The children are coming today for the weekend, so there’ll be a game of Catan happening this evening. Bear’s picking the car up from the garage after work, thankfully only two new front tyres and a bracket for the exhaust was needed and then he’s going to get the children. They’ll be having dinner at home rather than with us, so I’m guessing we won’t be having the usual Friday night Spinach Pasta which has been a tradition for at least 12 years.
It was the first meal Bear ever made for me, on the day he brought me to live with him. I didn’t even know if I liked spinach as I’d never had it before, but it was really tasty, especially with the garlic Boursin. Strange how you remember things like that years and years afterwards. Strange how food makes you remember certain people and events in life. Well, isn’t it.?! Or is it just me.? I always remember an ex- from my mid-teens as the Crunchie kid.
He went to the Isle of Wight in England on a day trip and brought me back a box of 96 Crunchie Bars, which are chocolate coated honeycomb. I loved those things and so he bought me a boxful. My mother wasn’t impressed. 😀 An old friend whose name was Toby, was nicknamed Lord Battenberg, because he always had to have Battenberg cake in his kitchen cupboard. He felt it was the height of sophistication in the 1990’s to offer his guests Battenberg cake with their tea or coffee, so always had some. 😀
More personally, my ex- was cheesy mash guy, (amongst a whole lot of other far less complimentary things, but that’s a blog post for another day). My youngest son is plain pasta boy. He loved cooked pasta and hotdogs when he was younger, but without sauce. Not even ketchup. My sister is Billy Bear and Beans. Billy Bear was a processed pork sausage, cured and cooked and shaped into a bear face, then sliced. We used to get it from the local supermarket and she’d have it with cold baked beans. 😀
My grandmother and her Polo mints, she’d suck them down to a thin circle, then give them to her chihuahua. My stepmother would only eat Strawberry Split ice lollies in the Summer and my father had a thing for Yorkie chocolate bars throughout my teens. I used to love Jelly Babies when I was little, then Gummy Bears when I was in my teens and early twenties, but have moved on to Jelly Beans nowadays. Bear bought a huge bag of them in Maastricht one day the first time we went, paid €15 for them. They lasted little more than a week. 😀 My other true love is tortilla chips.
I finally surfaced at 9.40am… and so far, have written a blog post. That’s it.! Oh, and I’ve just had breakfast… at 2.15pm. I know… it’s bad. I should be being productive and I will be… later. I had a bad night. We had a bad night. I must have spent at least 4 hours coughing. I hate this damn cough. I hate all damned coughs when they’re mine. I’ve even gone through most of a 400ml bottle of cough syrup… still coughing.!
Bear had an early shift too, so that helped. The car’s in for an MOT this afternoon. It better pass. We haven’t had it that long. I can’t be blamed for anything though as I haven’t driven it, so all suspension springs should be intact and the brake blocks not eroded. I like to drive even though I haven’t in almost seven years. Bear won’t let me. I have a driving license, he just won’t let me. He won’t add me to the insurance.
I used to have a Ford Fiesta, gorgeous little maroon rocket she was. I named her Ruby. I name most things, I’m weird like that. Ruby was awesome. She could do 0-60 in around 4 seconds even though she was only a 1.2l. That car had attitude and loved to race. The hills we used to fly over at 110mph… it’s a wonder I’m still alive. 😀 And she didn’t object when I called her ‘bitch’ every now and then.
Now, it’s 3.10pm and I’ve just been productive. Vacuuming up- and downstairs and bringing the laundry down. See, I can get my shit together when I need to. Dinner’s already sorted and quick ‘n’ easy and I have an appointment to see the Doc’ on Monday, about my shoulder. The depression can wait, for now. I’m not actively considering ways to brutally slaughter Bear with his iPad yet, so there’s nothing to be concerned about.
And now I need to shower… you know it’s bad when you smell yourself and nearly vomit… 😉 In my defence I did shower on Monday, so it’s not too bad. Bear’s out tonight at a political meeting, so I’ll be Xboxing until something good comes on TV, or he gets home and I sit and watch TV alone while he scrolls through Twitter, Facebook and any other brain-cell murdering social media site he can find while pretending to also watch TV with me… whatever. I can resist the urge to kill. For now.
I don’t know what’s gotten into me today… it’s -2 outside and on a completely random whim, I grabbed my shoes and went out.
Yes… Out there… Where there’s peoples and germs and frigid air and… Peoples. For a full hour.!
Must be this cold affecting my brain. I actually walked. For 3.1 kilometres. Me. Walking. Voluntarily.
It wasn’t too peopley either. Just a bit, but then it is Wednesday. Very ducky though. I don’t mind ducks, geese are okay too I guess.
I took pictures. On my phone, so excuse the quality, a Samsung mini S3 is not quite an iPhone 11 Pro Max.
It’s this cold….
All was quiet and peaceful…..
and then someone threw bread.!
Duck
Pretty Duck
Duck Walk
And I walked. And I got further than I thought I would before my hip started bitching… but once started the other hip and then my knee chimed in with their 2 cents, and then I ran out of energy. So 3.1 km is pretty good for an old girl who hasn’t actually properly walked in almost 2 years. 🙂 Go me.!
I managed to see 9am today… and am feeling a little better. My throat isn’t so sore, but the way this damn cough is going, it soon will be. It’s turning into one of those hacking coughs that’s going to drive me nuts and keep me up all night. 😦 Today I”m going to ask Bear to make an appointment at the Doc’s for me, and see about sorting my shoulder out before it gets much worse. I know what the Doc will say, but it has to be done before I’m completely incapacitated.
My right shoulder started the same way seven years ago, with calcium building up in my rotator cuff, rubbing against the bursa sac and inflaming it to the point of agony every time I lifted my arm above elbow height. I underwent anti-inflammatory injections every 2 months into the muscles, which hurt like hell and did basically nothing. They were followed by an injection of saline which was supposed to break up and dissolve the calcium, but didn’t.
My only other option was surgery, which might or might not work, and there was every possibility the calcium would only build up there again anyway… so I didn’t bother. I saw no reason to go under the knife when the chances were high it wouldn’t do a damned bit of good and I’d just be left with yet another scar. That might be my only option this time too… and again I’m not going there without assurances that it’ll work and I’ll be able to use my arm normally again.
I’m already doing a great T-Rex impersonation, with the very short range I have with my arms and the limited use. I can’t lift anything heavier than a few items of clothing, can’t put my arms behind my back, or my hands behind my head to brush my hair, can’t push or pull doors heavier than the average house door, as resistance is agonising. I used to arm wrestle my teenage sons, and win… now I couldn’t arm wrestle a mouse. It feels like impact shock in my shoulder and bicep and tricep muscles.
Last night I made an Asian style soup with chestnut mushrooms, noodles, lime and ginger. It was pretty amazing, and even Bear said it was one to make again, despite it not being overly spicy. Tonight’s offering is a puff pastry tray-bake with chicory, celeriac and Gorgonzola cheese, three things I actually don’t like that much… but I’ve decided to give them a go as I’ve discovered a recent liking for other foods that I used to dislike intensely eg. chickpeas, cod, corn and cashew nuts. Good thing I like cake. 😀
Bear went out last night, to a Martial Arts training session. It’s the first time he’s been to a fitness class in years and boy, did it show. He came hobbling home, wincing and groaning in pain and will likely spend today and tomorrow stiff and sore, only to go back and do it all again on Sunday evening. He’s out tonight at a political meeting, so I doubt I’ll see him until around 11pm. It gives me a chance to catch up on NCIS, CSI and Bones, so I’m cool.
For me, the day started around 10.15am. This cold has taken over and my throat is raw and scratchy as all hell. My OCD kicked in and I spent the morning wiping down every surface with hygiene wipes and washing my hands with Sanex. I’m dehydrated and cold, even though I’m drinking plenty of fluids and wrapped up warm. I had the heater on earlier but it was like being suffocated, so it went off. Hard enough trying to breathe as it is.
I detest being ill. I can’t deal with the headaches, bodily aches and pains and constantly feeling like crap. It’s not something I have any patience or sympathy for, especially in myself. Thankfully, Bear doesn’t get ill easily, but when he does he gets really ill. He’s not a ‘man-flu’ type of guy. Most things he can shake off in a day or two, but when he gets caught by something nasty, he goes down hard and suffers for a week or more. He doesn’t do sympathy much either, so I try to be aware of his needs without fussing over him.
I am grateful that the day’s are gone when I had to shower two to three times a day with scouring cream and a scouring pad just to feel clean again when I was ill. Germs were life-threatening and I would go to war against every germ I ever caught so that I didn’t pass it on to someone else and risk it killing them. Not realising I was almost killing myself in the effort. I’d seen the medical adverts, showing how when a person coughed or sneezed, the germs would end up on their hands, faces, tissues, clothing and immediate surroundings.
So every time I coughed I used a tissue, threw it away and washed my hands, face and hygiene sprayed my immediate area, to kill the germs. If I sneezed it was the same, except I used a Qtip dipped in hygiene spray to wipe around my nostrils to kill the germs that caused the sneeze. The more I got ill, the worse the germ-killing became until I was using stronger more abrasive cleaners and cleaning a wider area than just my immediate surroundings. I changed my clothes four times a day, and showered with harsher cleaning fluids than previously because I felt the germs all over me, inside and out.
Before long I was using household bleach and a steel wool pad to wash with, germs were everywhere and if I passed any on to my children they would die. Germs were in dust, so I eradicated any dust in my home and patrolled every surface to make sure none landed. Then I realised we breathed in dust, and thus breathed in the germs, so used a hygiene spray as an air freshener, to kill germs in the air. Obviously I didn’t do it when my family were around, I knew I had a serious issue and I knew it was my issue not their’s. I was just waiting for them to leave the house so I could continue my compulsive behaviour every day.
Strangely, the same compulsions were different at work. I kept my space clean and hygienic, but allowed the rest of my work place to just be, keeping it clean but not hygienically clean. I ran a library and knew books picked up all kinds of germs, but because they were very dry, germs couldn’t live long on them and as long as I washed my hands regularly when handling them, I wasn’t likely to pick up anything nasty. It wasn’t a busy library anyway, being hidden away on a Military housing estate, just a handful of regulars with a few irregulars now and again. It was there I met an old gentleman who realised what I was doing to myself when he saw the scars I had on my inner forearms from the steel wool and bleach.
He came in one day with a single red rose and a small bottle of Echinacea cream and sat me down and asked about the scars he’d seen. I allowed him to see the rest of my arms and he didn’t flinch at all when he saw the burns and raw abrasions all the way up to my shoulders. He rubbed the cream gently into my arms and said that this had to stop. Every few days he’d come in to talk and see how my arms were healing. I slowly got better, learning to cope with the compulsions and obsessive behaviour with his help.
He told me how he too had done to himself what I was doing to myself. He had been a soldier in WW2 as a young lad and the things he had seen had deeply affected him to the point that he felt he could control his surroundings and thus the people around him, and what happened to them if he did certain actions repeatedly every day, these actions included washing himself a certain way with a certain product as he washed his home, car, garage, patio, shed and gate. He believed that as long as everything was washed with a certain product in a certain way, they would protect everyone who came within the bounds of that cleanliness.
Then his wife died. He went to therapy and realised there had been nothing he could have done. Cancer doesn’t respect the boundaries of cleanliness and no amount of cleanliness will protect anyone from it. Like me he felt defeated and with help started to get better at coping with his loss and the feelings of failure because he hadn’t been able to protect his wife. As I couldn’t protect my children. I realised I was in a losing battle. Germs were everywhere, on everything and only they would win, always. I also realised some germs were good, if we didn’t have them, we’d die.
It took over a year for me to recover from the wounds I’d been inflicting on myself, both mental and physical, and get back to a place where I could control my obsession with germs and not allow the fear of dying to overwhelm me when I or one of my children got ill. Now I have moments where I have to hygienically clean just for peace of mind, but in no way is it the obsession to bleach everything I used to have. Knowing Bear will recognise the signs of my OCD helps me keep them in check. Giving him cause to worry about me is not something I will allow, so when my head starts telling me horror stories about dying just because I have a cold, I slap that lying MoFo down hard.!
The best laid plans and all that… *sigh* Yesterday ended at just gone 2am for me as we sat up and watched the two NFL games. I managed to keep focused until half time in the Packers/Niners game and then gave up and went to bed. Bear came up about 45 minutes later and I was out cold. I got up around 11.40am with him following at 12.15pm… so there go today’s plans to do something other than chores and sitting around on the Internet. 😦
This stupid cold has gotten a grip, although the Ibuprofen is doing a valiant job of trying to kick it’s butt. My nose isn’t running anymore, which is a bonus, but my throat is raw and my voice a croak, and I’m aching all over. Grrr.! Still got to get stuff done though. Bear raised an eyebrow at the shopping list he saw me writing and was raised an eyebrow in return. He went shopping yesterday, when he should have gone on Saturday, and now doesn’t want to go again.
Tough really, if he wants to eat this week. Although we could always go back to the every day shopping he used to do (and complained and griped continuously about) until the beginning of this year. Now he goes twice a week. Monday’s is food shopping for the week, Saturday’s is weekend shopping for the kids and household needs, like shampoo, dishwasher tabs, loo roll etc. It stops the complaining and griping (somewhat) and keeps the stress of having to plan a meal from whatever groceries there are in the fridge and cupboard every day to a minimum.
Plus it’s saving us money. Knowing what I want and how much stops waste and our local supermarket has bonus offers that start every Monday, so if I see something that’s on offer and I can incorporate it into a meal, it’ll go on the shopping list. The supermarket gives bonuses on everyday stuff too; two weeks ago Bear saved €27 on groceries because of the offers and bonuses. So it’s well worth checking out your local. We tried using coupons, but most of the time they’re for things we don’t use, so we don’t bother.
I still plan on making quiche today, we have some Chorizo left over and some cherry tomatoes and Bear picked up some pastry at the store, so we’ll have another bash at it, and see how it turns out. Dinner today will be kale and red onion mash. I got the recipe from our local supermarket website, so it might have to be translated. There’s peas and almonds and egg in it too. Looks good, so we’ll have to see what Bear thinks. He loved the Cajun spiced linguine last night, so that’ll go on the ‘To Do Again’ list.
I’m cheating today, it’s Sunday which means I don’t have to spend ages cooking… yeay.! \o/ So I’m just going to knock up a quick Cajun spiced linguine and put it with the spiced fishcakes I made two weeks ago that have been in the freezer since. Surprisingly, I remembered to take them out of the freezer last night. Go me.! So dinner is going to be quick and easy.
Bear’s on another late shift today, but he has tomorrow off. Woohoo.! 😀 Not that we’ll do much, unless I can drag him away from Twitter. I might just get him involved in making another quiche. I didn’t get to the kitchen cupboard doors yesterday, somehow I managed to forget that was what I was going to do… so I’ll try to remember to start them today.
I woke up this morning with a sore throat and a running nose, after spending a lot of the night coughing. Great… all I need.! Not. Gave it a blast of Ibuprofen, but other than the throbbing in my head that had started, disappearing, it hasn’t done a lot. I’ll blast it again in an hour or so. I will not be ill. Especially when once I am, I seem to be for months on end.
We’ve started looking into beginning the process of adopting a dog. Our local shelter train all their dogs so they are more likely to be adopted and train the adopters to help them integrate with the dog that’s been chosen for them. I like that they choose your dog, rather than you just go in and say I’ll take that one with no idea as to whether you’ll all get along. That way they know the dog will suit your needs, you will suit the dog’s needs and the dog won’t get dumped back at the shelter because you didn’t realise just how much work it was going to be.
They do an initial at home interview, so that they can see what size your home is, how cluttered, or not, it is and if you have kids, and/or other animals. They discuss what kind of dog you’re looking for and try to match you with a dog that could happily live in those conditions and will be happy with you. I know this won’t be easy for us, as my OCD and mobility issues mean Bear will be doing the majority of the walks.
He’s never had a dog before and I don’t want to get in the way of him not experiencing that kind of love and devotion because of my daft hang-ups. So I’m going to have to give full disclosure and see what they think, and see what kind of dog they think will suit us, if they have one. We’d like a Bassett Hound, but that’s just a pipe dream. Pure breeds have awful health issues and finding a Bassett Hound for sale is next to impossible.
I had a pure breed Beagle some years ago, she had heart, sight and hearing issues, poor girl and had to be put to sleep late last year after losing control of pretty much every bodily function. The vet felt it was the kindest thing to do for her. I miss that little girl. I’ve always had a pet of some sort; cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, even a pet spider for a while. 🙂
Another early awakening, thanks to wheezy moped guy, but I managed to stay toasty under the covers, until my achy bits ached too much and then I went downstairs to start on dinner prep. Bear followed about 30 minutes later and I made coffee and breakfast. My left arm is really becoming a problem. It may be time to see what the sadists at the local hospital have to say about it and brace myself for another round of injections that do nothing.
Last night we watched the first episode of Star Trek:Voyager. Bear’s watched the whole series a few times, but this will be the first time I’ve seen it all. Previously I only caught an episode here and there so I know most of the characters, I just missed a lot of the story. We started watching Star Trek from the very beginning with ‘The Menagerie’ that had Christopher Pike (played by Jeffrey Hunter) as Captain, and have watched all the movies in chronological order. My geekiness is coming along nicely. 😀
Other notable series likes are ‘Mary Kills People’ and ‘You’ which are hilarious if you have a dark sense of humour, as I do. I have a thing for the psychopathic killer genre of TV series and am loving Prodigal Son right now, and the weird and freaky, like American Gods and Black Mirror. We’ve seen Blacklist, Blindspot, Sense8, The Man in the High Castle, Fringe, Homeland, The Handmaid’s Tale, Westworld and Battlestar Galactica. And of course the Doctor Who series’ and spinoff’s.
Today seems like a good day to tackle the kitchen cupboard doors. Until such time as the agonising pain in my shoulders puts a stop to it, that is. Then I might hit the Xbox and continue building towers, for some obscure reason. Tonight’s delectation is my personal take on Pumpkin Hash. Pan fried pumpkin with sun-dried tomatoes, capers and scrambled egg, topped with Feta cheese. Yep.. sounds weird, tastes amazing.! Can’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
I was woken this morning by the newspaper delivery guy, on his squeaky, wheezing moped, sometime around 7am. He parks it, still running, outside my house while he delivers to two houses opposite mine and then revs it up and sputters and squeaks off down to the next street and the next, where he can be heard doing the same thing repeatedly before he finally wheezes off onto the main road.
At 7.30am the guy across the street leaves for work, slamming his front door hard and getting into his car that’s parked just next to my house and starting it up with the door still open, so his 1980’s Dutch pop music blares out at volume, loud enough to wake the dead, then he slams the door and peels rubber pulling out because he has no clutch control.
At 8am, the guy two doors down, who owns pigeons and has an aviary in his back garden, gets a visitor who beeps the car horn when they turn up, drops off a usually crying child and beeps again as they leave. I can only assume the crying girl is his grandchild, and that she’s too young for Nursery.
Then starts a very loud conversation with the child as to why she’s crying and efforts to distract her. After which pigeon man’s grown up son, who has mental health issues, leaves to walk their Highland Terrier who’s named Sheila. I know this because he can be heard yelling her name every three seconds as he walks down the street talking and laughing to himself.
At 8.30am the two girls across the street are taken to school by their mother, who is constantly telling them to stay together and stop arguing. The girl’s are 5 and 7 and chatter away like starlings, sometimes shouting over each other to be heard. They can be heard most mornings saying hello to Sheila and talking to pigeon man’s very loud son.
Just before 9am, the woman across the road heads off to work. Her car door has dropped badly, so every time it’s opened and closed, it creaks and shudders and she has to bang it hard to get it to stay closed. Then it takes her three attempts to get it to start. Her grown up son’s work colleague picks him up at 9.15am, beeping his car horn three times to let him know he’s arrived while music blares out of his open car window.
At 10am, the next door (noisy) neighbour goes out to walk their French Bulldog, which gives daughter the chance to put MTV on her bedroom TV and blast out whatever pile of drivel is being shown at that time in the morning. Thankfully it goes off when Mum gets back, and they start to fight and scream at each other.
All of this happens 5-6 days a week. If we’re lucky the little old lady on the other side of us won’t be up doing her housework at 6am, playing German folk music loudly and singing along to it. She stomps up the stairs around 1am, and stomps down them again around 5.45am every day. If she is doing her housework that early, she can be heard banging her vacuum filter against her wheelie bin to clear it of dust, and then banging the wheelie bin lid down.
The Church bells are also part of the morning chorus, with a low thundering peal heard at 7am… a louder, slightly higher pitched peal at 8am, then at 8.50am, 9am, 9.50am, 10am, 10.50am, 11am and 12noon. It goes on every hour on the hour until midnight, and then you hear one strike every fifteen minutes until the 7am peal. If it’s Thursday or Sunday, you get a prolonged call to morning Mass that goes on for 67 strikes. Yes, I counted.
This morning I got up at 9.45am, leaving Bear to sleep on. I know I kept him awake snoring like a steam engine most of the night. I remember the nudges and gentle pushes to make me roll over. Time for a little pharmaceutical help with this cough and stuffy nose. I don’t have a cold as such, just a stuffy nose and a bit of a sore throat, and an occasional cough. Still, keeping Bear awake when he’s got a late shift tonight isn’t good, so I shall resort to chemical support to deal with the darn thing.
I found a cool recipe for Gypsy-Moorish Veggie Stew for tonight’s dinner. Lots of veggies and pears in a sauce made from saffron and almonds. Sounds different, so I’m going to try it. Back to Spain again after last night’s Italian. The gnocchi gratin was amazing.! The tarragon really gives a nice zing with the goat’s cheese.
Sleeping in late always catches you out at some point and for me, it was today. I fell asleep around 1am and was wide awake by 5.40am… Ugh.! With just as little energy as any other day, I knew it was going to be a long day. Having exhausted all interest in Facebook, I made breakfast and headed for the Xbox.
Bear rang at 12.40pm asking if it was okay to bring a colleague home with him, as they’re off out to dinner this evening with other colleagues and his friend would only have to drive all the way home for a short period of time and then drive all the way back again, so I said yes. Brave of me really, seeing as I have no idea which colleague (not that I know the names of or have met any of them), and I’m eternally awkward around new people, not knowing what to say other than hello, and just sitting quietly and not saying anything at all until they feel uncomfortable and want to leave.
The penalties of living in a foreign country and having a partner who doesn’t care either way if you learn the language, but he’s not going to be teaching it to you. I’ve picked up a lot in the past nine years, but not enough to get by in a conversation, although I understand a lot more than I can say. Curse words I’m pro at, pleasantries not so much.
Communication really isn’t Bear’s strong point. This dinner this evening is supposed to be a Goodbye dinner with ex-colleagues from the Psychiatric Unit he worked on for two years previous to last August. The thing is he went to a Goodbye dinner with his then-colleagues back in June last year and came home with gifts and cards wishing him success and luck in his new position back at the Psychiatric Unit he worked at prior to those two years. Still with me.?
So I’m confused. Is this dinner with different ex-colleagues, who missed out on the June dinner and decided to re-schedule a new one; or are they the same ex-colleagues that he had dinner with last June and who felt they had to ensure he’d left the keys, passwords and latex gloves behind before hitting him with the door on the way out.? Or have they all forgotten there was a June dinner and still think he needs to be said Goodbye to five months after he left.?
So far, Bear seems to think I’m psychic and will understand all once I initiate my super powers and read his bloody mind… not that I’d get much enlightenment from doing that, if I even could, too many compartments to choose from and I’d only get distracted looking for answers to the questions I had nine years ago that he still hasn’t bothered to respond to. Sometimes it’s like getting blood out of a stone… impossible.!
At some point I’m going to have to do the Mom thing… take a deep breath, sit him down and start from the very beginning, calmly asking pointed questions until I finally get the full picture. No wonder I’m exasperated and frustrated most of the time.! Good thing there’s limited alcohol in the house. 😀
So not only have I done sweet F all all day, I plan on doing the same all night too. Dinner is Gnocchi Gratin; vegetarian mince with onion and cheese sauce, gnocchi and toasted breadcrumbs with tarragon and goats cheese on top. Sounds like comfort food to me, so it’s perfect. If I can find an episode or two of Bones or NCIS on TV, all the better.
UPDATE: I did the Mom thing… the dinner is a Goodbye meal for other colleagues that Bear used to work with, before his two year stint in the other psychiatric unit, during which they left and found new jobs in other mental health organisations. So the ex-colleagues are all getting together for a night out to connect and catch up. Apparently, it hadn’t crossed his mind to tell me. 😮
Dear Diary... 
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