Daddy was making her laugh.
It was obviously a very funny joke…
or a very funny sound.
But sometimes you just want to eat raisins and watch birdies out of the window.
Giggles
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Monthly Archives: January 2012
Meal Wrangling
Trying to live a more simple, well-organised life means getting the whole dinner situation under control. This is the area with which I struggle the most – I go through phases of having all our meals planned for the next fortnight or beyond only for it all to fall apart when the next lot of planning is needed. Then comes the next three weeks of eating hotch-potch meals with emergency trips to the Co-Op to buy supplies – hardly intentional living.
So I have been working on setting in place a system using Ziplist which will help with the loathsome planning phase so that (hopefully) I wont need to put it off again and again. I have started added any online recipes I like or want to try to Ziplist – it has a nifty recipe clipper which makes it super-easy to grab recipes which link back to the source so you always know where they are from and in fact, usually you need to click back through so that you can see the instructions. I am also manually adding recipes that I love from my books.
This is fairly laborious but I do have a reason. Ziplist has a great shopping list function. you can click on a recipe, it pulls all the ingredients into a list with check-boxes so you can remove the items you already have in the cupboard and add the rest to a list.
Eventually, once I have a large pool of recipes, I should be able to whizz through the ones I have chosen for that particular week/fortnight and add the ingredients to a shopping list. It will also mean that all my favourite recipes are in one place AND I will have access to these anywhere since Ziplist do in fact have an iPhone app for that. Finally, you can tag your recipes making it easy to keep them organised so I have a set for dinner, a set for buffet/party food, a set for trying - recipes that sound lovely but I haven’t tried yet and a set for Evelina (although she will be eating with us more and more).
I need to then record the list of recipes I have chosen for any given period somewhere – perhaps I will print this off and put it in my home management notebook. I have already mentioned that I am loathe to assigning particular meals to particular days given that our plans change so quickly so a list of ‘current’ recipes which I have the ingredients for will work just fine.
Craft and Conversation
This weekend, I took a trip back to my hometown, Southend-on-Sea, to visit Sarah and her adorbz daughter, Nancy. With Nancy’s 2nd birthday coming up, I wanted to make her some bunting which I knew Sarah wanted to complete Nancy’s new nursery. But when I realised that Sarah was keen to get crafting herself, I leapt at the chance to visit, reconnect with her and pass on some crafty skills.
The first order of business was to get her new sewing machine set up. Then we started chatting and the rest of the evening was history! This morning, we got all the triangles cut and then we each sewed them up before turning them the right way out. I have left Sarah with a piece of bias binding and a ton of sewn triangles so she can finish it off – I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Book Review – One Day
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
For some reason, I had high hopes for this book. I expected to be blown away and instead, when I finished the book, I felt decidedly underwhelmed. This was our last book club choice for sew make believe and we had our book chat meetup last night. Despite not being totally enamoured with the book, I really enjoyed the meetup.
*spoilers ahead*
I hadn’t known much about the book before I started: I was aware of the film’s existence but I hadn’t seen it; I knew there was a sad ending; I had read (and thoroughly enjoyed Nicholls’s previous novel Starter for Ten); I had read the blurb which described the format as visiting these two characters on the same day through twenty years of their lives.
My biggest problems with the book were as follows:
- I just couldn’t stand Dexter; even his name annoyed me. I was not rooting for him until the very end when I finally felt some sympathy towards him.
- Whilst I didn’t dislike Emma, I found her rather dull. She came across as a bit whiny and it irritated me.
- The book was too long for the amount of story. Whilst it is true that years can go by, especially in your twenties, without much changing, it is not interesting to read.
- I read the book in a constant state on unease, waiting for something awful to happen. Dexter certainly seemed like he was one mistake away from total disaster and so when Emma met her sudden end, it was a shock – I had expected it was something that would happen to Dexter or at least because of his actions.
Despite enjoying Starter for Ten, I can’t see myself rushing out to read more of Nicholls’s work when there are already so many books on my ‘to-read’ list. The next sew make believe book club book is The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue which I am looking forward to getting my hands on, although next in my pile is Saturday by Ian McEwan – can’t wait!
Evelina the Hipster
