What are we calling it this week?

We're having a new room built on the front of our house. We've been intending to do this for a long time, but for many reasons, mainly to do with the availability of builders and the weather it's being done now. It's almost finished which is a good thing as I am sick of it not being finished, but I am at the 'It will all be worth it in the end' stage.

Originally it was going to be a small sun porch. Lots of houses on Orkney have small sun porches/tiny conservatories on the front. This is partly to do with enjoying views and sunshine and long summer days in the summer, and partly for catching and using what little light there is in the winter. Traditional Orkney houses, like ours, have thick walls and small windows. This is very good for heat conservation, but tends to make the interiors dark.

Several years ago we enquired of a local firm about putting on a conservatory. They came and talked to us, took details, said they would send a builder round to discuss siting and size and they never did. I chased them up twice and got 'I'm very surprised the builder hasn't been in touch Mrs A, I'll chase him up' twice, after which I decided that they weren't going to be coming and wrote them off as a bad job. Which is a good thing because if I had been waiting with bated breath for them to contact me I'd be dead now,  because they never did.

Anyway then we had the new kitchen, and some expensive holidays and a bad year  and then we did the bathroom and bedroom and now the new room is taking shape at last. Because the builder decided it was best to do a pitched roof tied into the roof we already have rather than a flat one we decided that rather than have a measly little conservatory we would make the new room a reasonable size - a size worth building really, which is what we've done. As a result we could no longer call it the sun porch or the conservatory and I call it inter alia the sun room or the garden room and everybody else, when they're asking about progress call it Your Extension.

It's almost done and once it's finished I'll doubtless come on here and shout hurray. Meanwhile here is the story of the whatever room, so far, in pictures.

 

digging foundations (not us the builder!)

 

the slab - which I was sure was too small

 

 

look at the size of those windows - who's going to clean them?

 

going up....

 

lots of storage - those boxes go round two walls. And it's not too small at all.It's bigger than it looks in  this picture.

 

 

We still need the outside rendering finished and the decorator to come back and put some colour on the walls and the electrician to wire in the lights and the sockets properly. But we're almost there.....



Project 60: Number Three.

Baking Muffins.

It's a sad fact that a lot of the things I've thought about doing for Project 60 are food related. Especially since as I've said previously I am not a foodie in any shape or form. Mind you at least these food related things are  relatively cheap and easily achievable. A lot of the other things I've thought of doing involve travel and lots of expense. And some of the others require preparation,  of the losing some weight first variety. Hence Number 3, like numbers 1 and 2 is all to do with food.

 

I'd never made muffins. I quite like muffins. Ergo I made some.

 

There are photos. (I did the muffins ages ago, but I've only just uploaded the photos onto the laptop, hence the delay).

 

 

 

Half were chocolate chip, on the left, obviously, and the other half were lemon curd. Those whose memories stretch back a while will remember that making lemon curd was the second new thing I did. I bought a little gadget in a shop designed to take cores out of cup cakes and muffins, and although it didn't work brilliantly, it worked well enough to allow me to pop some lemon curd in the middle of the muffin and then pop a top back on.

 

Close ups

 



they were delicious and I can quite see making muffins becoming a bit of a fixture. I did some lemon and blueberry ones only this morning and popped a little muffin recipe book onto my Amazon wish list so that I can ring the changes.

A Bijou Rant-ette

Many years ago when I was first, a teenager, and later a young woman looking to establish myself in a career I, along with the rest of my generation, was fed an insidious myth about gender difference in the work place.

It ran along these lines. Men could compartmentalise, women couldn't. This meant that when men went to work, whatever was happening in their lives elsewhere was left at the door. They came into work, shed all their non-work problems and agendas and were able to apply themselves 100% to work without anything else affecting either their work performance or their relationships with co-workers. Women on the other hand, brought all their problems to work with them. They got distracted. They couldn't concentrate on their work or what people were saying. They cried or lashed out or drew all the other women in the workplace into their little whirlpool of worry or misery thus spreading the non-working infection beyond their own desk or section of the conveyor belt or whatever.

 

This is cobblers. It worked for a long time to keep women out of workplaces and later boardrooms, but there is no woman of my acquaintance who hasn't worked with a man who all too obviously has brought his outside problems into work with him on a regular basis. In fact a boss once complained to me about the rudeness of his staff in not greeting him with a 'Good Morning' when they met him for the first time each day. I gently explained that  the reason no-one ever said Good Morning to him before he had greeted them was that they never knew whether they would be rewarded with a smile, a grunt, or a comment along the lines of 'Well it might be a good morning for you but some of us have things to worry about.....'

 

Last week I was with a man who very obviously has something bad on his mind. It was  pre-occupying him to the exclusion of just about everything else. The something can have had nothing to do with me, and I rather resent the way that whatever it was, was taken out on me regardless. Here was someone who obviously couldn't compartmentalise and I suffered because of it. Strangely enough even when my mother was dying which is, you know, quite a preoccupying thing, I never lost my good manners. I carried on saying please and thank you and listening to what other people had to say to me. I didn't sigh heavily at them, get defensive with them or give voice to gnomic utterances which would have done nothing except make them feel inadequate, uncomfortable and in the way.

 

Funny that. You might almost have said I was compartmentalising.  But that can't be right can it? 'Cos after all only men  can do that.