dressing-gown instead of the summer one plus a rug round my shoulders...
I discovered from the manual that the flashing bar which had appeared on the left-hand side of my fancy wireless thermostat system was a low battery indicator( Read more... )


I improvised a 'chocolate beetroot upside-down pear pudding' by combining the recipes for wartime beetroot pudding and 1960s upside-down pineapple pudding (and adding an ounce of cocoa). The beetroot pudding is made with half an ounce of fat, an ounce of sugar, and '6oz wheatmeal flour' to 4oz grated beetroot, and tastes precisely as chewy and uninteresting as one might imagine :-p But I thought adding the chopped pear and 3 tablespoons of golden syrup (which took *forever* to extract from a squeezy bottle) might liven it up.

( Read more... )

My alarm clock has failed to go off for the last three days in a row, with assortedly unfortunate consequences. ( Read more... )
Edit: my alarm clock, re-set as a test for 10am, has just gone off again, precisely as happened yesterday when it was already too late... so I simply have no idea what is happening, other than that I evidently cannot rely on it :-(



I made a 'Bread meringue' from the "120 Ways of using Bread" leaflet; this is basically bread and milk simmered together and then sweetened and enriched with egg yolk and dried fruit, and I suspect it should have been cooked for longer (I note that the Chocolate Bread Pudding took a long time to set). Like many of these 1930s recipes it uses an *unsweetened* meringue topping, i.e. just beaten egg white piled on top of the filling. I was a bit sceptical about this, as I had always assumed that meringue was simply spun-sugar held in shape while it dried out, but in fact it did hold up without any sugar 'skeleton' to give it body. It does not, however, taste of anything to speak of!

I also used the Victory Sponge recipe from "We'll Eat Again" to improvise a raspberry pudding, using windfall apples and some very squishy supermarket raspberries. ( Read more... )

I acquired three and a half pounds of windfall plums, picked over 2lb of blackberries (and gathered some windfall apples to go with them) and paid £3 for a box with 8lb or so of overripe cherries -- so I have been drowning in fruit! Preserves: bramble jelly (2 1/2 jars), plum chutney (2 half jars), roasted savoury cherries and cherry-stone cordial. I have also made plum soufflé, German plum streusel cake, boiled cherry vareniki, and other desserts, and still have a fridge full of the least squishy plums and cherries, not to mention a summer pudding waiting to be turned out...

Contrary to my belief, the upper trusses of the Roma tomatoes did in fact set some fruit; the first and largest truss is now pretty much ripe and will need to be picked and cooked with.

( Flat tyre and mileage )

( Clock started again )

( Fic progress )

( fanfiction.net spam ) :-(

My bathroom clock kept running slow so that I had to reset it before every time I wanted a bath, and eventually stopped working altogether after I kept fiddling with it -- the hands came loose and just hung there even though it was still ticking. ( Read more... )
However, it was so offputting being in the bathroom and not being able to look up at the clock on the wall that I went out this afternoon and bought a cheap and nasty battery clock from a 'bargain homewares' shop to replace it.



This is not as large or clear to read as the previous clock, since it has a small face and tiny hands, and it arrived with a grey mark on the 'glass' over the figure 3 which doesn't come off -- and of course it is incredibly light and flimsily made. It does, however, have an actual square recess in the back to hold the motor unit securely in situ when you are twisting the little knob to set the hands, and it boasts a second hand as well as a reassuringly loud tick, often seen as a sign of low-quality manufacture but invaluable as a means of discerning whether or not a battery-powered clock is actually working or not :-p
( Read more... )

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...

Well, I managed a twenty-minute bath without stopping the clock...

My cycle computer (with its brand-new battery) stopped working again after the bike fell over on a Sheffield stand; I initially assumed that the magnet and/or transmitter had become displaced, but no amount of adjustment made any difference. Eventually it occurred to me that the battery might have been dislodged internally, and when I managed to prise off the cover -- always a fiddle -- this fortunately proved to be the case: one end had been jolted sideways enough to break contact but not enough to open the cover.

And after several days of wondering whether the flashing red light on my replacement central heating controller represented 'Alarm' or 'Receive' (according to the labelling it doubles as both!) I finaly got worried enough to look it up on the Internet, having failed to find the original manual in my Box of Manuals, and discovered that it meant 'low battery'. I also immediately remembered exactly where said manual was, and was then able to consult it as to how to change the batteries... yes, you really do need to use a coin to open the battery cover, as directed. A butter-knife will not work! :-p

First hot-water-bottle last night....

When I was putting back all my clocks this weekend, I discovered that my bathroom clock (one of the few acquisitions that continues to give me pleasure whenever I look at it, because it is just so *convenient* to be able to know the time whenever I am in the bath) had a rotten battery in it. A hazard of a damp atmosphere, apparently, although the clock was still working.( Read more... )

Edit: I was a little over-optimistic. I had a quick (and steamy, due to the cold weather) shower immediately after posting the above this morning, and the clock promptly stopped again and (judging by the time when I checked it again) didn't restart for six hours...