Tag Archives: vegan chili

Saturday 5th January 2019 – IT’S CURTAINS FOR ME …

new curtains place d'armes granville manche normandy france… here in this apartment.

Liz came round this afternoon with her sewing box and Terry came round with his tools. While Liz was cutting the curtain in the bedroom to the required length and sewing it up, Terry and I measured the curtain rods and cut them to length.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had bought some curtains from NOZ several weeks ago. We hung the new curtains from the rods, measured them to length and pinned them up. When Liz had finished the bedroom curtain she attacked the new ones that we had just pinned.

And when she had done that, she did the lace curtains in the living room too.

It’s really hard to believe, but this place is actually now looking like a home. If I’m not careful I’ll find myself properly settled in here.

Despite what I said last night, it wasn’t an early night at all. I got deep into something on which I was working and it was gone 01:30 when I happened to notice the time. I have a feeling that I’ll be paying for this in due course.

Leaving the bed wasn’t easy, especially as I was in the middle of a nocturnal voyage. I was in my old blue Cortina – PMB 270D – and driving down Welsh Row in Nantwich to visit a former work colleague. It was all left-hand drive stuff – steering wheel on the right, driving on the right. In the car I had three kerbstones in the car and was going to drop them off at his house so that he could make a parking place in the street but as I arrived he was pulling away in his car with his wife and kids – he’d been parked on a hatched area of the road where normally one isn’t allowed to park. I decided to call back later, and at that point I received a text from the guy saying “nice car” and a smiley. Down the hill I went and had to turn right but down here I had to drive on the left so I cut across the traffic at the traffic lights, just as a Ford Paramount coach appeared. I braked and he braked, but I just touched him ever so lightly and there was a tiny dent – a really tiny, barely perceptible dent on the front of his bus. It wasn’t anything at all but the driver started to make an issue of it, filling in forms and all this kind of thing. This annoyed me – not because of the actions of the driver but of disappointment with myself because it was such a ridiculous thing to happen and it was actually the second accident I had had that day and I was annoyed that the insurance people would start to do nasty things to me about it.

After breakfast I had a shower, a clean-up and a change of clothes. And then I hit the streets. It was a bit touch-and-go though. Caliburn’s battery has been sounding a little weak just recently but this morning it was a struggle for it to start. That will need replacing this week, I reckon.

I had to be quick around the shops because I’m expecting a postal delivery today. The parcels postie always arrives between 11:00 and 11:30 so I need to be back by then.

This morning I did the usual round of the shops – LIDL, NOZ and LeClerc – but didn’t buy anything at all special. In fact, it was probably the cheapest round of shopping that I have done for quite a while.

It was 10:40 when I returned, only to find that the postie had already been and gone. There was a message in my letter box to tell me that she would be back on Monday. But there was some stuff there – the powered USB hub and the powered adapter for the Roland Bass Cube amplifier. And it works too.

One thing that I like about having visitors is that it obliges me to tidy up and clean up. With the anticipated arrival of my visitors I cleaned and tidied the bathroom. It actually looks like a bathroom now.

After lunch Liz and Terry arrived and the first thing that we did, apart from have a coffee of course, was to watch a couple of videos. I’d received a package from the people with whom I’d travelled to the Arctic and included were two videos – the famous one of the iceberg capsizing and then a big one that Garrick Ng had made of the whole trip They made me all nostalgic and I’m ready now to pack my bags and return.

During the sewing bee, Terry and I went for a walk. Liz had been dropping hints about us being in the way and she finally stopped hinting and told us in no uncertain terms to clear off We had a wander around the walls and then went to the bar for a drink. By the time that we returned Liz had almost finished.

After Liz and Terry had left, I had tea. Liz had brought me a pile of home-made soup and some vegetarian chili. So pasta and chili for tea. And delicious it was too.

Rosemary called later. And we were on the phone for over 2 hours chatting about this and that. Rosemary is going back to the UK for her medical check-up next week and not looking forward to it.

By now it was almost 22:30 – too late for me to go for my walk. But there were a few things to do on the computer and no-one was more surprised than me to see that it was almost 02:00.

It’s been a long day, but it’s Sunday tomorrow. No alarm and so I’m going to sleep until I awaken.

Monday 18th January 2016 – WHAT A NIGHT!

I know that I went to bed early and tried to doze off to sleep but it wasn’t much good. Half an hour later, I was wide awake doing something on the computer again. It was beyond midnight eventually before I settled down and still couldn’t doze off. It’s been months since I’ve felt like this, hasn’t it.

As for my nocturnal rambles, I didn’t have the chance to go very far because it really was a fitful night. Although I only wandered off down the corridor once, I was awake, tossing and turning on several occasions. There’s clearly a great deal on my mind at the moment. And what rambles I did go on were quite disturbing – they certainly disturbed me and I shan’t repeat them on here because you might be eating your tea or something like that. Let’s just say that they were not for the faint-hearted, and anyone suffering from Coulrophobia (12% of the population of the USA apparently) will certainly not appreciate them.

I was up and about at the usual time and had to wait for the nurse – but I didn’t have to wait long for the nurse. I passed the time by making the fire flare up and putting more wood in it – we still had glowing red embers at 08:00. The nurse was unlucky today. He couldn’t make any blood vessel in my left arm work and in the end had to switch over to the right – something that I’ve been trying to avoid since I had my blood clot. But at least there was some blood there – I’d told him that the reason why he couldn’t find anything in the left arm was that it had all gone.

But it hasn’t all gone – in fact my blood count is up to 8.7 at the moment – the highest that it’s been for quite a while. The transfusion that I had last Friday evidently worked. But it will diminish over time and I’ll probably be back in there this coming Friday – they certainly didn’t call up tonight.

heavy snowfall january 2016 sauret besserve puy de dome franceAnd that’s just as well because we’ve had a really heavy snowfall today. Although most of it melted by late afternoon, at 14:00 it was looking quite ominous and I certainly didn’t fancy going anywhere at all. And neither did Liz and Terry. They had a car to rescue from near Menat and when it started snowing at about 09:30 they nipped off quickly before the roads became too bad, leaving me behind to hold the fort and man … "PERSON" – ed … the fire to keep it topped up.

In exchange, I asked Liz to post the letters that I had prepared and to pick up the next load of injections for me from the pharmacy in St Gervais. It’s pointless sending two cars out to the same place, particularly in this kind of weather. I stayed in and did some 3D work and some of my Animation course.

What we are studying this week is an animation technique called pixilation, which is where you use stop-motion photography to film humans so that it seems as if they are very realistic cartoon characters. It’s not what I would call animation and not what I want to learn, although many others on the course disagree. I’m hoping that pretty soon we’ll get onto Computer-generated animation, which is what I really want to do. However, it makes a great deal of sense to study the basics and learn the techniques.

Liz made a beautiful vegan chili for tea. Nice and hot which was just as well because earlier she had cut our hair. Mine is now really short and so the weather will certainly get at me if I have to go out, so loaded up with red-hot chili is a sensible solution.

So that’s it. I’m off for yet another early night. The joys of Swansea City against Watford I will miss tonight.Too much excitement is bad for me.