Barbapapa and the 37p lemon

Today I am wearing a pale pink jumper and Nice Man commented that I look like Barbapapa - remember him?

World readers might be aware that we are suffering a UK 'credit crunch', and the phrase has to be used on virtually every news bulletin. Of course it's noticeable across all grocery shopping, but yesterday I saw the 37 pence lemon for the first time. In a supermarket too! I remember the stable 15p lemon and the feasible 19p lemon. I had been mildly perturbed by 31p lemon, but wow, 37p? Will it be 45p next month?

Ah, the true cost of man's environmental impact. What on earth can we do for the next generation? Ah well, it's okay...babies probably won't like eating lemons.

-C

Lunch box lurkers

Hoorah - week 27 of the pregnancy and I am always hungry. I was sitting in the waiting room of my lovely massage girl, waiting for a foot massage, and I pulled out my (see-through plastic) lunch box to eat the dry crusts I had left there earlier. Yes, that hungry. The receptionist jumped up in fright and yelped. What's wrong? I asked. Oh, she said, as I opened the lunchbox, sorry, but I thought you had a tarantula in there. I've heard about odd cravings in pregnancy, but tarantulas in lunch boxes? Her subconscious must have been looking out for one.

-C

Ya Bute

I am becoming a short-cut blogger by just posting photos instead of observations. I persuaded Nice Man to go with me for a night in the country on our nearest island - the Isle of Bute. Having been to the outer Hebrides and grown up on Islay, Bute seems flatter and less exotic. Sorry Bute! There's lots of faded Victoriana, chip shops and seagulls that need ASBOs. We had a good time though. I'd recommend Mount Stuart house and gardens - a posh mansion with splashes of eccentric flamboyance. Gothic high camp. Think stained glass windows for each sign of the zodiac. Very Russel Grant - only these were from centuries ago.

-C

My Best Friends' Wedding (without Julia Roberts)

Time's relativity as measured by water filters

I've reached the half-way point of pregnancy - 20 weeks. On the one hand, it seems to be going very slowly....until I change the water filter. We have a water jug to filter tap water and the filter is supposed to be changed at the start of each new month. I find myself thinking - wow, it's time to change it again? Already? So, I've started to measure my gestation in water filters. I have 4 more to go...

I saw another great film last night called The Visitor. Here's a photo from it. Take a tissue or two...

-C

In Search of a Midnight Kiss...

...is the indie film I saw tonight. I enjoyed it much more than I had bargained for. Stuart came to the cinema with me and he whispered that the film featured the apartment block he stayed in and the local cafe he frequented while recording in LA.

I've never been to America myself. I'd like to go one day, before flying becomes socially taboo and the world's oil runs out. There, I've gone all Woody-Allen-pessimistic on the environment again. Must-keep-up-eco-morale! We really need to start some lateral thinking on the big issues. Solar panels and wind farms - I open my arms to them all.

-C

Lost e-mails, double trews...

Thanks for all the kind messages of congratulations. I hear that some people e-mailed me at my old e-mail addresses and the e-mail's didn't get through. Tiscali and Talk Talk are no longer.

Alas, I lost my Outlook Express email address book when my laptop was stolen and I don't know how to import addresses on the new Windows Vista. For those trying to get in touch, the best way is to email me via the blog link. I think there is a link?!

What a lot of rain has fallen, on these longest days of the year. The breeze is still chilly enough that I have resorted back to wearing the double trew (two pairs of trousers at once). It's a combination that I usually reserve for October to April wear. My sister tells me I should get warmer, further on in the pregnancy. It's like carrying a human hot-water bottle around, she said.

-C

Great Expectations

Well, I'm finally back in the blogosphere, with the happy news that Nice Man and I are expecting a bambino in November. Amazing huh?

The scan above was taken at 10.5 weeks and I'm now about week 17 -approximately 4 months. ( I had no idea about what week numbers meant, until it happened to me). I'm feeling reasonably well and still hope to do my part-time job until Autumn. We won't know if it's a boy or a girl until birth. Glasgow NHS has a 'don't tell' policy, and it's probably better as a surprise. I'm not into all this painting-the-nursery-pink-or-blue shenanigans. Cultural conditioning can wait.

Yesterday I was 'best man' at Stuart and Marisa's Glasgow wedding celebration. I told the crowd to bear with me, if there were a few pregnant pauses in my speech...ha, ha. I also made a quip about baseball that nobody laughed at, so I jumped in and said Nice Man had given me that joke, then got a big laugh.

I'll see if I can post some photos later.

-C

Dispossessed

A morally-challenged man decided to take my laptop and exchange it for some class A drugs, so I'm unable to respond to emails for a while. Just so you know.

-C

Red bananas, blog guilt, creme eggs.

There were 'red bananas' for sale in the supermarket. They actually looked more purple than red. At £1.99 they were twice the price of yellow bananas. I wanted to widen my fruit experience, so I bought them. Newsflash: they just taste like yellow bananas. There, I've saved you a pound.

I have blog guilt for not updating the blog.

I had a couple of month's break from Mickel Therapy when I moved in with Nice Man and started my part-time job. All that is still going well, but readers, I can't say I feel fully recovered. Instead I feel like I often have a way to go and don't know how to get there.

My MT therapist is well-meaning to the point of evangelism. She really wants to help. I went back to see her again and she was urging me back to the process. MT is not about bare effort or force. Au contraire. It's about trying to get into some sort of mind/body flow where mysterious forces combine to lessen the 'symptom load.' The hardest part for me, is that it sometimes feels like bare effort and force and I don't get the gains I'd hoped for.

But, I am not dismissing it either. And that is important. I'm just letting you know where I am and hoping aloud that I can get back into the flow.

It's good to have an Easter holiday. Nice Man bought two creme eggs, and I thanked him for the gesture and confessed that I can't really eat creme eggs (wondering whether I should just force one down, so as not to seem ungrateful, my inner Mickel Therapist crying 'your bodymind won't be happy!') And, furthermore, Nice Man is fully aware of my Gillian McKeith gene. As I hesitated, he popped both creme eggs in his mouth before breakfast, just to observe my horrified response. I might find it easier to stir a bag of white sugar into a tin of syrup and drink it from a chocolate cup inside a vat of candyfloss. I wouldn't feel queasy at all. How did I manage to eat them as a kid? Happy Easter-ing.

-C

The thing about the taps (and the texts)

You know how taps (faucets) are made of chrome silvery stuff? Well, the bathroom taps in our new flat are merely coated in the silvery stuff and (barely visible to the eye) it's started to chip and crack, like tin foil only sharper. When I turn on the hot tap, I sometimes get papercuts in my fingers. I am learning to turn on the tap by barely touching it. Meanwhile, I'm waiting on the landlord agency to fix my fall-aparty chest of drawers. If I mention the taps, they'll think I'm strange. There's nothing to see. They'd have to move in with us and get a few papercuts before they realised the predicament.

I started getting scam texts that say 'I did the girly thing for leap year and proposed to him! He said Yes! Lucky Man.' One just said 'How the devil are you?'

I'm using a birthday gift token for a scalp massage this afternoon. Oh yes, follicles....ye shall relax.

-C

A bug?

I seem to have gone down with some kind of cold bug that's giving me flu-like aches. How very dare it. I'm not used to this. It shows how well I had been doing. I can't wait to feel better again. Indulge me this boring moany post!

Isn't February going fast? Nice Man is off to Spain tommorrow to hit drums with bits of wood.

My brother, John, directed a documentary on Scottish pop that will be here on BBC iPlayer for 3 more days. I was proud of him.

-C

The social lottery of Glasgow buses

Getting on a bus in Glasgow is like playing the lottery of social intercourse. Sometimes, you sit beside a person of questionable personal hygiene, who then asks if he / she met you on holiday. (No, of course, is the answer). I hit the metaphorical bonus ball yesterday when I helped a partially-sighted, 93 year old man on to the bus and we sat beside each other.

He was all cheery about the weather - thank goodness for weather as an opening topic to almost all conversations with strangers. He said it reminded him of the days when he got 'a penny fair' on the tram, and he and his wife went to the bluebell woods (now a housing estate) past Anniesland. He had such light in his eyes, I thought he'd be one these guys who had a long marriage. When he told me he'd been with his wife for 70 years (since age 23) and then that she died 2 years ago (aged 88), I got a big lump in my throat.

He told me he had fought in WW2 and he goes swimming every morning and has a wee dram at nights ('just the one, mind'). His 'children' are in their 60's now (unfathomable to me) and he doesn't like to impose on them. He told his son he would go 'chasing the birds' at the bowling club socials and son said, 'you wouldn't know what to do with them, if you caught one.' At that point he gave a big self-deprecating laugh and I noticed how shiny his black shoes were, and I thought how clean and chlorinated he must be after the swimming pool. Almost like a baby.

-C

boys in green aprons and freudenschade

Now is the time that I wish I'd learnt touch-typing in school. Secretarial studies, as it was called, was generally frowned upon. If you were 'clever', you were encouraged to do languages or science instead. I took German, but I think I'd swap it for touch-typing. These people that can type without looking at the keyboard impress me more than anyone who can use an Umlaut or know what Schadenfreude really means, when you break it down. Can anyone learn to touch type, later in life? i.e. after their brain is hard wired to look at every key, or else thye end up wrtining lke tis?!*!?

Today in my local supermarket there were about 10 varieties of apple. I used to love cox pippin in autumn and granny smith in spring. I asked a boy in a green apron which apples are in season now (half of them are from New Zealand or somewhere a million food miles away). He went to ask another boy in a green apron and together they asked a third boy. The consesus was that all the apples were in season. They're all in season, he said, waving his hand across the display, to lend weight to his argument. Okay, I said, but I didn't believe him.

Here is a good website called Eat the Seasons that should tell us more.

-C

Movers and Shakers

Dear Readers, you find me typing while on the dog-and-bone to my ISP, Talk Talk. I've been on hold for just under a million minutes. The recorded message keeps shouting 'Thank you for your continued wait!' and sounds like Davina McColl. I keep thinking she's actually the customer service person and I jump to attention every 30 seconds.

I am trying to arrange a change of address for my ISP. What's that, you say? A move?! Yes, indeedy. More will be revealed later. It involves myself and Nice Man and it'll be good once we get passed the nitty gritty. Today's nitty gritty involves sticking my head into the back of cupboards (at my current, soon-to-be-'old') flat and finding packets of lentils or self-raising flour marked best before Jun '05. There is a fleeting temptation to keep them, but '05? Come now...

More of today's To-Do's involved throwing random possessions in blue plastic Ikea sacks (socks/books/flowering cactus) and getting ready to plead (when I finally get through to Talk Talk's home-moving helpline) that their requirement of BT reactivating the existing phone line at the new address (ie flicking a switch in an exchange box somewhere) is reasonable, but the fact that BT are then charging £124.99 for this honour, sounds to me like they're taking the mickey. Jeeze, that was a long sentence. And perhaps unnecessarily so! I'm warbling...

Wish me luck.

-C

Pleasing Party Aftermath

Oh, how lucky I feel to have a surprisey party thrown for me, and even better, it coincided with my 40th birthday. Nice Man made me wear a scarf tied around my eyes as I walked in to a mystery destination (yikes) and lo, a room full of people were singing Happy Birthday. Happily still, they were my nearest and dearest and they did place kisses on my cheek and give me presents. Nice Man sang with his guitar and John McCusker got his fiddle out and Heidi Talbot sang this melodic swooper of a song. I tried to chat to everyone at least once, so it was a bit hectic at the time, but in the aftermath, well, it was a pleasing mass of general loveliness. I'll write some thank you cards soon.

PS - I found a tank-top in a bag and I don't know if it was a present for me without a gift tag, or some one's knitwear gone AWOL. I'll wear it, if its owner can't be found. Black and 'V' necked, it's a utility classic to be applauded.

-C

Lychee Birthday to me

I was 39 years on this earth before I tasted a lychee. Initially I was wary - once peeled they looked uncannily like eye balls or pickled onions. Yesterday, in the supermarket, I bought a plastic tray of them for a mere £1 and tonight, on the eve of my 40th birthday (see how I dropped that in?) I peeled and savoured several of them in a row and thought how lovely they were. I will tell you if 'life begins at...' in my next post.

-C

Island Hogmanay - part 2

Well, Nice Man and I spent a second Hogmanay on Islay and had a great, battery-recharging, nature-loving time. We took a day trip to Jura, where I lost my fake-fur hat. There are 6000 deer on Jura and less than 200 people, so if any one spots a deer wearing a deer stalker...

-C

Greetings of the season

Dear readers,

if there are any of you left (?!) excuse me for letting this blog slow to almost a halt.

The Mickel Therapy has helped me beyond my meagre expectations this year, and yet there are still times that I find it profoundly challenging. I won't dissect it all here, but perhaps that is why I am hiding from the blog - the second half of the race is still difficult for me, and I am doing the best I can, behind the scenes. Perhaps I'm too good at getting in my own way (?!)

Next year will bring changes and I will update as plans unfold. Maybe I will try to update at the end of each month, so people know when to check.

Apologies for not sending off any Christmas cards and it was good to receive a few. Next year, I'll get on the case. Here's a link to an animated card site that my nieces love. You can see free preview cards with lovely animation.

Happy Christmas - may you find yourself in the woolly jumper of contentment and the pantaloons of peace.

-C

M&S, S&M

My dear friends, Stuart and Marisa got married in New York. May happiness reign upon them!

-C