Quiet this morning with nothing to write about… or right about… I say that cos I’ve nothing left to say… gawd I *must* be bored 
I have a few things to do. Gardening front and back. Cleaning top and bottom. Well ok I suppose I have an enormous amount to do… but I’m a bit short on motivation… except the oldies will be here soon and they won’t fancy wading through the mess to get in. Come to that the table is filled with junk as well… ok I have several months work to do today.
About eighteen months or so ago we had a foster child and her sister stay with us. The older girl made a friend at her school and when the girl moved on the friend carried on coming down to play with my eldest daughter despite being 3 years older than her… aged around 11.
Time moves on as it does and when the time came she moved from junior school to high school. We expected there’d be some changes but the transformation she’s gone through has been nothing short of frightening.
At 11 she was a beautiful little girl with bright ginger hair, huge eyes and a big smile. Her personality was totally open and innocent. She was in love with the world and was a bouncing bundle of energy.
At 13 she is totally changed. Her long ginger hair is cut short and dyed black. She wears thick black make up and bright red lipstick. Her eyes are hooded and totally ‘closed’. She has piercings in (to me) strange places and her mood has darkened .
Despite her all bar moving in with us at one stage, she rarely speaks to any of us. Oddly, she still has us on her contact list in Messenger. so we can see the changes in her appearence through her web space on which she has now declared she is a lesbian… or at least bisexual.
I’m not convinced she knows what either term means but either way, it’s so sad to see the changes in her from what she was when we knew her to what she is now. Ok she is getting older and will develop a personality etc regardless of any input we might have had… but it’s still such a long way from where she was to where she is that it makes me despair. In effect she’s changed so much it means we no longer know her.
Thing is of course I have my own daughters and I’d hate for them to go change into someone like this… a total stranger.
I spent a large chunk of last night munching on grapes… bloody fabulous ones too! Imported from the USA… small, red and seedless. I think the variety was Red Flame (?). I must have eaten nearly a kilo… and at $15 a kilo it wasn’t a cheap snack by any means.
Most of me figured I was just desperate for sugar since one part of the diet regime is that I drop as much sugar and carbs from the diet as possible but at the same time I was reading that grapes contain large quantities of anthocyanins which are a potent antioxident… so maybe my body is telling me to eat loads to help clean out my system.
It might actually have some validity as I’m not getting the same ketosis effects I usually get when going on a strict diet. Call it rationalisation if you like but it works for me
The diet isn’t 100% effective yet… I’m still trying to cut everything out but it isn’t so easy
On a theme… I’m sure some of the problems are caused by a food intolerance. Yes last time the pneumonia caused a lot of problems and I ended up eating crap again, but I was already on the way down when I got it. I’m *still* convinced I’m either gluten intolerant… or there’s some problem with me eating wheat based products anyway because I seem to dive into a mega depression when I eat them and it takes such a long time to pull myself out again.
Having said that.. I can pinpoint *exactly* when the diet failed last time. I was the day after the Easter Show and we’d had a barbecue… I didn’t eat must more than normal, but maybe I had a burger or cheap sausage or similar that had something ‘bad’ in there because I immediately began to struggle!
The *last* time I was able to pull it off was when I did my Masters back in 1990. And now I look back I can see why. I’d all bar stopped eating bread and cakes etc. and was 100% vegetarian. We lived on mostly legumes and assorted vegetables… as you do .
And yet… we had a friend who had an Indian restaurant and I used to eat tons of rice… yet my weight dropped to normal and I was full of energy… even to the extent of being able to jog etc!! So it’s not as simple as it sounds.
Maybe this time with a little more insight I might manage to keep on top of it. I suppose all I can do is hope…
Ouch… ! Went to the docs a week or so ago with the wife. While she was there I asked him about some itchy pimples I had on my shoulder. Aha… says he… shingles! Weird, thinks I… doesn’t shingles cover the stomach, chest and back?
Apparantly not… well not always anyway. Seems the virus travels a nerve path and is only a problem if it attacks many nerves at a time. Anyway… since then I developed a few more lumps further down my back. What lumps I *do* have are actually quite painful… and of course itchy… by as I have a nice wooden back scratcher it’s quite manageable.
I just hope it doesn’t get worse – I’ve known people who’ve had it covering them and they’ve been in *real* pain!
I wonder what marvellous hiccough in evolution produced such a weird diseases? I think nature is a wonderful thing. 
Despite my best intentions… I did indeed pick up the wrong tray of seedlings from the garden centre… so my wigwam is going to be covering the dwarf french bean instead of the climbers. Erk… methinks a quick visit to the garden centre will solve the problem… *if* they have climbers there… else it’ll be seeds and have them fight against the roots of the others.
Ah well… I tried
I posted this on the forum but thought it could be usefully posted here too…
I was going through a bit of a bad patch when I was sixteen and after an abortive attempt to move to London I had decided enough was enough and I headed for home back in Wales.
I’d counted my pennies and worked out I had just enough to pay my train fare from London to the city nearest my home town and would walk the remaining 15 kilometres. I also had to walk across London from Earls Court to Paddington to catch the train. So I set off not really knowing which was best or west 
On my way I wandered along the Embankment… clearly hopelessly lost… and I bumped into a Salvation Army officer and asked him which road was the best one to take. He asked me what I was up to… and of course I explained. Without further query he emptied his pockets of all the change he had on him and forced it on me so that I could afford to get a tube train across London and maybe a bite to eat to keep me going til I got home.
In the end I accepted it, not that it was much really, caught the train home, regrouped, reassessed, retrained and set off again a few years later and made a much better job of it.
However… that one act of unsolicited kindness has been repaid countless times. Nearly every time I pass a collector for the Salvos I throw a few coins in and say “Thanks for being there when I needed you.”.
Neat site this. Has some really cool stickers for your wheelie bin to liven up those miserable lines of green or yellow bins.
You can find them at Wheelie Bin Art. It’s a UK company but they happily post overseas.
I spent some of this arvo creating one of those really useful little art works that repays your efforts in kind. What is it?… you say… and I answers… I planted meself a bean tub!
At the front of the house we have a circular concrete sewer access manhole cover thing… which isn’t particularly aesthetically appealing set, as it is, in the middle of a grass verge.
Over the years I’ve wondered how to cover it yet not arouse the ire of the local council who take exception to people hiding them (as they do) by burying them etc. The guy at the end of the street painted his green… which works for him… but in eventually I decided to place a half barrel on ours and fill it with something useful.
So off I go to the hardware store and picked up half a wine barrel… which smelled good enough to chew actually… but I resisted manfully. I also picked up 6×2 metre plastic covered poles… well this is Australia… why would we be able to *buy* bamboo… I mean it grows wild everywhere so who’d want it? Me of course… gawd… 
I also bought 100 litres of compost, some lobelia, parsley… and french beans. Trouble is that as I sit here typing I *cannot* remember if these will spiral up the poles or just sit there hunched over laden with beans – I think maybe I should look then up in the gardening book before it gets embarrassing
Still. I drilled holes all round the base, filled it with the compost (including a load of cow manure) then stuck the poles in, tied them off at the top as a wigwam structure and planted it out.
If the beans etc *do* grow it will look really attractive. I love those bright red flowers… and they’ll be set off by the emerald green of the parsley and purple lobelia… and of course the fresh beans will be an added bonus!
Of course, any beans we get will have cost a fortune. The entire set up must have cost $100… but I console myself with knowing it’ll be pretty through the summer *and* it’ll be there for use year after year. Who knows… eventually the cost of the beans might drop to less than we pay in the shops
Now we wait… well now we go check the beans are the right one and *then* we wait!!
Well ok it isn’t snowing here, but it *is* snowing further south! Seems a cold snap has pushed its way onshore and temperatures have dropped,
To give some indication of how it feels… earlier today the temperature in the garden was 33ºC and currently it’s 14ºC… a drop of 19 degrees! No doubt it feels chillier than it really is but even so… brrr
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