30th September, 2008 (6:27 pm)
The Day With the Sadness (10)
I’ve been a bit of a funk lately. Let’s call it bad gunky: it’s not being emo exactly because I’m 32 and, obviously, far too mature to permit myself to wallow around in black clothes and thick eyeliner, tearfully relating to every wallow-y song in my iTunes library. And I’ve had a good couple of weekends - fun nights out with friends, lots of dancing and alcohol, and a wonderful evening with our friends from France who stayed with us last Saturday. But being married is just not remotely fun right now, work is simultaneously getting me down and getting on my tits, and - as my Twitter will attest - I’m having to choke back the urge to just jump into the car and drive until I run out of fuel and never look back. I’m sick of being ill, sick of my girlie bits eating me from the inside out and sick of . . . well, other stuff that involves family that I can’t write about here. I’m starting to get stupid and obsessive about food again - my number one anxiety cue - and that’s never good. It feels like I’m itching all over and just can’t scratch hard enough to make it go away.
We all know that this is not a happy place to be. And we all know that I’m a flake, and I’m stupid, and this will all blow over, possibly following a cake-like treat or a perfect bar of Galaxy. But for now I’m sad, and I don’t like being sad. Although I am by nature stroppy and confrontational and kind of terrifying, I’m not naturally sad. So I don’t like feeling like this at all.
Comments: (10)
25th September, 2008 (8:30 am)
The Day With the Cheesecake. Again. (13)
As it’s the national MacMillian Coffee Morning tomorrow and - as well you know - I can bake but cannot cook, I’ve decided to whip up my Five Steps to the Perfect Strawberry Cheesecake (I know - the recipe isn’t there anymore. How annoying is that?). And because Teesee, Sharon and I have been swapping recipes like grannies over a garden fence, I figured I’d contribute this one. Enjoy!
You Will Need:
12 Digestive biscuits
3 tablespoons of butter
500g of mascarpone cheese
1 cup of strawberries (it’s not an exact science and depends upon how much you like s’berries)
50g icing sugar
You Will Need To:
1. Crush digestives with mallet/rolling pin until only fine crumbs remain;
2. Melt butter in pan. Stir in biscuit crumbs until it is all coated with butter;
3. Leave to cool. Then squash base into the bottom of a greased bake tin with loose bottom. Press down tightly with back of metal spoon;
4. Squash the strawberries into mush (this is a good recipe for anger management). Add icing sugar, and then the mascarpone cheese. Mix well. Add to top of biscuit base, spreading evenly;
5. Leave in fridge for an hour or two . . . or for however long you can bear to wait.
Let me know if you make it with a picture or two and a commentary on what you think! Hmmm. I want cheesecake for breakfast now . . .
Comments: (13)
16th September, 2008 (8:06 pm)
The Day I Won’t Ever Be a Grown-up Again (14)
That is the very last time I EVER try and be a grown-up.
I’m not bad with money. I used to be - I used to fucking shocking. But we learned the hard way, dragging our sorry asses out of debt over several years thanks to a (then) booming house market, hard work from us both and a job change for me, and I will never go back to that dark, horrible, scary place again. We still have debt but it’s less than the UK average, and we manage it well. Our credit score is impeccable. I haven’t paid credit card interest for a couple of years now (having wised up to always moving the balance when the honeymoon period expires) and at the end of each year our overall debt is always lower than the year that preceded it. It’s slow but it’s right and I know we’ll get there in the end.
But like everyone else, we’ve been having to adjust to the rising costs of, well, everything in the latter half of this year. The last couple of months have seen two trips abroad, a little one’s birthday and accompanying party which all means that we stretched ourselves a little too thin. Yes, it’s our fault because no, we didn’t have to be so extravagant for S’s birthday, and we certainly didn’t need two vacations. But up until six months ago our disposal income could’ve coped with this. Today it cannot.
To compensate, I arranged for us to extend our overdraft by an extra £250 (about $450) to tide us over. And because I’m a responsible adult and trying to decrease our debt, not increase it, I put an expiry on it to ensure that come payday, the extra debt would be gone and we’d be none the worse off for having it.
THIS IS THE STUPIDEST IDEA I HAVE EVER HAD.
As the rest of this is kinda rambling and ranty and really without purpose, I’ve put the rest under the cut. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Comments: (14)
14th September, 2008 (4:06 pm)
The Day With PMS Buddy (10)
So . . . PMS Buddy. Wow. If that isn’t the most fucked up idea for a website, I don’t know what is. A brother tracking his sister’s periods? His mother’s? Am I the only one slightly repulsed by that? Ewww.
And while I’m writing about things that piss me off (whoops - there goes my own take on the above. So much for impartial reporting) - PLEASE, internet, learn how to spell the word ‘definitely’. It is NOT definately, it never HAS been definately, and never WILL BE. Kthxbai.
Comments: (10)
13th September, 2008 (11:18 am)
The Day The Picture Says It All (16)
I was doing well with the whole blogging thing there, wasn’t I? Almost had a pattern down. Had a whole heap of bloggy-rich material to talk to you about, questions to ask, opinions to pose. But really, none of those things matter. Not when I look at this picture and see how close we were to losing everything.
Go on, click on it - see the bigger version. Yes, that’s my back garden. Yes, that’s my lawn waving like seaweed beneath two foot of dirty water. Yes, that’s my bin languishing on my patio. Even though you can see grass at the end of the lawn, don’t let that fool you; our lawn slopes down towards the house, and the little fence you see behind the wall - see it? our one attempt at trying to prettify our garden - is actually not that little. It’s just that the flood water makes it look little. The photo was taken by my husband as he balanced on the threshold of our back door, moments before he shut it and frantically piled towels, sheets and blankets against the bottom to keep the rising water out.
I say my husband because I wasn’t here. I’d traveled to London for a meeting and got as far as Paddington station when M called me, high-pitched and scared, to tell me what was happening. M shouldn’t even have been home but the roof collapsed at his work under the weight of a month’s worth of torrential rain hitting it in a few hours and they all got sent home. I don’t know which is worse; being a hundred and fifty miles away, as I was, lost and scared and useless, or being there and seeing it happen in real-time and still being useless. But then I couldn’t get home. Train after train was cancelled and I was just stuck, stuck in that station, stuck doing nothing - and I am SHIT at doing nothing. I’m a doer. I take action. Even when there’s no action to take that’s what I do because I don’t know how to do anything else. So I was calling my financial advisor, asking about my buildings insurance - the buildings insurance I’d let lapse in May because I’m a dumbass and only renewed SIX DAYS PREVIOUSLY - and calling M, and calling my Dad, calling anyone, anything to make myself feel useful and controlled instead of stuck and stupid and scared.
Our back fence is fucked, as is our shed. I don’t care much about the latter as it was only full of shit, but our garden furniture, purchased only last year, is also FUBARed, along with most of S’s bikes/scooters/cars that you can’t see but were behind the house and to the right of the picture. Our garage was also flooded and while a good three-quarters of that was also full of crap, the remaining quarter was important; old LPs, bags of clothes for goodwill, our lawnmower, paint, tools, etc. We have our washing machine in there, too, and while it appears to be still working, I’m told that it probably won’t be for much longer.
We escaped being flooded inside our home by an inch. It looks crazy, written like that - one, single, inconsequential inch - but that’s the honest Christ’s truth. When the fire service arrived and started pumping the fuck out of this inexplicable water, the river in our backyard was lapping the underside of our doorstep. We live in Surburbia, on a quiet, 12-house cul-de-sac that backs onto a main A road. I’m told that at the top of the road a culvert burst, sending water pouring down the road, flooding cars, sweeping stuff away, and four out of the six houses that back onto the road were flooded. We were one of two that escaped with just a fucked fence and a soggy lawnmower.
So, I had grand plans to update you on the weekend I spent with two of my best friends and their partners, getting drunk and indoctrinating them into the wondrous world of Rock Band. And the weekend I went to London with my girlfriends, against my better judgment, to watch the stage show Dirty Dancing. (Afterward I wished I’d listened to my doubts; it was appalling - like really, truly, horribly dreadful - and sat only five rows from the front, I had to duck each time Johnny “Not Remotely As Attractive As Patrick Swayze” Castle turned my way as the sight of his omnipresent but unflinching erection made me want to chunder.) I wanted to talk about how strangely depressed I get when I realise people have de-linked me (I’m 32, for fuck’s sake - does it matter? Well, no, not really, but I can’t help how I feel - WHY OH WHY, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!) and how on Thursday night we went to the O2 Arena to see soul legend Stevie Wonder in concert, and M and I managed to spend twenty-four hours with each other without wanting to purchase a gun. They were good times, ladies and gentlemen - good times. But then I look at that photo taken on September 5th and everything else seems shallow and stupid and ridiculously inane.
Comments: (16)
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