Not ready

This morning I was not ready to open the curtains, and discover that the garden was green: but I did. It was still covered in white when I went to bed. Now there are a few tiny patches of snow, but most of the garden is just very, very wet.

Yesterday I was not ready to settle my remaining parent into a care home: but I did. It is clearly the right place, but I feel this is the kind of thing I should be doing in my 50s, not now. I felt a bit like I was letting my baby start at playgroup, with all the worries of whether they would look after them.

On the way home, I bought a magazine (not a craft one, a general woman's magazine) and a packet of ginger biscuits (it seemed more indulgant then chocolates) and did nothing useful all evening.

Ob: carved pumpkin (Part 3 and 4)

Remember that pumpkin? It's still in the garden, and still turning into a post-Halloween horror story.

Here it is on the 7th November - a week after carving:


But that isn't the end of it: on the 13th November:


PS Don't forget the giveaway at the bottom of my last post. At the moment you have a very good chance of winning.

Ob: carved pumpkin (Part 2)

Same pumpkin, same pile of leaves.



But what a difference a few days makes:



(Did you notice the white eyes in today's pumpkin: that's from the mould.)

Someone else's attic

"Everyone wants them kept" said the recently retired professor of history at Oxford, when discussing the collection of New Scientists from the 1950s which I have acquired "but preferably in someone else's attic".

Messy Lives

When my parents were well and healthy they did things like knit multiple ponchos for my brother's bridesmaids, and did much pruning in our garden and travelled to Machu Picchu and met princes and former ambassadors. I talked proudly to the other mums about what they were doing at playgroup when I collected children. And my friends talked about the interesting things their parents did.

And then my parents got old and ill. And when they decided to move house, I had to travel for two hours (each way) to meet the estate agent and show them round the house. And then my mother went into hospital, and the move happened around my father, and I signed the things that had to be signed, and orgainsed the storage unit. And when I mumbled about this to my friends at the school gate, a different set of friends told me about the daft things their aged parents and parents-in-law were doing, and I realised that my parents were part of a different set of parents. Some people's parents might be climbing mountains, and talked about with pride by their grown-up children. Other people's parents found climbing stairs beyond them, and their grown-up children kept quiet.

And that is today's installment of messy Tuesday.