Soledad's Journal

I started the day with the grocery shopping as we had run out of bread and almost of milk, too. Thank God for the Lidl at the next corner.

I did a bit of cooking today; not much, just a cauliflower Strudel (sorry, noadvertising), with ham and grated cheese, as usual. Yum!

I also did a tiny bit of crafting: worked some on mini-scarf #6 (go figure, I'll be halfway through by tomorrow) and on pot holder #4. Neither of them is finished yet, but I'm taking my time. This is a hobby, and I only work on them when I feel like doing it.

I had a nice, long nap in the afternoon. When I woke up, Mum confessed having caused a small flooding in the kitchen. It wasn't her fault, though; these modern taps aren't suited for old people whose motor skills aren't what they once used to be. Poor soul had to clean the whole working surface because she didn't want to wake me. Which was silly, as now she's exhausted like whoa, but she's stubborn that way.

Tomorrow I'm planning to make an interesting sort of strawberry jam: one with basil and balsamico. I'm curious how it turns out; bought only half a kilo strawberries for the experiment, in case it isn't really good. If it is, I might make some for the fair later.

... only without the nap this time, because I'm an idiot.

So, I did the grocery shopping today.

I've cooked a nice, thick potato cream soup, which Mum liked a lot; for me, it was too spicy. It didn't seem to taste of, you know, potatoes. We'll still eat it for another two days because I always make a lot of these things, so that I can avoid cooking as long as possible. We had some leftover Topfenknödel for afters; that took care of the lunch.

I then half-emptied the balcony because it hasn't been properly cleaned for two months and now I can't avoid it anymore. God, I hate housework.

Then Mum suddenly wanted to go for a walk, so we did that. She actually managed to the playground next to our building, which was considerable progress compared with yesterday's five steps. We might reach the corner café one day again!

Then I forced myself to start knitting another mini-scarf and to write roughly two lines of dialogue, so that I could have something out of the rest of the days. Aside from the stupid YouTube videos, that is. For which I sacrificed what could have been a nice, long nap time. As I said, I'm an idiot.

- I washed my hair.
- I gave Mum her weekly shower.
- I unboxed all the remaining cookies to make room in the fridge for the homemade Schoko-Bons - alas, I didn't get to make them because Mum wanted to cook today, and that means a blocked kitchen for most of the day and an unholy mess afterwards, since she was making Schnitzel, which is a very messy undertaking.
- I worked a bit on my little Santa hats. By my current speed, they'll take forever to be finished, which is actually my own fault: I keep adding more tiny details because I thing they would look cute. They do, but stitching berries on tiny straps of felt is fiddly work. Those berries are small like the head of a steel sewing pin...
- I helped Mum a bit with the cooking, which mostly meant moving heavy objects she can't move herself. The kitchen seems to shrink somehow when we are in it at the same time...
- I watched quite a few idiotic YouTube videos. Blocked a few dozen more channels to prevent temptation. Still not enough, it seems.
- I gave Elise a phone call; she's going to come over tomorrow to fetch her cookies. I hope she can stay a bit this time, even if it means postponing the making of the Schoko-Bons again.

We survived another visit from our talkative chiropodist lady. Like in the recent two times in a row, she asked to watch her favourite series here. I escaped via doing the grocery shopping. Mum endured. Afterwards she talked to her friend (the one that had visited on Monday), who, it turned out is also watching the same series. So she updated Mum about the basic settings. A good thing that the series runs out next Monday. I wonder what the lady will watch next time...

As always after her series, we were both brain dead for the rest of the day. So brain dead that I fell asleep during "The Repair Shop" repeatedly. So I gave up and slept for roughly two hours. Now I feel that I might be able to function again.

That was what we had today. Mum's oldest friend - also beyond 90 - took a cab to us in the morning. They phone each other daily but haven't met in person for years. The old lady lives in a building without an elevator and Mum is no longer in the shape to climb up two storeys to her. So, they had fun.

While they were discussing "God and the world", as the Germans say, I made the iceberg salad for today's lunch. We had fish and chips, which I bought frozen at Lidl and only had to shove in the oven. Not a real delicacy - I had much better fish and chips in a nearby eatery - but it spared me the necessity of cooking, so I was happy to compromise.

When Mum's friend left, I did a short grocery shopping. Then we had lunch and watched some telly. Well, YouTube, actually. Then I called my friend Elise to discuss ways to get her Easter cookies to her. Currently, she spends most of her day in an outlying village because her father needs to be cared for, and her hubby is mostly useless in such things. Alas, we still haven't found a solution; which is bad for me - I want all those cookie tins out of my fridge to make space for real food!

Drained by so much social life, I slept an hour and a half afterwards. Which means that no crafting or writing got done. But my tired old bones - not to mention my tired old brain - needed the rest.

So Mum had today an appointment with the hairdresser who's kind enough to make house visits and pretty her up in our kitchen. She looks twenty years younger now and is ready to celebrate. :)

As for myself, I made some long overdue phone calls - to the insurance lady, to the financial advisor guy and to my neighbour, the IT guy. Hopefully there will be some serious computer update, soon. I'd prefer to keep my Windows 7, but there are websites that don't accept it anymore, so needs must. Gah, I hate getting used to new things!

I also started another three mini teddy bears - one for Elise's other grandson and two more as preparation for the Christmas fair. Those two will get little Santa hats and knitted scarves. Four-stitch-wide scarves of 20 cm length are about my limit where knitting is concerned, but at least I can do those.

We were still eating Evie's goulash soup; for the third time, and Mum is determined to eat the rest tomorrow. This is the kind of dish that gets better with each new heating up. I'm actually acquiring a taste for it... once a year. I'll need several weeks of very light food to recover from this masterpiece of traditional Hungarian cuisine. *g*

Tomorrow there will be baking again. I'm giving the alfajores cookies a try, and since they only require egg yolks, I'll make Amaretti biscuits from the egg whites. Those are completely flourless, so Evie will be able to eat them. Bad enough that she developed a gluten intolerance in recent years, she ought to have some yummy things for Easter, too.

We had beautiful weather today: sunshine and 16°C in the early afternoon. So after I had done my shopping trip, Mum and I finally got out of the house. The two things took me the whole morning and early afternoon, so I was accordingly exhausted after that. More so as I had to visit several shops, all relatively close to each other; close enough that taking the tram wouldn't help, so I walked all the way to the nearby small shopping centre at Savoy Park. The distance isn't great, one kilometre tops, but I'm clearly no longer used to good walks. Gone are the times when I had to jog down a fairly long street to work and back...

Fortunately, we still had leftovers, so no cooking was required. I was terribly lazy for the rest of the day, taking a nice, long nap and reading on the iPad. No writing, no crafting - I simply didn't have the energy. Getting old is no fun.

Back in Romania we'd be wearing little badges called "märtisors" on this day. Mum once had a colleague who also hailed from Transylvania and gifted those tiny things upon us every year. A long, long time ago...

Anyway, we had nice weather but stayed indoors as Mum's knee is acting up again. Arthrosis isn't something that would get better with time, unfortunately. So we had a quiet day. I wrote a good chunk, almost finished the new teddy (I'd have needed fifteen more minutes with natural light but didn't get it) and we rested a bit. And watched telly.

In the evening my friend Evie called. She's going to do a play with her lower primary class for the school's annual cultural event and asked for help with the dialogue. We agreed that she'll come over on Tuesday after her shift and we shake the little scene into proper shape. For many years I used to do plays with my pupils for these occasions, so I have a lot of experience with this.

And now I'm going over to picowrimo and make the daily post.

... aka the first part of my Easter collection. Whether there'll be a second part is still to be seen, but I thought I'd post a pic of these cuties. Or rather a link, since Pinterest no longer allows pics posted there to be embedded into LJ entries, for reasons of their own.

Lookie, lookie:
https://hu.pinterest.com/pin/341640321754807406

Otherwise it was a quiet day. We tried to recover from the big cleaning frenzy, ate leftovers, made a heroic attempt to walk till the other entrance of our building (successfully; this was the first time Mum actually left the house in this year) and I made a lot of phone calls. To my goddaughter who had her name day today. To my friend Evie. To my friend Elise who's still down with a nasty cold she got from her youngest grandson. Toddler germs are dangerous. To my friend Erna (our art teacher). We also got a call from my oldest cousin. So it was a socially active day but much less so where physical activities are concerned. I'd take it every time.

We needed to gather our strength, as tomorrow we're going to have a visit from our talkative chiropodist lady, so...

I had plans for this day, since we postponed Mum's birthday for tomorrow. Since I didn't have to cook, either - long live leftovers! - I planned to do a few things for myself. Like a bit of crafting, a bit of writing, a bit of resting. Well, the last one actually happened, but the first two...

I started with cutting out the basic parts of an elephant plushie - only to discover that I didn't have any grey thread with which to sew them together. After having spent a small fortune on red and white thread yesterday, I'm no facing the necessity to do the same with grey thread. Why is it that one can have entire boxes of thread in various colours (which I do!) but never the only one needed at any given moment?

As for the writing part, I intended to add another scene to Chapter 18 of "Alternate Caretaker" and/or write the opening scene to Chapter 19 (the story has actually 22 written parts at the moment but 4 of them are so-called interludes, so I'm still at Chapter 18). Well... neither of those things happened. I'm brain-dead, totally unmotivated and couldn't think of a single thing that would work.:((

So we watched some crap telly, Mum happily accepted congratulatory phone calls (and one video call from H. and her immediate family), and then we took extended naps. And now I'm mourning all the time I've wasted today. *sigh*