Caped Gooseberry – Page 18 – Deborah Makarios

March 9, 2015

Question: Zombie Cookery

Not how do you cook a zombie (that’s unhygienic) but when you feel like a zombie, what do you cook?
Everybody has that go-to recipe that’s so familiar you can make it even when your brain has fallen out the back of your head and is slopping miserably across the kitchen floor.

When in dire mental straits I tend to resort to scrambled eggs on toast. In fact, I was on one occasion so tired, stressed and disorganized (combination of new job, moving house, planning wedding etc etc) that when my dearly beloved came round for dinner on his usual evening, all I could manage to feed him was scrambled egg in a cup. Because I had run out of things that could be toasted, e.g. bread. (And he still married me!)

What’s your emergency brain-out-fallen recipe? Share below!

March 6, 2015

Not for All the Jewels in the Crown

I’m having trouble sleeping. (Sleep? Sleep? I couldn’t sleep tonight…)

I could have danced all night – the cinquepace, perhaps, although the mazurka somehow seems more appropriate for midnight dashings – but I am afraid the crashing noises would keep more than myself awake.

The problem isn’t so much that I don’t sleep. The problem is more that my brain doesn’t flick the on/off switch – which is to say the un/conscious switch – until I’ve been lying in bed for an hour or two*. Which is a waste of perfectly good consciousness.

After taking the questionnaire which recommended a 12:30 a.m. bedtime, I had the brainwave of spending that hour or two reading or knitting.

For each solution, a new problem. I have yet to master either reading or knitting in the dark, and keeping the light on kept the Caped Gooseberry awake – and no-one is recommending a 12:30 a.m. bedtime for him.

For each problem, a new solution. I used the candle-lamp of my ancestors, which provides enough light for me to read or knit by, but little enough that the Caped Gooseberry can go to sleep.

And this is where my dastardly brain pulled the ace out of its sleeve: I don’t go to sleep until an hour or two after the light is out.

It doesn’t matter how deliciously sleepy I get with the candlelight flickering on the page, how about-to-lose-consciousness I feel, once I take off my glasses and blow out the candle, my mind knuckles down to the serious business of the night: Think About All The Things!

Well played, brain. The ball is in my court, and… I got nothin’. I already refrain from drinking tea after mid-afternoon, I have a milky drink at 8:30 p.m., turn off things with screens, follow a wind-down routine…
What more can I do? Relight the candle and keep reading? Find a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, books 7-12, aka The Most Boring Thing Ever Written? Send a flock of neural sheep trotting one by one from parietal lobe to occipital lobe?

Do you ever have problems sleeping? What do you do? Do you know of any books more boring than the second half of the Aeneid? Please share below!

*My method of estimating duration of wakefulness without looking at bright cellphone screen for time: take ‘how long it feels I’ve been awake’ and divide by two.

February 16, 2015

the Question of Exercise

Being a full-time stay-at-home writer is a wonderful thing, but after nearly a year, I have discovered one area in which it is severely lacking – namely that of exercise.

Back in the days of the Dreaded Day Job, I used to walk to work. Not for the sake of the walk itself, but because the buses were so utterly unreliable. Which was probably just as well, all things considered, because the DDJ was an office job, and the biggest bit of exercise in the day was walking up the stairs in the morning.

Once I left the DDJ, that was four brisk 3km walks (1.86 miles, imperialists) which disappeared from my week. And did I replace them with several other brisk walks?
I did not. I like to do things efficiently, and it seems rather inefficient to leave the house just to wander around and then come back again. I do go for walks with the Caped Gooseberry, but chronic fatigue and brisk multi-kilometre walks do not go well together.

So here’s the question: what do you do to stay fit? What are your recommendations?

My criteria: simple, local, inexpensive, and preferably enjoyable.
I’m not looking to lose weight (nicely, nicely, thank you) or to develop a six-pack and bulging biceps – I just want to be fitter, and to have abdominal muscles capable of keeping my insides, well, inside. Ideas?