Bye-Bye Maisie

Saturday saw us say farewell to the demon in three legged cat form that is Maisie.

I have to say that as the days went on she did relax somewhat. The hissing and growling stopped almost completely, except when our cat Lorenzo went anywhere near either Maisie herself or any random bowl of cat food that happened to be in Maisie's line of sight at the time. I'm sure that  at heart she is an affectionate little cat  and towards the end of her stay she would even come to greet us when we came home after some time out. It did bring a little lump to my throat the first time she did it, as with only three legs, moving is a bit of an effort for her. There was something very moving about having this little ball of tabby fluff limping along the floor to come and say hello.

 

She was nonetheless  very pleased when Sue came to pick her up on Saturday and our cats were quite pleased to see the back of her I think. It was stressful for them having a strange and very vocal cat introduced into the house, and although we told them several times that she was only here temporarily I don't kid myself that they understood. I'm fond of my cats, and at least two of them are intelligent, but not intelligent enough to understand human speech.

 

Sue is de-stashing madly as the house she is going to in the Isle of Man is smaller than the one she lives in here, and she'll be sharing that one. Books and pictures are being seriously culled, which is why she delighted me by presenting me with this on Saturday

 

 

A print of Samuel Palmer's Coming From Evening Church.

 

I'd seen and recognised it as Palmer's in her house months ago and we'd had a bit of a chat about him; in my experience it's not often you meet anyone else who knows his work, but I'd never given the conversation another thought. It was therefore an unexpected and much appreciated gift [always the best sort] and I lost no time after she had departed with Maisie in taking down the watercolour of Skye that was hanging over the fireplace and replacing it with the Palmer. Where it looks very good indeed.

Oh OK, I won't hold my breath then

Regular  readers may recall this post. On Friday there was a letter from the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and I said to the OH 'Oh this will be my bone scan appointment'. Ha! Obviously I have far too much faith in the NHS, naïve young thing that I am.

The letter told me I had been referred for a  bone scan, which I already knew, and then said that the current waiting time for appointments was 24 weeks. It took me a while to translate that into six months. Six months for a basic out patient appointment!

 

Now to be fair I don't much feel like schlepping to Aberdeen just now, but there again there's no guarantee that I'll feel any more enthusiastic in six months time.

 

The penultimate paragraph begged me to believe that the length of wait was not anything they were complacent about and that they were doing their best to improve matters. So that's alright then.



In Which I have an Unsettling Day....

It was one of those days where if you could turn back time and make a different decision you would...for two reasons we should definitely not have gone to church this morning!

Reason the first - I saw my Ph D Director of Studies after the service and in the course of a general chat I mentioned something she had not known about and which it would be safe to say didn't thrill her. It wasn't anything to do with me except very peripherally, and if I'd had any idea that she would be annoyed by it I wouldn't have mentioned it. Have spent a lot of the rest of the day wondering what form, if any, the fall out will take, and feeling guilty about the whole thing. Sometimes I feel that I should walk through the world wearing a very secure gag....

 

And secondly,  when we got back to the car it wouldn't start. To be fair, it has been playing up for 10 days or so, but we have always managed to coax it into starting eventually and it is booked into the local garage for a look at on Tuesday coming. None of this was much help this morning though. The car wouldn't start, we live 15 miles away from the Cathedral, and there are no buses to where we live on a Sunday. Nary a one.

 

We phoned our friend J, she of the cat who needed to be fed, and fortunately she wasn't busy so she came to fetch us home. The car of course we had to leave behind in the Cathedral Centre car park, and no way of knowing whether it will start in the morning when OH goes into town to try and retrieve it. And if it won't it will need towing which sounds sort of expensive.

 

All in all it was almost 3.30 before we got home and had lunch which meant re-jigging plans for the rest of the day and I was just about to start on those when son no 1 skyped and we had a long chat; after which there wasn't a great deal of point in trying to get anything done at all. I did bake a cake, and finished a sleeve for a jumper and started another one.

 

But it could have been a much less stressful day had we just stayed at home this morning!



Craft-y Readers

may like this link.

http://therednosedaydolls.blogspot.co.uk/

I do.

A Rude Awakening

I was woken up this morning by John (Lord) Prescott and a high ranking policeman or former policeman from The Met yelling at one another. And no it wasn't a nightmare, it was Radio 4's so called 'flagship' news program, Today.

The cop was  shouting at Lord Prescott that he was badly researched and badly briefed. I forget what Lord Prescott was shouting at the cop. The presenter was making futile attempts to impose some sort of order.

The piece was about phone hacking; I didn't hear the beginning as the timing for the radio coming on was apparently for about half way through. I was fairly disgusted. We're supposed to get news and informed, chaired debate. What we got was a shouting match, full of sound and fury , which illuminated nothing. Except perhaps to suggest that whatever your accent (and the policeman sounded fairly posh) you're not above yelling in an attempt to make your point.

 

On the upside this may be an appropriate moment for me to share my very old John Prescott joke.

 

One evening John Prescott came into his living room and said to his wife Pauline 'I'm going out. You'd better get your coat on'. Pauline said 'Oh am I coming with you?' and John said 'Good Grief, no, I'm turning the heating off'

 

I think this is very funny. I told it to my Dad and he said Why does it have to be John Prescott? Well I don't know why, but it does, doesn't it? Even at the time there really wasn't anyone else to whom you could apply it, and now that the Labour Party is full of bright young things with meejer and politics degrees and more bothered about the marketing than the message, it's even less applicable.

 

And I have a bit of time for Lord Prescott. He knows what it is to actually do a job of work. His natural reactions to annoyance, provocation and snobbery haven't been trained out of him. He's clever but never feels the need to rub anyone's face in the fact. He's genuine, in an age when most of our politicians come across to many as utter hypocrites, in politics only for themselves, not for others.

 

But leaving aside the relative professions of the two interviewees, this was an appalling display of bad manners  by them both. The audience deserves better.

 

 

Brain Food

Back in the day when I was doubtful that I would ever get the Ph D green light my friend Anne asked if I would be interested in joining a class she was teaching at the Lairg Learning Centre in Literature of the North Atlantic Rim. At the time I could feel my brain becoming more like a dried out sponge every day so I said yes, subject to us getting the technology to work. Obviously I can't travel to Lairg every 2 weeks, so I join in by Skype.

So far we've only done an introductory session and there were a few microphone issues which I hope will be sorted by next Thursday. At that point we start discussing our first set text which is The Good Hope by William Heinesen. The local library didn't have it so I bought it from Amazon and it came on Tuesday. Here's a picture:-

quite thick, isn't it? In fact there are 384 pages of fairly small print. To read in 10 days.

Luckily, in a way, the weather here on Wednesday was foul. High winds, high seas, rain, sleet, hail, all day. So we built up the fire and stayed at home and did nice stuff. I got through the first 100 pages of  The Good Hope.

I have to say that it is actually quite interesting; it's set in 1669 in the Faroes, and although I'm finding the first person narrator a bit irritating I've been drawn into the picture it paints  of life in an isolated island community (I wonder why?!) I don't doubt that I will get it finished in time, although whether I will have anything useful to contribute to our class discussions remains to be seen.

We have a visitor....

 

 
 .;

 

The picture says it all really!

 

 

This is Maisie and we're looking after her for two weeks because her owner has gone to the Isle of Man to start work on her new house, preparatory to moving there permanently in March.

 

Maisie's owner, our friend Sue, is funny and clever and delightful. Maisie is not. Maisie is a yowling howling spitting hissing demon in cat form who doesn't want to be here thank you very much. And who especially doesn't want to share the space with three other cats.

 

The other three cats reciprocate. They do not wish to share their home with Maisie.

 

I have some sympathy with Maisie's point of view. She used to share her home with Sue and a big beautiful diabetic male cat called Willyum. Then Finn arrived, a boisterous collie pup. Not long after that Willyum died. And then last year Maisie had a fall and injured herself very badly. She survived, but had to have a leg amputated. So I can see that on top of all that being dumped in a strange house with two people she doesn't know very well and three other cats she doesn't know at all must be stressful.

 

This does little to reconcile me to the fact that 9 times out of 10 when approached she hisses, growls and lashes out with her clawed paw.

 

She goes home on 22nd of the month, so she's about half way through her stay. We're counting the days....

 



All Things Come to She Who Waits...

This has been a good week for getting stuff. To wit

1 a cheque from Petplan. Why is it that insurance cheques never seem to be for as much as you expect? If the bill is for £125 and you pay an excess of £40 surely that should mean the cheque  will be for more than £48. I know there will be a  reason, and that part of it relates to having to have poor little Floss put to sleep which the insurance doesn't cover.  I'm not up to querying it to be honest, because I'm sure it's right after all sorts of other stuff has been taken into account that lurks in the small print and if I do query it I shall only end up feeling ripped off. It's not as though we're now going to insure the next cat in line with Petplan; I've had enough of them and their 'the second class cheque is in the post' ways so when we do get round to insuring the next one it will be with someone else. Probably a ubiquitous supermarket so that we can get loyalty points. 

 

2  my new laptop, on which I am typing this very blog post. We ordered it last weekend and the website almost made my head explode, what with sneaking stuff into my basket and not being very clear, or even clear at all, about how to chuck it out back out again, making you register for 'an account; (I hate that. Why do they bother? It's not as though I'm going to be buying a new computer every week for goodness' sake.) Postage charge to the Northern Isles of course, even though for everyone else it's free unless you want it delivered on a Saturday (and I daresay if I lived south still and wanted a Saturday delivery that would rile me too) And then at the very end a whopping great charge for using a credit card! and an even bigger one for using PayPal. I was able to use my debit card for which there was amazingly enough no surcharge at all, but given that they are web only dealers from whom you can only order over the Internet, nothing helpful like proper customer service and a telephone order number, I think they should be biting the bullet, or at least shaving a tiny amount off their doubtless gargantuan profits and absorbing the pence per transaction  that  the credit card companies charge them for facilitating their business.

 

Anyway OH, who used to be very laid back but who shows a distressing tendency to get worked up about stuff these days hassled me constantly for the rest of the week to look up the tracking reference and see where the new machine was. I didn't want to do this, as it meant logging in to 'my account' which meant remembering the password that I had oh so grudgingly set up, but eventually, fed up with his nagging I logged in on Friday. This informed me that my order had reached a 'transportation hub' somewhere in Birmingham just that morning. Cue moans from OH about couriers, unreliability, non-updating of tracking software etc etc. and muttering from self questioning what is wrong with the word depot all of a sudden.  None of this prepared us for a knock on the door at 12.30 that day by a courier bearing my new laptop.

 

It's now set up and working and very nice, although it appears my Zylom games may not play on it which is a shame, and as I haven't been ale to purchase Office yet I'm a trifle limited as to what I can do with it. Sure it will be a great boon once it's all properly loaded with the necessary software though. And it takes up so much less space than the old PC and monitor.

 

3 Also on Friday a big bag of bright blue wool. The sweater- in -just -over- a -week having turned out so well I decided to take advantage of another wool offer and bought some to make version 2 . I need a lot of new jumpers which is why I don't mind doing the same pattern twice in a month. Especially as it is mindless and needn't distract me from anything I might find worth watching on TV.

 

4 And an e-mail - oh how prosaic, from UHI Grad School informing me that the Research Sub Committee has approved my application. The writer was awaiting delivery of my ID card after which she would be in touch again.

Now that's good news. It's excellent news for me, and quite good for you as it means I won't be banging on about it any more but I couldn't help feeling a bit - I don't know, a bit something. Would it have hurt to say they were 'pleased to inform me' about registration approval? Could they not have humanised it  a bit by adding 'at last' to the bit about my application being approved. And why on earth is my ID card going to wing its way from Aberdeen to Oban before being entrusted to me? Who knows. I sometimes think that actually doing this Ph D will turn out to be a doddle compared with the struggle I have had with TPTB to get it started. Lordy, lordy as they say. Somewhere.

What I did in January

This more an aide memoire for myself than anything else. It's so easy to forget things you have done and then panic yourself wondering how it is you waste such acres of time.

So, I knitted a cowl/collar type thing which turned out rather nicer than anticipated.

I knitted a  hat, out of some wool that I didn't choose.

I made OH a pair of bright socks (he's really into bright colours)

I made half a pair of socks for myself. I'm hoping the other half will get done this month.

I did a baby jumper. It still needs buttons, and there is a hat to go with it still on the blocking board, so you might see this again at the end of Feb when it's completely finished

Then there was the 9 day sweater, which is very cosy and a lovely colour and as I got the wool in a clearance sale cheap to knit as well.

 

And I completed a cross stitch project although I have yet to get it to the framers. I abandoned this many years ago because my husband said he didn't like the sentiment that went in the centre. As per the original chart this was Home Sweet Country Home. I couldn't ever think of an alternative that I was happy with, which rather took away my motivation for getting the thing finished. However when I mentioned this to him a few weeks ago he had, naturally no recollection whatsoever of ever saying he didn't like Home Sweet Country Home, but as you will see I modified it anyway.

 

 



 

I am sorry that you have to look sideways on for some of these, but the computer is resisting all my efforts to rotate them. As it is quite late and I have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to shower before the Sky Engineer arrives to see what, if anything, he can do to reinstate our satellite TV I must get myself off to bed. Sky  e-mailed us to say he would be with us somewhere between 12.30 and 2.00 but he had already called to say he would be here at 9.00 ish, winds permitting. The Great Excitement tomorrow is not the engineer's visit but battling with the winds myself, going to see my friend Maggie who is taking on the massive task of teaching me to use a sewing machine. Of which more, I am sure, anon.

For those holding their breath....

no, postie has not yet delivered my official letter of registration, nor indeed my student ID card, complete with 4 year old digital photo, from Aberdeen. Rest assured that I will let you know when he does. The moment I have finished goggling at them in disbelief.

Nor did postie deliver a cheque from Petplan, which according to the vet was supposedly sent out on 18th January. I had already decided that if it didn't come today I would contact Petplan direct which I duly did. I was informed by 'Joe' that the cheque had been posted last week, which sounded a bit vague to me. Joe also pointed out, less than helpfully I felt, that cheques were sent second class and therefore 'take a bit of time'. I did not point out to Joe that even allowing for Petplan telling the vet that the claim had been dealt with on a Friday and maybe not issuing the cheque until after the weekend, that still means the cheque 'has been in the post' for eleven days. Which seems a long time to me, even for second class. I get letters from Australia quicker than that.

 

I would be less suspicious about this had I not had to ring Petplan the last time we made a claim before this one, to be told more or less the same thing; cheque has gone out, but sent second class, may take a while, blah, blah, blah. On that occasion the cheque turned up two days later which I found very suspicious indeed.

What  postie did deliver, to my surprise and joy, was the deposit cheque relating to a June booking for our holiday flat. This booking was made several weeks ago by telephone and I had heard nothing since, nor had I taken any contact details from the person concerned. [Which is a lesson learned, I can tell you!] Since the booking was for two weeks slap bang in the middle of the season I had been castigating myself for my stupidity for long enough so getting the cheque, complete with address, phone no and e-mail address was a huge relief.

Good News, Bad News

So, early e-mail from Son No 1 this morning.  He has been unhappy in his Cheltenham job for some time. Probably from about day 7 I would think, and has therefore been looking around for a new one. He applied to a place called Cook, some UK readers might have heard of it. We hadn't, but then we live on the edge of nowhere it seems. Anyway Cook is a half direct managed, half franchised operation which basically sells upmarket microwave meals and in some areas has a café attached as well. The recently opened version in Cheltenham is a franchise and has a café and shop and Son No 1 has successfully applied to manage it. He seems pretty pleased, which is a good thing and I very much hope that he will settle down there because it seems a long time since he spent longer than six months in a job, and I would worry about him less if he could manage to stay somewhere  even for twelve months at a time.

 

There are some good and some understandable reasons why his life has turned into a series of short term jobs, but just because they are good and/or understandable doesn't mean that I am any happier about it.

 

Anyway that was the good news, The bad news came in a Skype message from Son No 2, who had just been informed by his flatmate [pause there for New Zealand joke about possums, if you know it], that he is leaving the flat at the end of February. Son no 2 now in a bit of a quandary as he doesn't need a two bedroomed flat, and doesn't want to pay all the rent himself, but is settled, has a contract for Internet provision there etc etc. It's not the end of the world for him or anyone else but it's just one of those niggly little things that we could all do without.

 

I'm sure something will get sorted though. Maybe one day I will wake up and not have to worry about either of them. Or is not worrying outwith the parental remit?