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.

Guess What?

Tomorrow we're going south. Again. This time we're off  to move son no 2 into the Glasgow flat, lock stock and barrel, which will mean quite a few  trips between Kirkcaldy and Glasgow, not to mention quite a few trips to the Glasgow IKEA.

Also looming is a visit to the Ph D supervisor, but I've taken the edge off that by arranging to meet someone I know so far only from the virtual world of Ravelry straight afterwards, in what looks like a rather wonderful café cum bakery cum delicatessen.

 

I doubt I'll blog while I'm away, although you never know...

Wrapping Up Greece Part 2

Be warned, there are no pictures this time. Which is a bit annoying for me, and I'll tell you for why. When we got back to Athens on our final afternoon the coach driver offered to drop off anyone who wanted to go to the National Archaeological Museum at the door there rather than the hotel. Since we were quite keen to go, mainly because all the exhibits from the sites we had visited during the week had been vacuumed into the all consuming maw of the National Museum ( and I wonder what that reminds me of?) we took advantage of this opportunity.

 

And we had a great time. We started off with lunch in the café which was busy but efficient and possibly the nicest food we had in Greece all week. The only downside for me there was the visiting pigeon which of course alarmed and upset me. (I may not have mentioned this previously. I am seriously phobic when it comes to pigeons, but embarrassed generally to admit it). However it got shooshed away and I bolted the rest of my lunch before it could gather sufficient wit to return.

 

Then we took to the galleries, and spent most of our time where the artefacts from Mycenae were displayed. It was so beautiful. Obviously I adored the jewellery, but was surprised to be also captivated by the pottery. I've done my fill of walking, glassy eyed, past cabinets and cabinets of Roman pottery lamps and vases in museums from Italy to Portugal - they must have been produced by the million - so I've never really thought myself a fan of ancient pottery. But these were glorious; beautifully shaped and  balanced, in warm earthy colours; really I'd have been happy to have some of the jugs in my cupboards.

 

And all the way round, rather than take photographs, which was allowed, I was planning what to buy postcards of at the shop. I knew there was a shop and I sort of assumed that there would be racks of postcards of all this beautiful stuff. And a good book in English about the site of Mycenae.

 

Well, how wrong can you be? The shop was large, dark, and badly stocked. The book section was very limited, even in Greek, let along in foreign languages, and there were no postcards to be seen. And not just because it was dark. It was because there were none.

 

I won't expand on that. Except to say they are missing a trick, which in my experience is unusual in a museum.

 

Wrapping up Greece. Part 1

I can't help feeling that since I've posted half my Christmas cards, albeit they are going out a tad early this year, it's more than time I finished the tale of our trip to Greece. Especially since it is taking longer to write it up than it took to experience.

 

Nafplion was our last port of call really; after three nights there we were back on the bus and heading back to Athens. We did this by way of the Corinth Canal; not that we travelled through it on a boat you understand, just drove over it on a bridge. And then walked back over it on foot, then returned on foot on the other side, all the time tangling with visitors from the Far East all determined to take pictures of themselves with the canal in the background, and never mind how long they blocked the very narrow pathway for everyone else.

 

The tour guide had given the canal a big build up, so it came as rather an anti-climax to me as I had been expecting something much longer. When you stand on the bridge you can actually see the sea at both ends of the canal simultaneously which wasn't what I was expecting, but I'm sure that it is still a huge feat of modern marine engineering. Or something.

 

Pictures? Well yes I do.....

 

 

oh look, in this direction you can see the sea!

 

and look, the other way you can see the sea too!

 

this is some weird European habit this year apparently. Young couples putting padlocks on bridges. It's a sign that they are locked together forever by their love. Colour me cynical but I wonder how many of them are still together now that summer's over?  

 

Nafplion

Nafplion is a small town on the coast of the Peloponnese. It is also somewhere where, we were told quite a lot, real Greeks go for their summer holidays.

This does leave the question of where artificial Greeks go for the summer and I suppose that must depend on what they're made of. If they're plastic they probably go to Scandinavia, because if they went to Nafplion they would melt.

We were also told it was a charming little town and I suppose it was, although I think taking people there when it's so hot, leaving them there for three days and booking them into a hotel without a swimming pool is not the best itinerary decision a holiday operator ever made.

Anyway see how charming you think it.

 

the view from our hotel room balcony - looking a bit dark there

 

The Main Square.  Yes it is raining. In fact it is chucking it down. This happened all three evenings we were in Nafplion. It was a total nuisance.

 

Nafplion once belonged to the Republic of Venice, as commemorated by this rather sweet little Lion of St Mark. I know, you have seen better carved lions in your time. Haven't we all?

 

One of the 'charming little streets'

 

Lunch. Yes seriously. This was lunch one day. I shall stress how virtuous I was by pointing out that mine was the Peach Melba so I was at least getting some vitamin C. And I couldn't finish it. The chocolate concoction on the left was the OH's. No vitamins. And he finished it too.

 

You may be getting the impression that I wasn't too taken with Nafplion and if so you are probably right. If there'd been a pool we could have used I expect I would have loved it, ditto if the hotel had had a restaurant we could have eaten in where an evening meal for two would have come in at less than the cost of flying back to the UK and eating there.

 

But there you go, don't let me put you off. It is a pretty little town and I expect that by the time we reached it I was just a bit fed up with the other people on the tour, and the heat, and it unfairly coloured my perspective. If you want to go somewhere Greek by the sea and you don't mind that the beaches are all stones, there are myriads of naff restaurants all touting for your business and a menacing looking beggar with a tin who wanders round for at least 18 hours out of 24 then Nafplion is probably just the place you're looking for.