Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Okay. Nice boring post coming up. As you know, if you read my blog regularly that is, we are redecorating the back half of the living room. Now this used to be a seperate room. Where the square gap is in the wall used to be solid. There used to be a seperate door into this room. But the two rooms were knocked into one, and the old doorway was concreted up. We want to have the two halves of the room decorated differently. The idea is to make it look almost like two seperate rooms again. Before you ask, this is how it was when we moved in. It's not something we did and now dont like.
Firstly, let me show you what we have had to look at over the last four years. Excuse the cobwebs in the corner, that part was behind a bookcase, which we had just moved.
As you can see, the walls were pretty garish! Please excuse the mess around my computer. I tend to be a bit of a hoarder, and with decorating, everything just got shoved on those shelves.
So, we decided to just try the colours we had picked in one corner first, to see how they looked. When we stripped the paper off the walls, we found lots of dents and bumps in the walls that had been covered up by the paper. So, we had to fill the holes, level the bumps. Had lovely patchy walls for a while :)
A total mess eh? Annoyed us a bit, because it took so long. But, we finally got to the point where we could slap on a coat of paint to see if we liked the colours as much as we thought we would. We chose a real terracotta coulour, and a light terracotta one.
Now, the big patch of plaster you see by Clives elbow, is where the old door was. We had to totally cover the concrete with plaster or it made the paint look a different colour! But you can see just how much we had to level those walls. .
So, there you go. The first stage. We decided we like the colours, so we will put a proper coat one those walls. This was just to make sure they went together okay, and that we liked it. Now we have to strip the rest of the walls, no doubt finding more dents and lumps and bumps, and then level the walls, and then paint them.
So. Are you bored yet? You could always come and do the work for us :) Okay, so I am kidding. We have to take our time, but we are actualy enjoying doing this.
More photos and more tales of the unexpected (problems) later.
Be good!!
posted by tazfan at 9:30 am comment(s) made:
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Saturday, June 17, 2006
Another night of not sleeping. It's too warm, and I just cant settle. The heat isn't the only thing keeping me awake. But it certainly doesn't help.
Seems like the dogs like the new cooker and breadmaker too. Because I have been doing more cooking and baking, there are more scraps left for them. I know I will get over the novelty of having new stuff soon, especially when I have to start paying for my cooker!! First payment is due next month.
A nice guy I met on the Nascar.com chatroom has made me very happy. He's a Brit, lives not that far from me, maybe 30/40 miles. Small world eh? He noticed the Brit bit in my chatroom username, and asked if I WAS a Brit. When I told him I was, and where I lived, well, we hit it off quite well. Anyway, he gets NASN, the channel that costs too much for me to get, and he records the race and puts it on his computer, Then he burns it onto DVD-RW and sends it to me to watch. Then I send the disks back and he puts the next race on. Mart, if you ever find this, you are a STAR!! Babs, you were too. I still owe you a lot for what you did for me. Just as soon as I can get another litter of pups, I will make sure I pay you. If not all, then some. But what are the chances of going into a chatroom based in another country, and finding someone who lives that close to you???
The dogs are all very quiet. They dont like the heat much. We keep putting ice cubes in the waterbowls, but Shunya just steals the ice cubes and goes off to suck them!! Daft pup.
Starting on the re-decoration of the back half of our living room. The part where my computer is. I cant stand these stripes any more! They make me want to scream AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! See what I mean? We will be taking the wallpaper off, and just painting the walls. I have a nice real terracotta colour and a light terracotta. They go well together, and they dont clash with the liqeur, cream and gold in the front half of the room. I'll post pics like last time. Might not start painting for a few days, as we are trying to rid the walls of all the dents and bumps we found under the paper.
Well, off to get something to eat now. byeee
posted by tazfan at 1:17 pm comment(s) made:
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Friday, June 16, 2006
I am SO bad. I haven't updated my blog in forever! But I have just not really felt like doing anything. I have been having a lot of trouble with my ankles and my feet. They are so swollen.I don't know if it is water retention or something else, but they look like huge, over-stuffed sausages. Now, I know I am no super-model. More like a super tanker. But I can usually tell the difference between my ankles and my feet. At the moment its hard to say where one ends and the other begins.
I managed to get myself a bike of our local Freecycle group. I LOVE Freecycle. I have given loads of stuff away to people who can really make use of it, and I have got myself some pretty nice stuff along the way. Anyway, I got this bike. Just needs cleaning up a little as it has been stored in a garage for the last year. Then I can get out a bit more. I can cycle further then I can walk.
Along with my new cooker, I managed, through vouchers I get for doing some online surveys, to get myself a breadmaker. And I am having FUN with it. Today I made some banana bread, some cheese bread, two plain white loaves and a wholemeal loaf. And all for less then I would have paid for the two white loaves at the supermarket!!
I'm still not sleeping well, but at least I am getting SOME sleep. I have also FINALLY got my ENT appointment. The doctors at the hospital said I would get it and be seen within six weeks from my discharge from the hospital. Its now seven weeks since I got out, and my appointment is July 24th. Good eh?
My life is so boring. I just read what I have typed. If I was someone else, I wouldn't bother reading it. It is so much drivel. I need some form of excitement in my life. Other then Nascar, which I DO love, I feel like I don't really have a valid reason to exist any more. And no, I am not contemplating doing anything stupid. I just don't see a daily reason for me to get up and do anything. If it wasn't for the dogs, I would probably never get out of bed. There is nothing for me to do.
I better go check on how Tony has done in qualifying!!
posted by tazfan at 11:02 pm comment(s) made:
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Thursday, June 08, 2006
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! I am a happy bunny. Yesterday, I got my new cooker. I have needed one since before Christmas. The oven and the grill on my old cooker gave up the ghost. I had to get my sister to cook our Christmas turkey at her house on Christmas Eve! I like my new cooker. It's pretty basic, cos' that's all we could afford, but it has a working oven, a working grill, and all four hob plates work! I made us some pies for tea yesterday. Oh, but this oven cooked them so nicely. It has a facility where you can have the heat coming from the bottom of the oven, or the top, or both. So I cooked the pies with the all round heat, then finished off the tops with the top heat. YEAH!! Scrumptious food. And I am going to do some more cooking today. Don't know what yet. But I am. And Clive is going to make Toad In The Hole for our tea. Just in case you don't know what Toad In The Hole is ( I usually get sort of blank stares when I say it, especially to my American friends).
Ingredients:
100g/4oz Plain Flour
1/2 level teasp Salt
1 Egg
270ml/9fl.oz Milk
225g/8oz Pork Sausages
Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 200C, 400F, Gas mark 6 and grease a shallow ovenproof dish or Yorkshire pudding tin.
2. Place the flour, egg, milk and salt in a large mixing bowl and whisk until smooth and lump free.
3. Place the sausages in the greased dish in a single layer then pour over the batter. Bake in the oven for 40-45 minutes until well risen and golden.
Try not to open the oven door during cooking or the pudding may not rise.
Serve immediately with an onion gravy and chopped cabbage or other green
vegetable.
Serves 4.
There endeth the lesson on English cuisine for today :)
The dogs are SO confused by the new cooker. For a start, my old cooker was blue, this one is white. The old cooker was shallow from front to back, this one sticks out quite a way past where the old one ended. They keep going in the kitchen and looking at the cooker! Daft or what? :)
I am a bit peeved too. I was winning an auction for a Tony Stewart Shrek 2 diecast. I went right up to the limit (money that was given to me specifically to buy a diecast, by a friend). I was beaten by ONE PENNY!!! One penny, honestly. That really got my goat. I was NOT in a good mood for about 20 minutes. Until I went in the kitchen and saw my new cooker again :) Do you realise how hard it is to provide good meals with just a toaster, a George Foreman grill, a slow cooker (crock pot) and two working hob plates? I was going barmy. And I was so bored of what I could cook too.
Oh well. Off to see what I can cook :) See y'all later.
posted by tazfan at 11:16 am comment(s) made:
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Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Sometimes, I wonder why we defend other peoples rights to pursue their own enjoyment. Our neighbours are a middle-aged couple with two teenaged children. We go out of our way to make sure that we dont disturb them with the dogs, So we work hard to keep the noise down. If the dogs get too excited when they are playing, and start barking, we bring them indoors. We are as considerate as we can possibly be. Today, the girls from next door were playing out in their back yard. Now, you have to realise that our house is one of the middle two in a terrace of four. In other words, the four houses are all connected together.
The three windows and the door belong to us, the windows the other side of the fence and drainpipe belong to next door.
So now you can see how small our house is. The fence divides our back yard from the neighbours on the other side of us.
Anyway, back to today. The dogs had been playing outside. Fairly quietly. Then the doorbell rang. It was Steve from next door. complaining that there was dog hair blowing over the fence. I mean........ DOG HAIR!! Not huge great clouds of it, just little bits. The dogs are moulting, but not very much. It's a good thing Clive answered the door, and not me. When he told me, I was ready to go round and give Steve a yelling at. But I cant do that. We dont want to give them any resson to complain about the dogs.
I AM SO MAD!!!!
posted by tazfan at 6:58 pm comment(s) made:
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I see we are back to being able to post properly! Good. I like being able to put pics in my posts. Even if others don't want to see them, at least I can look at them.
Clive had to go see our normal GP today. On Saturday his hand swelled up and was very painful. It has been easing off slowly, but it still bothers him, so he went to see the doc, who has NO idea what it was. So that was a waste of time. But at least Clive got some good painkillers.
The dogs have been enjoying the sun and hot weather today, we should get up into the low eighties this week. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too hot for me. I like high 60's low 70's.
Shunya has discovered that if she stands with both feet in the waterbowl outside, she cools off a little. Stupid pup. She gets her feet wet, then tries to run inside. But we have laminate floors, and she just slips and slides everywhere. Kind of reminiscent of Bambi in the film, where he is trying to walk on ice! Here's a pic of took of Shunya and Inka today. Shunya is eight months old, and Inka is Four years old. Shunya is the same size as Inka now!!
HEEEEELP!! She is going to be huge when she is fully grown :)
posted by tazfan at 12:46 pm comment(s) made:
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Monday, June 05, 2006
Congrats to Matt. I could almost hear Babs yelling from here!! Of course, it wasn't the same with Tony being out of the car. But, at least Ricky made sure Tony got some points. As long as he stays in the race for the chase then I am happy. He gets another chance at being Champ again!
Although the weekend was good, today wasn't so good. Clive had an appointment with the vascular consultant at the hospital. Clive has what we were always told was bad circulation. But things have not been good for him lately. He cant work with his arms above his head, so simple tasks like painting the ceiling, or changing light bulbs, are all beyond him. Anyway, we went for his appointment. He was due to be seen at 2.20pm. Apparently one of the doctors was taken ill, so the appointments were delayed. It was 4.15pm before we got seen. Clive was NOT happy. But we did come out of the appointment happy. The consultant discovered that a lot of Clives problems are caused by a leaky vein!! And he can have a small operation to fix it. Which should help with other problems he has. So we are pleased with that.
My daughter moved into her new house on Saturday. She seems to have already got quite settled. Which I am glad of. Her baby is due at the beginning of August, and I wanted her to be able to sit and relax for the last couple of months. Now she will be able to.
Oh well. Here's hoping that Tony IS fit enough to drive next raceday. I want my boy back in his car! :)
posted by tazfan at 7:59 pm comment(s) made:
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