Hestia hates...Tartarus's job

Yeah - but you're all divorced drunks

It was around my birthday earlier this month when I got the telephone call from Tartarus:  'They need me to work another week out here.  Is that a problem?  BTW - happy birthday.'

At the time, it wasn't a problem. Indeed, I need a lead in of about a fortnight to get the house suitably tidy for him coming him coming home from sea and with all the work flooding in for websites, I was secretly glad to have a bonus seven days at my disposal to get the hoover out to suck up the dust wildebeest from the darkest corners of my home.

But working an extra week has its complications: Sonshine has another seven days without his dad.

Swifts, being, erm, swift

I went out for a joggy walk the other day (not quite a jog, not quite a walk) and took myself off up to the local park.

I puffed my way down Lovers' Walk, keeping my eyes peeled for dog poop as the path wended its way along the side of the little stream.  I reached the end of the Walk and gratefully hung over the wooden hand-rail, as is my wont, to get my breath back.

How beautiful and still it is over the cricket and shinty pitches, I thought.  Early morning dew gleamed like abandoned diamonds in the shivering grass.

I listened for the familiar 'sweeee'  of the swifts as they swooped in to pick up insects from the grass

Nothing.  Not a sweee to be heard, there was nothing darting over the pitches, only whistling young seagulls flapping past - on their ungainly way to rip open bin bags, no doubt.

I walked to the bottom of the steps and stood on the path, the early morning sun casting long cool shadows; I stood for ages: looking, listening (getting my breath back).

The swifts were gone.

I picked up the pace and ran all the way home, my lungs burning and my side aching.

Summer was officially over.

And you know what that means.

AW11 is officially here.

And I haven't got a thing to wear.

Hestia's Harvest

....yeah, it's pretty meagre, isn't it?  For someone with a polytunnel the size of HMS Belfast AND a greenhouse.

Today I harvested this:

That's a bowl of strawberries to you non-gardening types....

And this.....

Them's kerrits... two thereof.

I cannot tell a lie.  What you see above is their ACTUAL size.

No, it's not a lemon the size of a child's head.  My carrots are PATHETIC

Still, as every gardener says, there's always next year.....

Hestia and Sonshine - back to school

Forgive me while I air-punch and run around the house naked but for a pair of rubber gloves and a party hat....THE SCHOOL HOLIDAYS ARE OVER!!!!!

It's not that I don't love Sonshine with every fibre of my being, it's just that, well, they do get a bit irritating sometimes.  Like sand in an oyster.  Like a wasp in your lager. Like thrush.

Hestia's birthday cake

My 48th birthday cake, as marzipanned and iced by Sonshine's own fair hand.  

Shhhhhhhh don't tell him.

Hestia...is another year older

Woke up this morning to yet more rain....

And these:

Card from Sonshine - not as squat as this, edited it in Blogger software
And this small fat card is the result

Can you click on it to see what he wrote?
Mad me get all teary-eyed, lemme tell you.


And from my Evil Twins.....

A GORGEOUS Tarot Bag from Ania M and a diet-sabotage duo
of Chocolate and Cake books from Viv

Thank you!!!!!!

So far, despite the rain, it's my best birthday EVER :-D

Hestia and the Dog Show, Part II

And the heavens cracked and it did raineth for 40 days and 40 nights and God said: 'Yeah, verily, I will show these long-suffering farmers that they canst suffer a little more. And lo,  He decreed it Agricultural Show Day.

Our footwear of choice

Rotten weather utterly ruined attendance :-(
Show did not take place on a slope.  It's an ARTY camera angle.

All together now 'My lovely horse....'

How I actually viewed the horses 

Drookit judges and admin staff in the Flying Gazebo

The water is literally running out of my Aigle jacket.  Waterproof? Waterproof, My Arse.

 

Look closely - that is actual water in my hood (and the handloop for the camera.  And my wellies)

Weather was so bad that I had to send sonshine home before the dog show judging went ahead.  He's 11 - so hopefully Social Services will have more things to do with rioters than they have with stressed out judges in Dog Show Competitions.

How did it go?  I can tell you that Endless Rain + Paper + a biro = a lacy mess of illegible scribbling that was SO bad, all we can submit as results to the local paper are the Dog Show Trophy Winners (ie four of the 16 categories).

Still, it was marvellous fun.  Even if my jeans dyed my knickers blue.  And my knees were so cold that they were orange and purple.

I wonder if they'll ask me back next year.......

Hestia and the Dog Show - Part I

When I volunteered to help my Day Carer with the admin of the local Agricultural Show I envisaged nothing more taxing than sticking on stamps or folding up letters....or maybe braiding flowers into the mane of a big shire horse.  But instead I found myself signed up to admin The Dog Show.

Anyone who has ever seen All Creatures Great And Small know the hell that is the Dog Show.  Hotly contested and prone to violence on a London Riot scale.

'Are you ok with that?' asked my carer, peering over her glasses as my face fell into my plate of lasagna as she announced her news.

'Oh yes, I'm fine with that,' I smiled faintly and none too convincingly.

Hestia and the tyranny of passwords

This is me at my actual pc. So old it works in runes.

I'm sure I'm not alone by admitting this - but I have to write down all my passwords and login details because every sodding thing that you like on the intertubes needs them.  And being a bear of little brain (well, a bear who refuses to devote much of her little brain to remembering them) I write them down.  Don't tell my bank manager.

Every month I pay my credit card bill and the event goes like this:  Find credit card bill (hopefully within a few days of it needing to be paid) log in.  Pray to God that my computer remembers all the log in details, otherwise I need to go upstairs to my office and rootle through all my credit card statements until I find the ONE with the cryptically inscribed password/login details.

How cryptic are they?  Well, put it this way - I usually have to e-mail Tartarus to be assisted in what my cryptic clues might be - For example DOB 4 and 5.  Obviously DOB is date of birth, but whose?  And what in the hell is 4 and 5? Neither of us has a clue what I meant, so we had to go through the palaver of changing the whole set up.  Now we can't remember what the new password is, but still have a clear record of DOB 4 and 5.....

Hestia and Sonshine's birthday

Yes, a Transformer has walked all over it and has a handful
of icing - we love Bumblebee in this house!

Wow - a whole year has passed since the debacle of the break-in at the swimming pool and poor Sonshine not being able to have his 10th birthday party there!

Yesterday he became 11 and he decided that he only wanted a Nintendo 3DS for his pressie.  A cool £200!! I told him that he could ask people to consider giving him money that he could put towards his new toy and that depending on how much he managed to collect, I'd pay the balance.

What luck!  What with his doting granny and uncle he raised over the required amount.  And so, dear reader, I found myself on the 10.15 am ferry yesterday morning with an overly excited child and a mother who can barely walk the length of herself without having to have a sit down.

Hestia and the BAWG

Sonshine and our bag of litter

Yesterday Sonshine and I struck a bargain - no telly or intertubes until after 6pm.

This lasted about 40 minutes for me as I had to go online to get an address.  OK.....so I shot onto Facebook as soon as his back was turned (ie he went to the toilet). I'm a grown up. I lie.  He needs to deal with it.

Anyway, we decided to go for a walk and just take in the view, have a chat....bond, that sort of stuff that has been neglected when I do the Tarot Conference.  So off we went to Loch Fad clutching our empty carrier bag.  For not only are we Hestia and Sonshine, we are secretly environmental activists and, when we go a walk, we pick up rubbish in a plastic bag and then tip the whole lot into the last bin on the walk home.

OK - so we use a plastic bag, but it\s better than leaving the rubbish around.  Just overlook that irony and see the GOOD :-)

We call ourselves the BAWGs - the Bag a Week Gang and we do exactly that: try to pick up a bag of litter from off the beaten track (ie where the council won't pick it up) on a weekly basis.

It's free to join, dear reader.  All you do is resolve to pick up other people's rubbish once a week (or a month - then you'd be a BAMG!) when you are out - walking home from work, taking the dog a walk, playing with the kids.....anytime.  There's always litter.  Sadly.  Sometimes I think that there are dead bodies.... but that's another story.

And, as Blur might say, you enjoy a sense of enormous well-being, when you pick up litter.  A sort of environmental smugness.  Which I like.

We did come across a LOT of peach scented bags filled with dog poop. WTF is going on with that?!

Bag it and take it home, people, but don't wang it up into the branches of a tree or fling into a hedge.  If there's one thing worse than encountering a big dog poop on your travels, it must be encountering an ancient one sequestered into a well-knotted peach nappy bag.....

Erm, hope you weren't eating or anything while you were reading that.

I'm SURE the computer keyboard will clean up fine.  Honestly.

Do you do any mad things when you're out and about?