This week I have been obsessed about
Boots. No, not the chemist. The footwear. I have seen so many women with very cool and funky boots. I need to up my boots game. I want new boots.
But in fact, maybe I should just start wearing the boots I already have.
Muppet coats. This seems to be a new trend – fleecy fluffy coats that look like someone skinned a muppet and stitched their pelts together into a human coat shape. I’ve seen blue ones (Cookie Monster), brown ones (Fozzie Bear, or Ralph the Dog) and yellow ones (Big Bird?!). They may be fashionable and warm but I find them disturbing.
This week I have been watching
Ragnarok. Suffering perhaps a little from the end of the Marvel Avengers film series, we started watching this Norwegian TV series where Thor is reimagined as a dyslexic dorky teenager just moved to a small fjordland town. Full of the stupid anxieties of teenage life alongside Norse mythology and Scandi-noir murder, it’s intriguing viewing. And the scenery is beautiful so it’s a bit like a holiday too. The only thing I don’t like is it’s been dubbed. I don’t like seeing people’s mouths move differently to the words they are saying. But apart from that small issue, recommended!
This week I have not been worried about
Coronavirus. Am I the only one not panicking? I’m in good health (touch wood) and live in a country with a reasonably well developed and accessible health system. So I expect that even if I were so unlucky to develop the virus, I would be taken care of and I would recover. But I speak to other people and they are concerned. Even my sister in Australia said she might think about stocking up on some tinned goods just in case. I’m just fatalistic about it. It will happen or it won’t and worrying about it won’t change a damn thing.
This week I have been waking up to:
The smell of cat pee. When we first moved to this house there were lots of cats in the neighbourhood. But we didn’t have one oursleves at that time so we tried to befriend other people’s cats. In fact there was a cat who used to come into our house whenever the back door was left open, who thought our house was his second home.
But then he disappeared. And for a long time there were no other cats. And then we got a mouse problem. And to fix that problem, we got Manny, our own cat, who fixed our mouse problem, our neighbour’s mouse problem and a large part of the neighbourhood rat problem we didn’t know we had.
And for a long time there were no other cats.
Now there are other cats again, and one of them likes to sneak in through Manny’s cat flap, eat Manny’s food, and then pee somewhere in our house. Quite a few times this week my first thought on waking was “cat pee”, which is not how it should be. And it seems to be not proper pee either but that stinky territory marking pee that’s more of a mist, because we struggle to find where it is in order to deal with it.
I have developed my own spray in return – a mix of white vinegar and water – and I have been spraying this about in the hallway and kitchen until the downstairs of the house smells like a chip shop. But vinegar does trump cat pee and when the chip shop smell goes away so too does the cat pee smell. But for a period of time there are both smells and you had best fine a way to ventilate your house while that is going on.
We may need to invest in a microchip activated cat flap to stop this invasion by the other cats and the stinkifying of our house.
This week I have been:
Getting my kitchen disco groove back. After a week involving a special diet and a medical procedure (me) and several days of having a post-operative house guest friend, we had the first kitchen disco in some time on Saturday night. Kitchen disco was something I introduced to sneak some exercise into my husband’s life – and mine too, to be honest. It’s a way to unwind after work. It’s silly but it’s fun. Saturday night we tested my new 60s playlist and it worked pretty well.
This week I have been eating
Badly. As mentioned above, I had something medical done this week which required me to eat bland food for two days and then fast for a third. Bland food means no fruit, no vegetables, nothing colourful, nothing either any fibre. That was a sad two days for me! Fasting was almost easier. After my day in hospital, we allowed ourselves a treat of takeaway food, to recover from the bland food/fasting calorie deficit. But then…
Our friend who was in hospital this week and who came to stay at our place for a few days afterwards to recover also had a calorie deficit from her pre-operative fasting, so we had takeaway AGAIN. (Part of this was her being released too late in the day for us to cook anything, or at least that’s the excuse we gave ourselves.) Takeaway two nights in a row. And a lot of chocolate. I am looking forward to a much healthier diet next week.
Tales from Tobhamhor 