Urgh, aargh

Yesterday night (a phrase I have just invented: ugly, isn't it?) I slept badly, and then I couldn't get out of bed in the morning and banged about all day feeling logey and thick. Last night, this morning? Just the same. Can't decide if this is the natural consequence of being gloomy and stressed with residual jetlag, or if I'm actually sick.

Also, today I have put on a long-sleeved shirt, for Newcastle is cold and wet and rainy. My arms are bewildered by the concept of sleeves.

Whatever. We shall overcome. I have been to the Asian foodstore on the corner, and bought All The Things - well, all the things they had. And brought same home, and dumped it all on the hall floor while I wrestled off hat and jacket and so forth (see above, under "cold and wet and rainy"). Enter boys. There was a chicken - well, the back ends of two chickens - in one of those bags, and minced lamb also. What did Mac make a dive for? Ah, how well you know him. "Wow! Spinach! Om-nom-nom!!"

Sigh. That boy is mysterious to me.

Now I must make stock and take stock (do you see what I did there?) and check proofs and so forth. 'Scusi.

Also, the triffids

I thought my back yard would be a desert when I came home, all dried and shrivelled and dead. But no: quite the opposite. It is a crazed jungle out there, wild with vasty weeds and lovage. (The lovage is my height, more or less, growing out of a two-foot pot; and the weeds are chasing it.)

My bay-tree is dead, alas, and my rosemary has disappeared. I just grabbed some thyme for the stock and scuttled back inside; Mac dithered on the doorstep and decided not to come out at all. That may have been the rain.

I will need to do something radical out there, but I'm not quite sure what. It's all a bit alarming, really.

Also also, wheezing. Much puffery on the inhalers. I may be sick...

A narrative of unending domestic catastrophe

They do say that it's no use crying over spilt milk. Myself, I think I disagree. Certainly it is utile to yell and curse over an entire carton of spilt double cream: it relieves tension and averts undesirable apoplexy. Tho' not cats.

Also it leads - post-cats, post-cloths, post-hot water - to a very clean patch of floor, which is surely a good.

In other news, I appear to have melted the brush of my dustpan and brush. I had put it in the bowl to wash, post-creamy deluge; and then I may have drained the rice over it, and an excess of post-boiling water may have been a little extreme for its tolerances. Well, well. We live and learn. The trick is not to care. (I never liked that brush. And the pan is split almost in two, it was high time I invested in another. Etc.)

On the other hand, I do appear to have fixed my TV. I have three count 'em three means of digital delivery in this house: the TV itself has a digital tuner inbuilt, which picks up its signal via the regular aerial; I have a set-top box that brings TV in by cable; and my DVD/HD player has a Freebox tuner also inbuilt. When I came home from Away, the latter two were not functioning. At lunchtime today, the stormy rains had disabled the first also. I fiddled with cables and cursed, and the rain went away, and now I have pictures via all three means. Just in time to discover that there is no longer anything on TV that I actually want to watch. They have broken my television from the other side, damn their greasy hides...