Piccalilli

I find the more I make at home, the less I want to buy in the shops. I am appalled by the prices and dissatisfied with the quality. This can lead to the odd crisis, when I fancy something that we have run out of. I can't bear to purchase an over priced substandard substitute from the supermarket so I have to do without until I can find the time or the ingredients are ripe, to make it.
Piccalilli is a gardener's pickle really, as it infinitely flexible in what can go in it and in what quantities. My recipe book only calls for 6 lbs of mixed vegetables, suggesting beans (dwarf, broad or runner), red or white cabbage, cauliflowers, cucumbers, celery, gherkins, marrows, onions, shallots, peppers and green tomatoes. You get the picture, ideal if you have a glut of something or alternatively not enough of something else to make a meal out of.
This year my gardening has been deficient so I had no runner beans to put in and as I only have about four green tomatoes left, I decided I would rather leave them out and coax them into ripening instead. So I was left with an overgrown courgette and a bought cauliflower, cabbage, pepper and onions. They have to be chopped up small and left to soak in brine. The book says 'cut into uniform small pieces' but I prefer to judge it by what size vegetable I would like to meet in a cheese and piccalilli sandwich. As for the brine the book recommended a pound of salt to a gallon of water but I probably used half of this, and then left the vegetables soaking in a bowl with a plate on top to hold them down.
I actually did them on Monday, but was then occupied with garage doors and Oliver until today (yesterday's outing was only slightly more successful than last week's by the way, I got stung by a wasp, we only had time for half an hour on the beach and ended up lost in rush hour traffic in Hull).
So here are the vegetables ready in the pan with the brine washed off :

Now to make the sauce.
For a hot sharp piccalilli which is how I like it blend
 3 teaspoons turmeric
 8 teaspoons ginger
 8 teaspoons mustard powder
and 6 ounces sugar
with two pints of distilled vinegar and put it all in a large pan with the vegetables and bring to the boil and cook for twenty minutes. Then using a slotted spoon, scoop the vegetables out of the spicy vinegar and pack into jars.

The wide necked funnel is a left over from my chutney making days and is really useful for any preserving job.

After all the vegetables are out of the vinegar, mix two ounces of cornflour with a couple of tablespoons of vinegar and add to the spicy vinegar in the pan and boil to thicken it. 

Looks a bit like custard in the photo but I can tell you it smells nothing like custard!

Then pour the sauce over the vegetables in the jars until covered . I jiggled about a bit with a spoon to make sure the sauce was distributed equally and that there were no air bubbles in the jar.

The book recommends that the piccalilli should be left four to six weeks to mature and I think this is reasonable because at the moment the sauce is very sharp and vinegary, it needs time to mellow.So there we are, 6 and a half jars to add to my store cupboard. That should see me through the rest of the year and possibly the year after.

Of Garage Doors

Well they are finally finished, and I am hugely relieved.They started out like this:

And three days and much hard labour later, they ended up looking like this:

More important than what they look like, they now open and close and are not in danger of blowing down in high winds. The area in front of my garage is used by the district nurses visiting my next door neighbour and I didn't relish any of the complications of having a garage door fall on their cars. 

Anyway, I couldn't afford new doors and my carpentry skills aren't up to completely making new doors, so my only option was to  do a make over on the old doors. I knew from when we repaired the dormer roof that  sheets of 18mm exterior grade plywood came in 8ft x 4ft which is exactly the size of each door, and cost around £20 each. From that it seemed a simple idea to take the doors off their hinges and glue and screw the new wood over them and then give them new heavy duty hinges.

By Saturday, I had given each plywood sheet two coats of paint  in the garage where I could do it in the dry without having to use a stepladder. I had also sanded and painted the wooden surrounds, which meant by Sunday there was nothing left I could do without taking the doors off.

The trouble was that the doors were already up when we moved into the house twenty seven years ago, so I was trying to remove rusty bolts that could have been in place for forty or fifty years.

 I got them all off except two, which I struggled with all day. I went off and bought a metal blade for my jigsaw and then realized I couldn't get the blade close enough to use. I tried to drill it through but my drill ran out of battery. Eventually, once the drill was recharged, I drilled the wood round it and pulled it out that way. The second bolt just needed the wood drilling a little round it to let me get a spanner to it. Then I was left grappling with a completely free 8ft door. 

There was a distinctly wobbly moment when it looked like the door was in control over me, but then I got the upper hand and lifted it on a trestle table. The actual gluing and screwing process wasn't difficult apart from the old door was warped out of line and I think the new wood had  warped during its time in the garage so the two pieces had to be clamped together before I could screw them. By the time it was done it was about seven in the evening and I was too tired to have confidence in my ability to measure the spaces between the hinges properly so I had to call it a night leaving the garage missing a door which was not what I wanted. 

 On Monday, talking with a neighbour, convinced me that I would be better off using bolts rather than screws, so I set off for the ironmongers on the other side of Leeds.I had a meeting in the afternoon so it was evening by the time I had the hinges up, and was ready to ask neighbours to help me lift the door into place. Unfortunately the measurements had not been quite right and the door was too high up to close properly.

 Tuesday morning, I had to try and take the hinges off and drop them by an inch without taking the door off or putting too much strain on the new hinges. With the help of David, my neighbour, and using blocks of wood as levers we managed it,
And I was free to start on the second door. After all the trouble of the first door, I can't say I was looking forward to the second door but it was easier second time around. For one thing, I had borrowed an angle grinder which made short work of cutting through troublesome bolts. The only hitch came at half past four, when I realised I was a hinge short, which meant another trip across Leeds, driving through rush hour traffic to get to the ironmongers before it shut. Then I should confess, that I screwed that hinge in the wrong place so when with the help of the neighbours again, we lifted the door into place, it would only rest on the top two hinges. I needed to move that hinge and cut a inch of plywood off the bottom. I was getting distinctly tired now but I wasn't going to give up so close to the finish, and by eight o'clock it was done. I'd even screwed a bolt on the door to keep it shut.
There are a few more bits to do, the paintwork needs touching up and there are two battens that are still to be screwed on the bottom but they can wait. Today is going to be spent relaxing with Oliver (hopefully a happier picnic than last week) and then tomorrow I am harvesting my first honey!

Winter Approaches

Winter is coming; the weather today is predicted to be twenty degrees and sunny, and I can still wake up by natural light before 6 am but there has been a definite turn in the seasons. Summer with the lazy feeling of one easy day following the next, has gone. In its place is Autumn with its underlying notes of panic. Summer may whisper 'Relax, lie back, enjoy yourself' but Autumn is saying 'Hurry, hurry, hurry, so little time, so much to do'.
Like the animals and birds, I feel the need to prepare for winter. I have been a disappointment to the garden this year, not enough has been sown or planted but the fruit has done well. There was enough rhubarb and red currants to mix with bought strawberries to make a summer fruit jam and there were five pounds of gooseberries to make into jam.

 Now the blackberry season has started,

I gathered three pounds on Friday

 with the promise of much more to come, they will go into the freezer for a few weeks until the apples ripen to make blackberry and apple jam and also pies and crumbles, the taste of autumn, warming food, served hot with custard. I currently have in the kitchen, one overgrown courgette, which with cauliflower, cabbage and onions I will cut up and leave in brine for a few days ready to make piccalilli. Most important, on the subject of food, I have reserved the loan of a small extractor from the LBKA to be picked up Wednesday so next week I will be attempting my first honey harvest.
However autumn is not just telling me to get my cupboards well stocked for winter, it is saying that I only have a month, maybe six weeks to get repairs and DIY done. I have a list as long as my arm of tasks that need to be done, before I can relax in security but there simply won't be enough time to do them all in six weeks, especially whilst preparing to sell soap as Christmas presents, so taking one task at a time I am preparing to renovate my garage doors.

I can't afford the hundreds of pounds to replace them and even if I could I don't think I will ever be sufficiently interested in garage doors to want to spend the money on them, but they are in a bad way. The last time I remember sanding and painting them, I developed mastitis and as my youngest daughter is now 19, that is quite some time ago.
The doors are made of marine plywood on a wooden frame and the wood has started rotting especially near the hinges which in turn are rusty and bent.

The plan is to take the doors off entirely (if I can get the rusty screws out), cover them with new sheets of plywood and put new tougher hinges. The drawback is that this will make the new doors very heavy so getting them back up will be a struggle. I will let you know how I get on.

Oliver and the Unsatisfactory Picnic

Wednesday is Oliver's free day from nursery and it was such a lovely day today that we decided to go for a picnic as soon as we had got various bits of business out of the way.
We packed sandwiches (jam and cheese and cucumber) and as I haven't been baking much recently whilst dieting, I popped into Lidl and bought a doughnut for Oliver and a cookie for Rosie and Quavers for us all.
We finished our business in Headingley so it was only a mile or two's drive further up Otley Road to Breary Marsh, a small nature reserve opposite Golden Acre Park

It was about half past two by then and unusually for him, Oliver was showing signs of being tired and asking to be carried, we diverted him with fallen tree trunks and horses hoof prints and explanations of why a stream only flows in one direction but it was hard work and a relief when we reached the focus of our walk Paul's Pond, a small, tranquil and unexpected lake complete with coots and water lilies.

 Oliver and I sat on a fallen tree trunk and ate sandwiches whilst Rosie scouted for a better spot.
All she could suggest was that we sat in the sun on the wall by the edge of the lake, so we moved there, Oliver cautiously sitting close to me. Unfortunately, as Rosie swung her long legs over the wall, she caught the edge of Oliver's half eaten doughnut and sent it into the lake.

Now if you coax a tired and grumpy toddler to walk with the promise that at the end of it there will be a doughnut with pink and white icing on top and then  part said toddler from said doughnut, the outcome is not good. The lake was no longer tranquil, the coots scooted. All offers of replacement food were rejected, at least, he accepted part of Rosie's cookie but his heart wasn't in it, he put it to his lips but doughnut mourning tears were still falling.

We gave in and set off home. Oliver cheered up with the promise of an ice cream from the van in the car park, set off at a good pace and promptly tripped over a tree root, fell full length and cut his knee. More tears. I scooped him up and carried him away, realising as I did, that he must have wet himself as he was now transferring a damp patch to my t shirt. He was persuaded to walk again, by more talk of ice cream, and then I found one perfect raspberry growing wild which I offered him. He likes raspberries and took it appreciatively and promptly dropped it. Oh dear. Rosie hunted desperately for any more whilst I looked for the water bottle to wash off the dust.
The promised ice cream seemed to be getting bigger and bigger as we increased the bribe but it seems to have done the trick.

Finally we reached the car park and the ice cream van nirvana but the day of disasters was not done yet. I ordered a cone each for me and Rosie and was asking Oliver what he would like, when I realised that the twenty pound note I had got out of the bank in the morning, was still sitting in the pocket of the paint splattered jeans I had changed out of. The ice cream man was very nice about it and said to bring him the money later, I gave my ice cream to Oliver and we set off and drove to Otley, found a cash machine, got the money out, returned to Breary Marsh, paid the ice cream man, drove home. Oliver fell asleep in the car.
This was intended to be a tale about having fun with children whilst introducing them to nature and not spending much, instead it is best summed up as aaaaaagh!

The Never Ending Quail Tail

In my last post I had left the quail in two hutches, Goldie and Una happily in one and Tim unhappily in the other. Despite laying an egg nearly every day, Una may not have been too happy, as over vigourous mating by Goldie had led to her developing a bald patch on the back of the head. Clearly both cages needed more females.
This was reinforced on Saturday when I had a complaint from a neighbour about the amount of noise Tim was making at night. Now a male quail doesn't crow like a rooster but he can let out a surprisingly loud and piercing cry at irritatingly irregular intervals, like having hiccups or listening to a leak dripping in the night, just when you think you can relax and go to sleep, he will do it again.
The complaint gave me the push to get on the phone and source some females. First I tried the elderly breeder I bought Tim and Goldie from in April. His son answered the phone, as his father was too distressed to answer any more calls from Asian males wanting groups of male quail only. Normally male quail are more difficult for a breeder  to get rid of, as quail live most happily in a ratio of one male to two or more females. The fact that he had received four calls by Saturday lunchtime, all wanting males only, led him to believe that they were wanting to celebrate Eid by staging a cock fight and the idea sickened him to the point of handing the phone over to his son. In any case his quails were only a week old and too young for the sexes to be identified.
Eventually I found a poultry breeder near Penistone who had spare females, and I arranged to drive down on Sunday morning. Although the farm was only a few miles off the M1, it was well tucked away at the end of a mile long rough track which had me fearing for my car's suspension. It was lovely to pass a field of donkeys though, one of whom was feeding a foal. The farm was my kind of farm ie a bit ramshackle with nettles and brambles growing between the poultry sheds. It was an old stone-built Pennine farm and every stable and barn and outbuilding had been converted to hold poultry of some kind. In addition there were hutches with rabbits, two friendly dogs who came over to sniff us out and very cute kittens playing in the sunlight on the cobbled yard. The quail were kept in a fenced off area in a converted stable and Graham, the owner took my box and climbed into the cage amongst what seemed to be hundreds of quail and then rapidly checked for sex. All he was doing, was checking to see if they had a spotty breast (female) or a rust coloured breast (male) but he did it so quickly that I got the impression (untrue of course) that he was picking up handfuls of quail and throwing the discarded males over his shoulder.
I returned to Leeds, most satisfied with my box of five quail (the ever useful Wilson's Christmas hamper box of course) and introduced three of them to Tim.

 I can say that Tim is no gentleman, without bothering to say welcome to the cage, he was on the first one like only a long frustrated quail can.
Happily we haven't heard a peep out of him since, and I went to bed pretty satisfied that my poultry problems were over and looking at interesting recipes for Chinese Pickled Quail's Eggs.
Unfortunately they weren't. The bald patch on the back of Una's head seemed to draw the attention of the two new females in her cage and they pecked at it overnight until it was a bloody mess this morning.

So I once more have a quail in my kitchen, as I have isolated her to give her a chance to rest and recuperate in peace.

Knowing how Una fought her way back to health when poorly as a chick, I have every confidence that she will recover.

As promised, a Chicken and Quail Special!

As I said yesterday there has been much going on here poultry wise over the last month. Having to keep all the occupants safe and happy has at times been rather a juggling act. I bought a secondhand rabbit hutch to get Tim, the quail with the deformed foot, away from Goldie the other male quail as they were fighting, but then I was forced to use this second hutch as a broody coop for Amelia Chicken,

and bring Tim back into the large plastic crate in the house we had used when the quail were chicks.
This was far from ideal as he would kick over his food and then spill his water and then his droppings would become mixed in the soggy mess and the whole thing would quickly start to smell. I learnt afterwards from those up in Feng Sui that I had placed this malodorous box in the wealth corner of my house. Possibly why wealth has been fleeing from me recently.

 Once the chicks were hatched, I started moving them during the day into a special enclosure I had put together on the lawn, from chicken wire and a beach shelter, which meant Tim could go out into their hutch during the day making it easier to keep the crate clean. Solving the problem entirely, I bought a large rabbit hutch on ebay for a tenner, the type with living quarters upstairs and a hole in the floor leading to a downstairs run. I totally failed to appreciate however, that the hutch which was 4 ft high by 4 ft long would not go in my car. Now my car, is a 7 seater people carrier, and with the seats down will easily take the 6 ft tables I use for the shows, so I never expected trouble with a rabbit hutch, but  I think the maximum height and width of the car was 110 cm and we needed 120. The seller offered to cut it in half and remove most of the base. I agreed thinking it wouldn't take long with a jigsaw and then watched in embarrassment as he laboured with a handsaw  for forty minutes on one of the hottest days of the year. After 25 minutes it occurred to me that I could arrange to come back another day and bring my own jigsaw, but I didn't feel I could mention that after he had struggled so long. Eventually, thank god, he succeeded and we hefted it into the car. The following day all I had to do was cut a piece of wood to size (using a jigsaw) to fill in the hole in the floor and Tim was in a home of his own. He still needs company, and more females are also needed in the hutch across the way, where Una has suffered from being the sole recipient of Goldie's lust ( the back of her neck is beginning to look quite bald). But she is laying.
Here is a picture of one of her eggs compared to one of Mary's.

And this is what poached quail eggs on toast look like. They cook in about a minute, incredibly quickly, I think I will need a bit of practice before I can make the perfect poached quail's egg.

As I said before, the chicks hatched during the Great Yorkshire Show. I had ordered 6 mixed breed eggs from ebay and they sent me 3 Orpingtons and 3 Brahmas and one of each hatched. I will probably get a better hatch rate next year, as I have learnt several things about the brooding business. One is to get the hen settled on the nest before introducing the eggs. Amelia had gone broody and was sitting tight on the nest box but when the eggs arrived I moved her and them into a broody coop, so then when I encouraged her off the eggs every morning for her to eat , drink and exercise she would forget and return to the nest box instead of the broody coop, making me worry about the eggs getting chilled. But it was lovely to hear cheeping from inside an egg a couple of days before the due date and even lovelier to see the little hatchling and then a pleasant surprise to see another, the day after. I had wanted Orpingtons, because my friend has one, and it is a lovely plump cuddly hen who finds flying difficult. Brahmas are also large fat placid hens but when I had looked in my chicken breed book I had been put off by them having feathered legs which I thought would get dirty easily.
The Brahma chick however emerged with the cutest fluffy trousers

Both chicks are excessively cute and Amelia is a very good mother looking after them like well a mother hen,

 She clucks constantly near them and they cheep back so that they always know where each other is. They are approaching 4 weeks now and are a little taller and have developed real feathers on their wings and can even fly short distances but are still very much in need of Amelia's protection. Chickens normally start laying when they are about 5 months old, sometimes later in pure breeds and as they don't lay much in winter I am not expecting the chicks to lay until next spring (assuming they are female of course).

Amelia has not laid since she went broody and I don't expect her to whilst she is looking after the chicks, which left me with the prospect of just one laying chicken for months ahead. I needed more. Mary was in any case lonely, she didn't like the hen house by herself and had started hanging out with next door's chickens and putting herself to bed with them. I investigated the website of  The British Hen Welfare Trust and discovered that they were taking a delivery of ex battery hens that would otherwise be slaughtered in a weeks time so I put my name down for three. These deliveries are to a volunteer co-ordinators farm and as she has her own life to live all the chickens must go the same day they arrive. This takes some organisation and we were all given time slots to turn up in. I arrived with two sturdy cardboard boxes, paid a £10 donation and was given three bedraggled hens to take home.

 When bored hens will peck at each other's feathers as a result all three are very scarce on wing feathers, two have bare bottoms making them look distressingly like oven ready chickens in a supermarket and one poor chicken is in addition lacking a tail.

I lifted them into the chicken house with Mary (the plump, healthy almost white one in the picture above) and left them to get acquainted overnight. The next day I opened the hatch but left it up to them if they came out or not. By mid afternoon the bravest who is also the most feathered was outside. I have named her Briony after Sir Brian in the poem who was as bold as a lion. Slowly and uncertainly the others followed and then it was such a joy to watch them behaving like chickens for the first time in their lives, scratching the ground and snatching at bits of leaf and grass.
I was warned that sometimes the shock of the change can be too much for them and they can die unexpectedly within a short time I will just see how things go. I did have a scare during the week when I thought I might have broken Briony's leg. Being as bold as a lion she was reluctant to go to bed one night. Now it was 9.30 and getting dark and raining and I wasn't at all reluctant to turn in but Briony was resisting all persuasion and so I ended up chasing her round and round the house 3 or 4 times (she is surprisingly nippy for a supposed convalescent) until I had her pinned against the wire netting which enabled me to grab her firmly and shove her into the house. The next morning as she came out, I saw her leg give way under her, and realised that she could put no weight on it. Guiltily, I rushed inside, and read on the internet about making splints from lolly sticks and keeping the bird isolated, (didn't want this I'd only just got the quail out of the house) but when I went to inspect her she was feeding and managing to get herself around and by teatime she was using the leg although limping so I was much relieved to downgrade the injury to a sprain.
The ex batts have been here a week now, and every day I scrutinise them for signs of improvement. I have read that new feathers take a couple of months so we will have to live with there awful appearance for a while yet. Their eyes are looking brighter though and I think their combs are redder. Unbelievably they are still laying, at least 1 or 2 a day between them. They don't understand what nest boxes are for so I am keeping a sharp eye out in the run. One of the first eggs was very thin skinned with a network of very fine cracks at one end but they seem to be normal now. We also noticed that despite being freshly laid they didn't poach as well as our own eggs, the white didn't hold together as well. I have no idea why this might be.

There you are then, fully updated on all the poultry happenings here. The next things will be finding more female quails, watching the ex batts recover and finding out what sex the chicks are but I will try to keep you informed.

A Brief (Ha Ha) Update

Good Morning All !
I realise that it is several weeks since I wrote, and that fact has been languishing on my conscience and featuring daily on my to do list (or facienda) for at least the last week. The trouble is that the longer I left it the more there is to write about and the bigger the task appears. I think I shall just have to write an overview today and then write several more in-depth blogs. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for heavy rain, a perfect day for sitting at a computer.

Firstly the soapy business, the Great Yorkshire Show was very hot and very busy and a little like an endurance test, I was there from 7.30 am to 7.30 pm being pleasant and chatty and basically saying the same thing over and over again 'It's all made from beeswax, an amazing natural moisturiser. I am a beekeeper you know' By the end of the day I was sick of the sound of my own voice and pitied my poor neighbours. Like at Bramham I met an amazing bunch of entrepreneurial women and in quiet periods the marquee was almost like a study group or tutorial. The key topic of discussion was Twitter, some were old hands, some just starting (ie me - @Gilliganwood feel free to add me if you are that way inclined) and some were complete novices.  Whilst on the subject of e-marketing my website  www.gilliganwood.com is now open for business. I won't say the website is complete, the pages on the benefits of beeswax are looking very bare and the 'What we've been doing' page is also in need of updating (another candidate for a wet Monday) but should anyone have an urgent need for a beeswax based skin balm they can now buy online.

Secondly the poultry, so much has happened here that they will definitely need a post devoted to them. Una the quail has started laying! She now lives in a hutch with Goldie, Tim being separated, in another hutch, both hutches in urgent need of more females. I saved up Una's eggs and made mini scotch eggs for us to take on a beach picnic. They were very cute and had the huge advantage of not having as much egg as a normal scotch egg. Amelia turned broody so I bought in some fertilised eggs and let her sit on them. She (or I) timed the whole thing really badly as they were due to hatch in the middle of the Great Yorkshire Show, which led me to refuse the opportunity of going for a drink with the words 'No, I must rush home, my eggs are about to hatch', the ladies eyed my dubiously and agreed that they mustn't hinder me. Two out of the five eggs hatched, a black Orpington and a Brahma. If that isn't enough poultry excitement, last Sunday I collected three ex battery hens and brought them home to recuperate and provide me with eggs. More about all of them plus photos, tomorrow.

The bees, also have kept me busy, partly this was my fault as being occupied with the business I left them to their own devices, which inevitably led to swarms. One of the swarms decided to settle at the top of the hawthorn tree that I didn't prune last winter. Remembering how I felt when I was pruning in the winter I asked my neighbour, Dave who is a climber for help. He involved his son, Kris and then in the way of our street, my other neighbour, Nicky came out to offer advice and ended up filming it all on her mobile phone. If possible I shall put this too on the blog in days to come. The next step I have to tackle in beekeeping is harvesting the honey. Last year the weather was so bad that there wasn't any honey to harvest but this year I have at least one full super, undoubtedly there would have been more if I hadn't let them swarm. Although there are ways of extracting honey without using an extractor, my plan is to put my name down to borrow one from the Leeds BBKA.

I'm afraid I have neglected the garden a bit this summer, all the hopes I had for growing my own veg didn't really happen. I have a few potatoes and carrots, a handful of tomatoes and one courgette. There are some onions in the plot but I have neglected them so much that I don't know how they are doing. It has been a reasonable year for fruit though, I picked a pound of red currants and added it to a pound of rhubarb I'd stashed in the freezer earlier and two pounds of bought strawberries and made a surprisingly tasty jam. The gooseberries have reached their peak of ripeness this weekend. I have been watching them carefully as I adore gooseberries that are ripe enough to be sweet whilst still keeping their crunch. I think the only way to achieve this gooseberry perfection is to grow them yourself. Promisingly there are berries on the cranberry bush this year that are looking pretty big, although still green. Hopefully there will be enough for home grown cranberry sauce at Christmas.

There has been work done on the house, as I am totally fed up with how bad my internet connection is and I am going to seek a new provider. However, I have suspicions that although the loss of internet for 12 hours at a time, is the fault of the provider, the extreme slowness of the system is probably down to my wiring. If I am going to let a telephone engineer into my bedroom to sort this out, then I would rather that he did not have to pick his way over sewing machines, spare computers, soap ingredients, wool, clothes and everything thing else that has found a home on my bedroom floor. This tied in nicely with the Mortgage Free in Three's challenge to chuck 100 things in 10 days http://mortgagefreeinthree.com/forum/the-100-things-in-10-days-challenge/  After several days work I can now see vast expanses of floor, I reckon by next weekend I should have it all in shape. Rosie is also busy throwing things out as she is moving into a flat for part of the week from September and is in the process of reassessing her belongings in a what to take, what to leave and I wouldn't wear that again if you paid me mode. So far she has managed three bin bags of clothes to charity shops and several bin bags of rubbish. I think I will write more about Rosie's flat in future if she will let me as it is going to be an interesting challenge to take a  basement  student flat furnished with basic necessities and turn it into something homely and creative on next to nothing. Her eldest sister Maddie has already crocheted a blanket for her. Incidentally since I showed the WIRE ladies, some blue genitalia that Maddie had knitted for a friend, she was ever after referred to as 'your daughter, the obscene knitter'.

Finally on the health front I remember mentioning in January that I needed to drop a size by summer so that I could fit into a wetsuit I'd bought in the sale. Frankly this never happened and by Bramham I had mysteriously gone up a size! I don't know how that happens, I take my eye off things and the weight just rushes on. So I have finally started dieting again and since Bramham have lost a stone. I don't want to say too much about this though, as other people's diets are not interesting. I will just say that having worked in an office where people were always counting points or on red days or green days or having complicated regimes where they couldn't mix carbohydrates and proteins, I am simply cutting back on my food. I do realise however that on a limited intake every calorie has to pull its weight so I am trying to go for healthy foods high in vitamins and minerals.

Phew! I think that is the end of the update. I bet you're glad I went for the brief version with no pictures or involved stories. I will save those for the next few days.