Sunday 31 May – Random Witterings From Home #19

Monday
I’ve started occasionally running along a short section of the canal tow-path again. I almost never used to encounter others there, but these days it’s a lot more popular. The cost of going that way is having to stop and step-off when anyone approaches, as it’s not a wide path and is currently bounded by tall grasses*.

It’s particularly attractive along the canal at the moment and the tow path, which is seasonally either a mudfest or horribly rutted, is currently worn into a friendly track (still need to be careful of roots, mind).

So green!

Ignoring my mug in this shot (not my best in-action selfie as I’d accidentally left a 10-second self-timer on!), what’s notable are the worn parallel lines behind me; neither Mick nor I have ever seen such wear before – testament to the increased footfall.

Tuesday
I only took one ‘photo’ on Tuesday: a screenshot of the most bizarre sentence that DuoLingo has given me to date:

As useful as being able to express that my hovercraft is full of eels?

Wednesday
I discovered that our favourite Thai restaurant had opened again, for take-aways. Somehow I failed to take a snap of any part of the resultant feast, but we thoroughly pigged out and enjoyed every mouthful. The ‘eating out’ portion of our monthly budget is looking (unsurprisingly) healthy at the moment, so I think there may be a repeat visit soon.

I thought the Thai was going to be the absolute highlight of the week…

Thursday
…but the highlight came unexpectedly in the middle of Thursday afternoon, when there was a knock at the door and I answered it to see Postie just running away. I quick look around revealed this just to the side of the door:

We weren’t expecting anything, but immediately on picking it up I knew what was in it, and the return address told me the rest:

Thanks go to Conrad for thinking of us, sourcing and sending.

Who would have thought at the turn of the year that receiving a gift of a bag of bread flour through the post would be so grin-inducing?

Friday
Friday’s parcel was expected:

White! I feel like I've slipped back in time by 15 years.

My running shoe collection is now such that I could wear a different pair every day of the week, but some of them are getting a bit long in the tooth (having covered more than double the manufacturers’ recommended mileage).

Completely unrelated to Thursday’s delivery (different type of flour involved), I also made Mick a rather good (even if I do say so myself!) chicken and mushroom pie:

I needed the room being taken up by the chicken carcass in the freezer and having boiled it up for stock was able to salvage plenty enough pickings of meat for a pie.

Saturday

Another mid-run snap

I’m getting a bit worried out the current run of weather. After such a prolonged dry spell, quite how much is it going to rain when it breaks?!

Sunday
That brings us to today, when I’ve not taken a single photo. I did however go for my 31st run of the month, bringing my mileage up to just over 151 – my third consecutive personal-record breaking month. I know I said the same last month, but I *really* don’t intend to run so many times, or so far in June.


^{(*a walker stopped for me the other day and I felt bad in case they thought I expected them to give way; I’d eyed up a place in between us where I could get off the path, but they acted before I reached it)}

Sunday 24 May – Random Witterings from Home #18

On 12 April, in one of my more random witterings, I talked about this lamp:

Mick wanted to remove it, but the end decision was that it had to stay because it was easier than trying to find out (in the absence of ever having found a switch) where the wires ran so as to disconnect it.

That position was changed by fate this week; or rather, by an electrical fault that tripped the breaker for the upstairs lighting circuit. I could, perhaps, have forgiven a single trip, but the fact that it tripped repeatedly told me it was an unignorable fault.

I didn’t much fancy the tedious process of trying to find the fault, but neither could we live without upstairs lights (although easier at this time of year than in winter!). After ruling out the most obvious (and also easiest) cause, further investigations* revealed a few things:

1)      Our ‘upstairs lighting’ breaker on the consumer unit also covers the utility room and the outside lights;

2)      Our bedside lights are not directly connected to the upstairs lighting circuit, but are wired via the utility room spur (particularly bizarre given those lights and the utility room lie at diagonally opposite corners of the house);

3)      The wires for all of the later additions to this breaker are connected via two stuffed-full junction boxes in a confined area of loft space;

4)      The switch for the outside lights was a light (not movement) sensor mounted on the roof;

5)      I’m now pretty sure that a small electrical box behind a radiator is where the armoured cable from the garden lamp meets the wiring from the house, however, we cannot access that box without removing the radiator.

I was rather proud that, having taken a guess as to what each wire was for, based on where it appeared to be headed, my further investigations proved me right in all cases. All of those wires are now numbered and my back-of-a-scrap-envelope sketch has now been written more neatly and lives up in the loft by those junction boxes so as to make any future maintenance easier.

As for the fault, it was the light sensor up on the roof. It is now disconnected and thus it would now be a straightforward job to either remove the offending lamppost or to install a switch so that we can use both of the outside lights, however, given that we’ve managed for eight years without those lights I think we can easily convince ourselves that they’re not needed.

Yep, more cakes. Coconut sponge this time. Far yummier than they look.

 

<sup>(*In my experience it’s best not to trace the wiring in your house as doing so tends to lead to the uncovering of things you’d rather not know about. There was an incident a few houses ago when, in removing plaster** to install a damp-proof course, I cut straight through the wire to the socket into which my SDS drill was plugged (yep, I’d marked the relevant channel in red and hatched it through to denote that I wasn’t to go near that area… then managed to overlook the markings). In putting it right I started by tracing all wires and creating a wiring diagram for the entire house and in so doing uncovered some absolute horrors of bad practice. Then there was a house we bought thinking it needed nothing doing to it and on the first day we were there I discovered that five sockets and three lights in an outbuilding had all been spurred from a single socket in the kitchen. I could go on…

**Mick knew nothing about this activity until he got home from work and found we had no plaster on the bottom 1m of the downstairs walls. He hadn't even known I'd been at home that day. The reason I was at home was a little ironic: two weeks previously a contractor had accidentally cut through the electric supply cable for the entire manufacturing site at which I was working; whilst discussions went on as to who was liable to put it right, the supply was re-routed; on the morning in question a different contractor accidentally cut through the rerouted supply; there wasn’t another supply cable so no further re-routing was possible thus the site got closed whilst an impressive number of industrial generators was brought in to provide temporary power pending restoration of the mains supply.)</sup>

Thursday 21 May – Random Witterings from Home #17

British Loaf Bouldering Championships

My last post included a photo of a not-entirely-successful loaf of bread and Conrad commented that it looked like there could be some good bouldering routes on that loaf. When I examined the photo again, I could see exactly what he meant and responded to the effect that it was a shame that I don’t have any photo manipulation software (nor the knowledge as to how to use it).

Humphrey has the tools and the ability, and this morning sent a link to this photo:

What a good laugh that gave us, as we uttered our assessment of ‘Brilliant!’. Thank you Humphrey!

Spot the Difference

The background Humphrey has used for the Loaf Bouldering was our latest ‘Spot the Difference’, as put together for the Virtual TGO Challenge. There are twelve intentional differences between these two photos (plus at least a couple of minor accidental variations), eleven of which are easy to find:

 

Spot the Difference (Howard & Hilda edition)

When we parkrun abroad, Mick usually wears his official ‘parkrun’ apricot t-shirt. Most people have these personalised with the name of their home parkrun and thus it’s normal for others to look at Mick’s chest to find out where we’re from. However, Mick’s shirt isn’t personalised, because being uncertain as to the most appropriate size, I played it safe and got him a plain one (which could have been returned for an exchange, if needed).

When parkruns got suspended back in March, parkrunners all over the world continued to go out for solo/family runs every Saturday morning, and lots of reports hit social media and podcasts of various ‘new’ parkruns – like “Ben’s back yard parkrun” – some courses requiring hundreds of circuits to achieve the required distance. parkrun HQ responded by lifting the restrictions on what you could have printed on the apricot t-shirts (previously only the name of an official parkrun was allowed).

I tussled with the purchase for weeks, on the basis that I couldn’t justify spending so much on a t-shirt. Then I remembered my birthday, ignored the fact that it’s not this month (nor next, nor the one after…) and announced to Mick that I knew what he was getting me for my birthday. As I didn’t get him a present back in February, he decided to join me in the frivolous t-shirt purchases.

I think our choice of personalised wording describes perfectly where we’re from:

His-and-hers matching! 

More cakes?!

I won’t share yet another cake photo, but this week’s baking was better justified than most as Mick nipped up to Halifax to help his mum out with a few things on Tuesday and, as I couldn’t go with him, I sent her some cakes instead. She’s been completely isolated since the beginning of March, so she was understandably excited to see one of her boys. It was a nice enough day (although not overly warm and a bit breezy) so they got to spend some time sitting (distanced, of course) in the garden whilst he did the necessary admin.

On another baking-related note, if we weren’t social distancing I might have hugged our next door neighbour this week when he came around with flowers flour (a bag of plain) for me. Yay! Woop woop!

If I can just get hold of some more bread flour (I’m about to put a loaf on and it’s going to wipe us out again), then all of my flour desires will be met.

Sunday 17 May - Random Witterings from Home #16

In a parallel world, where our year proceeded as originally planned, we would have been in Scotland at the moment*. Specifically, we would be at the end of our tenth day of sitting in the Kinnaird Room in the Park Hotel, Montrose, manning Challenge Control as 350-ish people walked across Scotland as part of the TGO Challenge. That said, we would have nipped away from Montrose this weekend and zipped up to Elgin to attend the annual RAF CXX Squadron dinner.

Same dinner, same hotel, two years ago

In the real world we are, of course, still at home, at the end of a week that positively flew by. I’ve been out precisely 10 times this week (7 runs; 2 walks; 1 shopping trip) but even with all of the rest of the time being spent at home there just aren’t enough hours in the day! The daily crossword habit has been neglected, for two consecutive days my knitting went untouched and although I keep recording things on TV to watch, they’re mainly piling up.

I’ve not got much to report for all the activity that’s been going on (Mick’s doing some work; I’m doing some reviewing of that work), but here are the bits for which I have illustrations:

Are you fed up of seeing cake photos yet? I probably need to ease up on my cake consumption (in my defence, I don’t know what’s going on with carrots at the moment, but they’re going off far faster than I’ve ever experienced before, so I had no choice but to make more carrot cakes).

This week’s loaf of bread didn’t come out well. Not sure what went wrong, but it still tasted fine:

This is not representative of what our bread machine usually produces! 

My proudest make of the week was a TGO Challenge themed face mask, as prettily modelled by Mick in this trio of photos:

There’s a virtual-TGO Challenge in progress on line; the maps are part of virtual-Challenge Control (Southern Division)

Otherwise there has been more cleaning out of cupboards (an activity that went by the wayside a few weeks back but I’ve started attacking again this week; I do have photos of this activity but am too ashamed of the mess to share them!), and a small amount of gardening. The courgettes in the garden are now all officially dead, but the ones indoors are growing well and hopefully it’s now warm enough for them to thrive when I plant them out next week. Meanwhile the runner beans and the potatoes are all looking good and there’s a reasonable crop (considering the small size of the bush) of gooseberries just begging to become a crumble in due course.

 

^{(*Had we, for some unfathomable reason, decided to stay in Spain and not even come home in April when we were due to, then we would have got all excited a week or so ago when it was announced that Spain was moving into Phase 1 of their lockdown, with businesses, including bars and restaurants (subject to certain restrictions) being allowed to reopen. Then it was announced that not every region was moving into Phase 1. The region we were in at the point we decided to come home (Castellon) is one of those that is being kept in Phase 0. Whilst the State of Alarm has been extended, permanent residents of other EU countries (which for the time being can be read as including the UK) are still permitted to transit across the country in order to return home.)}

Wednesday 13 May - Random Witterings from Home #15

An exciting day today: Mick and I have been for a walk together! The last time we did that (or indeed went out in public anywhere together*) was on 16 March when we walked around the ramparts at Montreuil-sur-Mer.

Since then we have abided by the Government’s request that we only exercise once per day and have opted to do that separately (at the outset because it was easier to pass other people at a safe distance when alone, since then because I’ve been running and Mick, with a poorly achilles, has been walking). However, today was the day when Boris declared that he was happy for us to go out, for the purpose of exercise, as many times as we wanted. Thus, I ran this morning then was joined by Mick this afternoon for a turn through a local patch of forest. I’ve run on the road around the outside edge of the bit of forest in question countless times over the last eight weeks, but have been put off from straying onto its paths due to the knowledge of how overgrown and uneven they are (taken at a run I’d likely fall and possibly injure myself).

I’ve visited just about every pond in the area on various runs over the last two months, but felt this one was off limits due to the nature of the paths surrounding it.

The view I’ve been unaccustomed to seeing: Mick a few paces ahead of me!

Today is also the day on which the reason for my current running streak (standing at 53 days**) came to an end. I should probably, therefore, break the streak…

<sup>(*I suppose you could say we were out in public together on the 17 March, when we drove home from Montrueil-sur-Mer, but as we were in Bertie the whole time it feels like we were ‘at home’.

**minimum of 2.5 miles per day, longest 11.1 miles, average of 4.55 miles per day)</sup>

Sunday 10 May – Random Witterings from Home #14

A few snippets from my week:

Funniest Neighbourhood Sight

Coming back from a run on bin day this week (seldom a good day for running – bins scattered willy-nilly over the pavements and it being almost guaranteed that, at some point, the need to step into the road to go around will coincide with a car coming) I saw that someone had taped a big ‘Thank You’ note to the top of their bin, augmented by three bottles of beer that were clearly a gift for the bin men. What’s funny about that, you may ask? The brand of the beer: they had put out three bottles of Corona Extra.

Hottest Date!

Okay, so there’s only one contender here, but the point is that I got asked out on a coffee date! And I accepted! Thus Mick and I made coffee in the kitchen and carried it, along with a crossword, out to Bertie. I’m sure Bertie must be wondering what he did wrong to suddenly be so out of favour, but hopefully he enjoyed our company. Not quite the same as being away somewhere new, but we had to concede that we’ve had many a park up with a worse view!

Most Exciting Purchase

Woo Hoo! For the first time since we got home, I found self-raising flour in the supermarket and snapped up not just a bag for us but one for a neighbour too. Another neighbour was equally delighted that I was finally able to get her some bleach. Still no sign of plain flour, but the check-out operator told me that they’d briefly had stock of yeast earlier in the week, so it seems that baking supplies are slowly coming back onto the shelves.

Most Successful Baking

They may look remarkably like the carrot cakes I made a couple of weeks ago, but these are coffee and walnut. I’ve only made this flavour once before and on neither occasion did I consult a recipe (for no good reason; in fact I don’t know why I didn’t). My guess as to the appropriate amount of coffee was more accurate this time (too little last time).

Best Ploughing

Not got anything more to say about this one, but it caught my eye on one of my runs earlier in the week. 

Worst News

My gran, who tested positive for coronavirus a week and a half ago, took a turn for the worse at the beginning of this week. Given her age and situation (98 and living in a care home), we had to acknowledge that the statistical odds were very much against her. They may still be so, but more positive news came a couple of days later that she had rallied. We’re willing her on to continue on the road to recovery.

Bonus snap from yesterday morning when it was sunny, warm and calm - a complete contrast to today! 

Sunday 3 May – Random Witterings from Home #13

In my last post I observed that I had only worn ‘normal’ shoes four times in six weeks and that Mick hadn’t been in a moving vehicle in that time. It was a few days later my mind put these facts together to realise that Mick & I have not stepped foot in public together  – not even as far as the pavement outside of the house – in that time either.

This leads on to the curious fact that in this period of movement restrictions, when most multi-person households find themselves spending more time that usual with their cohabiters, we are in the opposite situation, in that we are exercising separately and I am shopping (albeit infrequently) alone, not to mention the time one of us is spending in the garden whilst the other is engaged in some other fun(?!) activity indoors.

Glancing a moment into a parallel universe: what if we had chosen to stay in Spain and were still there? Only one of us would have been permitted to go to the supermarket (the nearest shop, note, not necessarily the one we wanted to go to) and we would not, until this weekend, have been permitted to go outside at all for exercise (nor, if we had a dog, would we have been permitted to walk it more than 50m from Bertie). The Spanish movement restrictions have eased over the last week, with children (wholly confined to home thus far) now having a little freedom to go outside and, from this weekend, with adults permitted to exercise, provided that they stay within their municipality and only go out within the allocated timeslots for their age group (Mick and I fall within the same age group; others couples with an age disparity may not be so lucky).

I hate to think how much fitness (not to mention sanity) I would now have lost had we remained in Spain, but if I step back to reality from that parallel universe, I ran every day in April, covering a minimum of 2.5 miles each day, and finished the month having beaten March’s record mileage, coming in at just over 140 miles. There are some people that cover that sort of distance in a week or ten days (crazy people!), but in my world that’s a big number. I’m in two minds whether to break the running streak (currently standing at 43 days) now, to save putting undue pressure on myself later when there’s even more to lose.

I’ll finish with a selection of this week's snaps, involving a bit of sunshine and quite a bit of food:

I’m not sure this looks particularly good in photo form, but it was very tasty! The first broth made with barley since running out just after we arrived home and not being able to replenish our supply until this week:
 

I used up some of the precious flour supply so that the broth could be accompanied by cheesy herb scones. (We’ve even less plain flour remaining than self-raising, but as I can make a small fruit crumble with less than 2oz (I use 50/50 oats and flour) that’s exactly how I frittered some away this week. Perhaps I should be thankful about the lack of flour – a limited ability to bake may well be a good thing when taking the lack of exercise into account!)

I could roll out the dough and cut them into neat rounds, but it saves time, effort and cleaning up just to slap the dough on a baking sheet, flatten it out with the hands then roughly chop it up. They still taste the same.

More nettles have been harvested from the garden. Meanwhile I now have six healthy runner bean plants out in the garden and another four seeds germinating indoors. Unfortunately the courgette plants in the garden are looking rather sickly, but there’s another batch just springing to life on the windows sill that can replace them if they fail (and supplement them if they don’t).

 
Whilst most of the week was grey, with too much wetness for my liking, we had a gorgeous start to the day yesterday, causing me to change my intended running route 1-mile in, turning right to enjoy the countryside rather than left to pound the pavements.