bunn

So that was 2024

2024-12-28T22:38:04Z

We whizzed down briefly to Devon before Christmas to see my mother, Pp's goddaughter and her parents and distribute presents.

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Cake and celebration

2024-05-14T20:38:18Z

My sister is visiting for a week, from Canada, and picked up my mother for a trip to visit us in Wales, since I hadn't been able to go for a while due to flu and Rosie not really being up to the journey..

It was good to see them if only for a couple of days, and we had a good sunny day out to Angle beach, coming home via Freshwater West, then took my sister out for a brief boat trip in the afternoon.

Since it had just been Pp's birthday and two days later, Mum's, I made waaaaay too much cake, and since my sister was among us, I made all the cake vegan and I'm just going to note which recipes I used in the hope that I might actually be able to find out if I want to make them again.

This was the carrot cake: https://theveganlarder.com/super-delicious-vegan-carrot-cake-using-aquafaba/#recipe - Philadelphia vegan not-cream-cheese is very convincing in a cream cheese icing.

And this was the chocolate cake: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/9555948/Chocolate-and-beetroot-cake-recipe.html only I replaced the three eggs with the water from a tin of chickpeas, and made a fudge icing with chocolate and vegan butter instead of doing the beetroot icing. It worked surprisingly well.

I did not attempt to make the cakes sugar-free or low-sugar. It seemed like changing too many things, and anyway, Pp has been pretty successful in reducing his size according to the rulings of the diabetes nurse. I wish I had done as well! Still, the summer lies ahead. I am resolved to swim and walk more energetically, and eat more salad, and (from now on) a bit less cake.

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Assorted Things of May

2023-05-09T22:57:50Z

Saturday was Pp's birthday. I had promised to make a cake and a meal, which I did, with some success in the most important department (taste) but less success in the visuals. I intended to make a chocolate tower-cake, but my tower proved structurally unsound, and even the addition of a bamboo skewer did not entirely prevent listing and eventual crackage.

We watched the Coronation (well, I went out and walked the hounds for part of it, but I got back in time to see the Drumming From a Horse, which was my personal highlight of the event. That and the mounties, who against stiff competition, I think had the best horses. )

The forecast was for rain, but in fact the sun smiled all afternoon. I mowed a lawn. I had intended to try for No Mow May, again (in which you don't mow till the start of June to allow time for the lawn to flower) but I think the wetter spring and dog pee combination had resulted in grass that was too lush to favor wildflowers. So I've mowed all but the spots where I have camomile and yarrow growing, and I have done my best to mow around those. I think I'll have to try to mow once in March next year, that might knock the grass back for long enough to let the wildflowers do their thing.

I have a bunch of plants in pots that I really must plant out soon. Still, a few more days won't hurt them.

The local street party was a fairly laid-back beach party on Sunday (due to the forecast for Saturday being dismal) so we dropped by that briefly to admire the fire and chat with a few people. After that, we went out on the river in the boat, and journeyed upstream on the tide many miles, to the very fringes of Haverfordwest. There was a fraught moment when we had to change the petrol tank and couldn't work out why the engine wouldn't re-start afterwards, but it was resolved happily. We do have an emergency paddle, but it would have been a long paddle home.

I've been oddly exhausted since Sunday and keep finding myself forced to stop and nap: unfortunate, since today I was dealing with a wrangle with the Oldies Club email that involved a teleconference with Google, and the Shop on the Borderlands had 28 orders to pack today, including a huge one to Australia. Still, we got it done, despite the minor niggle that the Royal Mail parcel-picking-up service is terribly glitchy and you never know when you'll have to just haul everything off to the sorting office. At least the sorting office has given us permission to ignore the 'no parking' signs when we come in with a car-load of post to send. We are allowed to park in one of the official van slots, as long as the vans are out delivering at the time.

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It's been a month! What have I been doing?

2022-06-15T14:31:57Z

( Cut for length because it's basically me rambling about things as they come into my head )

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Dungeons Llandragons

2021-11-04T12:15:05Z

Last week, we were roleplaying in an actual physical group for the first time since 2019! Which was very nice, though slightly overwhelming as well because PEOPLE. :-D

We started a new D&D 5e campaign, which involved a lot of puzzles and mysteries, which I'm not going to even try to write down, because we had a PIN BOARD for clues, complete with pins and notes and mad string:

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To Devon and back

2021-08-08T23:32:22Z

Having realised that at some point we are probably not going to be up to lugging piles of books up and down stairs, we are futureproofing and getting a lift. But I felt that probably Theo would be very enthusiastic about Helping With The Lift, and that this might not be the fastest way for the work to get done, so I collected the hounds and invited myself to visit my mother for a week.

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War in the East of Middle-earth

2019-11-06T00:07:01Z

It's taken me a while to complete this: arrival of puppy proved timeconsuming.

After part 1...

Pan out from the quest for the Numenorean Prince Irimon to a wider scale:the great unknown lands in the East of Middle-earth, for there are many forces moving as Sauron's plans begin to fruit and grow, in Raku, across the great grassy Plains of Alcar, in the great Harad desert and as far south as Ibavi. We moved to a Huge Map, where we could see the many forces moving.

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Rosie Roo's Big Boating Adventure

2019-10-01T00:41:36Z

(plus: her two clueless sidekicks...)

This is basically a giant photodump, but I wanted to put some photos from our holiday on here, and not having written it up as I went along, I'm cutting my losses in order to make a post of some kind!

Here are Rosie & Pp outside the pub we stayed at in Yorkshire. It's a long way from Cornwall to Inverness. We were not inclined to drive all the way in one day, and Rosie certainly wasn't: when she saw that I wanted her to get back into the car next morning, she made quite a determined effort to go back into the pub...

But! We arrived on the boat, and it was less difficult to get her into the cabin than I had feared. It was a large and very comfortble boat, with lots of room for dog and humans. We had two spare bedrooms for our stuff! It was a bit chilly at night, but fortunately I had brought a jumper & two blankets for Rosie, and the human bedding was more than adequate.
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I return! We've been on holiday to Scotland.

2019-09-24T22:45:08Z

Our twentieth wedding anniversary this year! We went to Scotland and hired a boat and motored all the way along the Caledonian Canal from Inverness to the far end of Loch Lockie and back! (OK, that isn't actually very far, but it was our first time hiring a motorboat, and there were a LOT of locks to navigate, plus Loch Ness, which can get a bit rough, so it was an Adventure.)

I have lots of photos, but here's the art first:

We had some marvellous misty weather and sunshine slanting through the clouds. This was a view from one end of Loch Lockie. We moored here for two nights, and in between, we went down the loch, which I think was the most beautiful loch we visited. I painted this mostly from life, sitting on top of the boat, which is a cool place to paint from, watching the mist flow past the mountains as the sun went down.

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What I did on my holidays

2019-07-18T16:52:43Z

This is partly because I and Rosie went away with my Mum to stay for a week in Maldon, which is where she was born and lived until she was 18 and wiped the Essex mud off her feet with alacrity, to go off to university.

Although Mum still has cousins in Maldon, and we've seen them occasionally, I'd only actually been to Maldon once, when I was... probably about six? For a family wedding. I can remember almost nothing about the place from that visit but a vague impression of mud. This proved to be accurate, as far as it went, although actually Maldon is considerably more pleasant as a place to visit than I was expecting.

First of all, if you ever need to go from Cornwall to Maldon, do not go on a Friday. The route involves the M5 (holiday traffic going home and on holiday) the M4 (Contraflows as far as the eye can see!) and the M25, which as we all know is specifically designed to be the shape of the character Odegra, meaning “Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds” in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu. Then after that you get to do the A414 which for a busy multi-carriageway A road is in appalling poor condition, and has so many holes and patches that driving on it at more than 60, which everyone does, feels like it's going to shake you apart.

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What I did on my holidays

2019-05-11T21:04:16Z

... Yes, we stayed in the same county that we live in, and went canoeing. But on a new river! A river we'd never explored before!
We went to stay by the River Fal, which flows south from Truro to the port of Falmouth.
This is where we stayed. It looked out over the creek, and the coast path was just to the left.

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Wandering the river

2019-04-20T10:43:45Z

Happy Easter!

I have taken about 999 photos of various expeditions I keep meaning to at least mention here but in the meanwhile, I shall just note that my sister has been visiting from Canada, and so yesterday we first went for a Rosie-Led Walk, in which Rosie led us Up and Up until there was no more Up available and then we had great difficulty persuading her to go back down again. But eventually we got her to go back to the river, which was much cooler and very pleasant, and while we were there, we saw some dippers and a pair of distant but definite kingfishers.

And then in the evening we went out on the river at Wacker Quay, since at long last the sun is not only shining but the wind has dropped too. Our canoe is not much fun in wind. We paddled up to St Germans, which has a handy little slipway where we were able to swap paddlers over so all three of us got a chance to paddle. Today my shoulders are a bit tired but it was fun. Very calm and quiet with huge reflecting hazy skies.

No photos of that because although I did remember my camera, I forgot it didn't have a card in it. Oh well. I snapped some pics on my sister's camera, anyway, which is one of those superzooms, though I imagine those will not come to light till she gets home and rummages through them. It was interesting to try out the amazing zoom, though I prefer to have a bit more control over what the camera does, it wasn't easy to work out even how to adjust white balance, since it's designed very much as a point-and-shoot.

Oh, and we saw a fox wandering through a field, from the canoe.

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A charcoal-grey beach on a steel-grey day

2019-03-24T18:30:35Z

It was my birthday... goodness, it was ten days ago! Anyway, we bunked off and went to the seaside, even though the forecast said it was going to be 100% humidity with 16% rain. The seaside with the least rain was at Seaton, where the beach is an unfestive grey, although somehow, mysteriously, the sea managed to be more or less blue despite the refusal of both sky and sand to collaborate.

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