Ania M

Welcome to the Lammas edition of the Tarot Blog Hop. This time we have been asked to share something from our table and if you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that there’s nothing I love more than sharing a good recipe 🙂 However, since this is supposed to be a Tarot blog, it seemed appropriate to draw a card first to determine the nature of the recipe. Of course, the simplest thing would have been to draw a card from the Epicurean Tarot and share the recipe on the card, but unfortunately I don’t have that deck (I know, how remiss of me!), so I’ve used the Housewives Tarot as the next best thing 🙂 (more…)

On the 6th of July our family grew by one member. He’s affectionate, playful, a bit smelly and surprisingly hairy. No, I haven’t had DS cloned, we’ve adopted a dawgie 🙂

He’s called Dexter*, he’s between 8-10 months old, so still a pup, a Pointer cross with probably some Doberman in him judging by the colouring and he’s completely and utterly lovely 🙂

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Sometimes, you get a day from hell. Sometimes, it’s a week and, if you’re really unfortunate, longer than that. Days when everything seems to go wrong, all your efforts are thwarted and frustrated, and every bit of good news is swamped by a relentless stream of guano until you think your head is going to explode.

My week from hell began last week a couple of weeks* ago on Monday when, whilst clearing space for DD’s new bed in her room, I was almost swept away by a massive (and I do mean massive) pile of sweet wrappers hidden in the corner. She had clearly been “posting” them there over a lengthy period (or at least I sincerely hope it was a lengthy period) in order to hide the evidence of her contraband. I’ll spare you a photo. Exhausted from lugging her new bed back and into the house, dismantling and carting out the old bed and tidying up (I must have easily done a hundred trips up and down the stairs. Hot, sticky and utterly dismayed by the wrapper spectacle, it was all I could do to stop my head exploding. The vacuum cleaner was less resilient and gave up in the face of it all by turning itself off and refusing to have anything to do with the business for an hour. Not a great start to the week, particularly in light of DD’s scant appreciation of my efforts, not to mention the persistent getting underfoot to “help” put the bed together. No work done.

*It’s been a hectic couple of weeks with one thing and another so this post took rather longer to get out than anticipated

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Welcome to the Solstice (Litha) edition of the Tarot Blog Hop. I haven’t participated in the last couple, but it’s nice to be back. You can find links to the previous and next posts in the Hop at the bottom of this page, along with a link to the Master list in case of any broken links.

I must admit that I struggled somewhat with the broadness of the topic (though mostly with all the references to “faeries”), the main theme of which was to share a gift or talent with the circle. I’m afraid that I suffer from a rather British reticence about blowing my own trumpet in any sort of blatant way. Our overseas cousins have never seemed to be afflicted by this malaise and are quite happy to blithely puff away, but over here, we tend to find that kind of thing faintly unseemly and embarrassing, albeit increasingly less so these days based on the wannabe culture of  X-factor and the myriad of other such shows. On this occasion, however, I have girded my loins, pulled up my big girl knickers, armed myself with cliches and set aside my reserve. I have emerged from beneath my bushel, blinking mole-like into the Solstice dawn. I have buffed up the brassware, taken a deep breath or three and am all set to blow like Gabriel. Ready?

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Waddya mean those aren’t horses?

I used to be quite good at picking the winners in horse racing. My links to horses and racing go waaaay back to when I used to ride along with them, they being on the TV and me being on my rocking horse. I rode real horses from the age of 7 until teenager-dom made it a bit uncool. Then later, at my first job, I would watch the racing while waiting for the backups to finish on Saturday afternoon, deftly (and almost always correctly) marking the winners in whatever tabloid I found had been left behind in the office. I never put money on the races (betting shops were very much the preserve of grubby, tobacco stained giffers in dirty macs as far as I was concerned), the uncomfortable exception being when I braved the seediness to put a small bet on the Grand National…oh, and a trip to the racecourse. Of course, I never won if there was money at stake. Perhaps the money aspect clouded matters so that I just didn’t trust my instincts or perhaps I’m just not lucky that way. That said, I am pleased to report that I have definitely backed one winner: today is the 21st anniversary of DH and I getting together and it’s out 19th wedding anniversary next week 🙂

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Pah! Who needs a Fairy Godmother anyway. Mind you, I could have done with one yesterday after much manic sewing to finish outfits for the Spectacular Spectacular Masquerade Ball. It was a close run thing, but I made it to the Ball…in a (sort of) finished dress. One wave of a Fairy Godmother’s wand and it would have all been ready in a trice, without all the blood, sweat and tears (and glue). Maybe, we’d even have been in time to get some food before all the selfish, greedy bastards very hungry guests who went back for seconds and thirds before some of us had even had firsts (and then left their plates piled with their uneaten food). That aside, it was fun (though being plied with wine on an empty stomach undoubtedly aided in relieving the stress).

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I have just returned from a weekend trading at the St George’s event at Wrest Park and I couldn’t have wished for a better start to the season. Wellies were left at home and there was this wonderful, shiny, golden ball thingy glowing hotly in the sky all weekend. I’m not sure what it was, (I certainly didn’t see such a thing last season), but I liked it a lot! It was mostly particularly welcome to thaw out from the overnight temperatures, which were minus lots. See the silver grass? That’s frost –>

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I was inspired to bake some bread last week, largely because the children were still on holiday so I had to feed them something and after our holiday the previous week, I’ve been far too busy catching up with work to shop and besides, the bank account is a bare as…umm…the bread bin. Time being at something of a premium, I cheated and just threw the ingredients into the bread machine and by lunchtime the smell was making it hard to think of anything else. Home made bread, even if it is untouched by human hand, is just so tasty… and irresistible. In fact, this is the main reason I don’t make bread very often or I’d be the size of a house.

*Yes, I am aware that the expression is that bread is the staff of life.

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It was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that we set off to spend the coldest, snowiest Easter week for years in the Alps North Wales.

You can see my confusion…

Llanberis pass

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I am Polish and so “herring” or, more accurately, “sledz”*  is most definitely in my dictionary. Alas, the same can not be said of Dirk Gently** or the major supermarkets, in this area at any rate. Not one had fresh herring fillets or even packs of salted herring. A few had some wretched. small jars of  marinaded herring (I made the mistake of buying one and could not believe how sweet and utterly revolting the contents were).

*(Pron: shledj, the “s” and “z” have accents

**see Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

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