aerobics and coffee

Our Wednesday morning beautiful though probably gay (the pink shorts does make one wonder) instructor has left us! We now have a muscle bound bloke who insists on taking off his tee shirt and plays the sort of thumpy thump boom boom music that one would expect to hear being played loudly by a car been driven by a 30 year old virgin going to a Division 4 football game.

Change is not always easy.

I go to Israel for 10 days Monday week to see the daughter and of course I have not thought about clothes but have the knitting sorted-a lacy scarf in the beautiful baby camelyarn spun and dyed by a friend. Going over will be a challenge amongst other things I am taking a charity shop bone china tea set , Meakin 1970's tea pot and milk jug and the Readers Digest sewing book.-I shall have to casually womble up to the check in pretending my hand luggage does not weigh a ton.

Coffee ah coffee almost as important as toast. Instant is slutty, cafetere bland and drip filter comes from the country that elected Nixon. Regan and Bush and tastes like it. My friend Richard has a £500 pound coffee (I know -he has no children) machine-it is bloody wonderful and my aim in life has been to replicate the coffee he makes on the cheap. I bought a second hand coffee machine that Richard and I tried to use without instructions-we both have degrees-how hard can it be. We ended up with limescale intensive water all over the kitchen and half a cup of the most ghastly luke warm coffee I have ever tasted. Do I give in and buy a Nespresso-thus being trapped into buying there overpriced coffee supplies or do I battle on?

God I love toast// knitting warning

I very long time ago the G2 section of the Guardian had a photo of a scarf with mittens on the end-brilliant I thought. I could not get the idea out of my mind especially when I decided this would be a great idea to knit in left over sock wool. I am 50 years old and I really should know by now that my great ideas should probably be very VERY carefully considered.

Firstly the scarf had to be long enough to wind around the neck and then hang low enough so my hands could comfortably hang by my sides in the mittens. Trust me this meant it had to be an extremely long scarf. Well after a year of mocking my impulsiveness this scarf was dragged out of the darkest back corner of my wardrobe and has now been knitted to the right length.

However there is another problem: knitting the second mitten results in the knitting twisting into a very long deranged spiral-and after all this -exactly how often in London do you need mittens any way. Furthermore I now think this crosses the line from funky to care in the community chic-oh well.

Why oh why do I miss toast. Because it is still Passover and this means no bread-ie no toast. It is incredible how much you miss the simple pleasures when they are gone. Thank God for my friend Julie who realised I have 31 teapots and none for Passover- and bought me a teapot for the festival. This does make life a lot more pleasant. My Slimming World class was awash with weight gain but at least the Christians gained their weight in a pleasureable way-Easter Eggs while the Jews have gained weight on matza oil eggs and potatoes. Trust me chocolate is a much better option.

I'm back/annual Pesach disaster

Many of the truely wonderful women on the truely wonderful Skip North told me I should blog again so here I am!
I have just finished preparing for the Passover (Pesach) this involves completely and utterly cleaning the home.-The principle being that the house is ready for the special foods of Pesach and any crumb of normal food is gone. I hate it and my muscles ache but it does mean that once a year the house is throughly cleaned-I find it amazing that the cloth I use to wipe the inside of wardrobes comes out black despite having done the same job a year previously.
But in this unnatural flurry of hyper cleaning there is always a complete disaster.
Last year I was in my husbands overcrowded office (that is overcrowded by his perpensity to keep piles of useless paper and to buy overpriced guitars-more of that another time.)
Anyway he is also doing an extramural degree in Applied Economics.Last year I attempted to talk on the phone-I needed a little pleasure-and clean his office and ended up with his text books in a bucket of soapy water.
This year I was looking at all these phone wires all around the lounge/dining room-why? The internet is wireless-that means no wires doesn't it? and a phone line with no phone. So with great pleasure I ripped wires that added nothing to the overall look of the room only to find that wireless broadband does have a wire-how ridiculous and the phone line is re directed to Clive's mobile. Once again I failed wife of the week until I saw the look on my husbands face when he realised that he could mention this for YEARS. I cannot tell you how often he is able to bring a cut wire into any conversation