Compost Your Enemies

Readers possessed of a better memory than mine may recall the post I wrote 2 1/4 years ago, about the garden patch and what turned out to be a Gestetner stylus found therein. I say a better memory than mine, because I had forgotten that I wrote it.

It refers to an “enormous black bag of weed roots – now too heavy to lift” and when I say enormous, I do not exaggerate. It looked like this:

A large black plastic bag, full, with a white bucket lid on top.
That revolting brown thing is a fallen camellia flower. Why do they do that?

Do not be fooled into thinking that this is your common or garden black rubbish bag, vol. approx 60L. No, no. This black bag was about a metre by two metres when flat, and when full it was, as previously mentioned, too heavy for me to lift. I can lift a ten kilo sack and carry it on my head. In a previous job I used to lift twenty kilo sacks of popping corn (though I was not foolhardy enough to put them on my head). I can lift and carry a large tub full of hardwood logs for the fire. I could not lift this bag.

Continue & Comment

Flannel Petticoat II: It Came from the Mending Basket

I recently discovered a fabulous way of reducing the pile of things forming archaeological layers – or possibly new civilizations – in the mending basket. Bin? Absolutely not. Forced labour? Also no. The trick, it turns out, is to shift the goal posts.

The mending basket has got a bit out of hand…

For a ridiculously long time, I have had a flannel nightie in my mending basket, waiting for a mend. Button-bereft garments come and go, elastic waistbands stretch and are replaced, tears are darned or patched, but this was beyond me. The worn-through yoke needed replacing. Did I know how to replace a yoke? No. So I left the nightie in the basket until such time as enlightenment descended.

Continue & Comment

Deep Rest

How exactly does one rest?

As I have had occasion to mention before (here and here), the Caped Gooseberry and I have different ways of relaxing, and this was something we were advised to address in our pre-marriage counselling. (Counselling: not necessarily because you have problems, but because you want to avoid having problems.)

potatoes with faces on tiny couch

The Caped Gooseberry finds strategy games relaxing. His hobby: thinking about stuff. (Makes him very hard to buy presents for, let me tell you.) I, on the other hand, find strategy games about as relaxing as running for a bus. In the rain. In badly fitting shoes. But I do like watching DVDs (not restful at all for the Caped Gooseberry) and reading (silently, to myself). All about the stories, me.

Except…

Continue & Comment