madeleine45
Good morning Mick and all GN's on a slightly windy, greyish morning but with a hint of sun coming up.
I dont know if any of you go back to look at the days posts, I usually post in the morning and dont always get back to see more later, so just wanted to say I posted later yesterday that I had managed to go out to a little village thing and came back feeling calmer and wanted to thank everyone for their help and care, and how much it had helped on a day when I felt so alone and miserable. So here I am today, still in a lot of pain, and it is taking me ages to get going, but I am here and the best I can say is that things are looking a bit better than yesterday.
Plans for today are quite simple. I am going to enjoy my desert island discs and private passions and lots of other radio programmes, which can keep me company as I continue to wade through the shambles. I did make a beginning yesterday and already have a big bag of mostly paper for the recycling, so I could actually see a way to walk to my chair without falling over stuff today! I am being careful to rip off any address or information about me from any letters adverts or information leaflets from the hospital etc and they do not go into the bag. We have recently been warned about this from our local police group, who said they had found someone purporting to be a dustman collecting bags to go through for information. Well fortunately , from my background I have always been very careful to do this, as I am not risking people getting information from my rubbish. I also tend to rip up such letters and when I hear anything about wretched Trump trying to get his greedy paws on another country it gives me great strength to rip things up with him in mind!!
I have a feeling that I didnt send my sons card off in all the hassle of yesterday , but cant see it at the moment so must carefully go through a towering pile of papers , put to one side to deal with later. I will carefully take half off first, or the lot will fall and jumble up everything. While I am doing all this sorting I shall also be being kind to myself and making cups of coffee and thinking of something that I will really enjoy eating , both to have something to look forward to, and giving me something else to think of apart from what I am going to do with the dresser. But now I have calmed down somewhat I shall be able to make a list , and add names to it as I think who might want it. I cant take a photo of it yet as the top is all cleared but there are a variety of piles of papers, books and bits still on the lower shelf, and of course it is still surrounded by bags of bits from the top half. Still by tomorrow, I hope to have at least cleared all the bags if nothing else. I am treating myself like a small child with promises to go out somewhere tomorrow if I get this all sorted!! Anyway once again thanks to you all for your support yesterday. It was so good to feel that there was someone knowing how hard things were and being on my own does make days like that worse, so it is great to feel part of the fellowship of gransnet.
I wish we could all meet up one day, for a grand , put the faces to the names, and descend upon some unsuspecting hotel or town en masse and take over the place! Well perhaps we might manage a get together in more local areas, or if we are on holiday somewhere near other gransnetters. Anyway long may we be there for each other every morning.
Ah , the sun has just made a welcome appearance and things are looking brighter now. Might even put a bit of washing in too. Does it show my age when I feel slightly guilty about putting washing out on sunday? As a child I remember my mother having quite a routine of what jobs were done when. This was partly because with at that time 2 children , who came home from school for lunch, an electric copper in the outhouse, but no washing machine in the beginning , just the mangle etc and not many gadgets , it was quite a full time job keeping the house clean with in those days coal fires too, so you had to have some sort of routine to cope with things.
She usually but not always washed on monday. Part of the reason would be that we would have had a roast sunday dinner, so there would be cold meats and pickle, with a bit of salad and either jacket potatoes or some saute potatoes, which didnt need a lot of preparation, whist she battled with the mangle and hanging out clothes etc etc. So as I loved the pickles etc I was very happy with mondays dinner. Sometimes she would just make a big jam and lemon curd tart too. She would put raspberry or strawberry jam - home made , on one side and lemon curd on the other with twiddles of pastry across them. We could then choose to have either one or the other or a bit with both jam and lemon divided by the pastry bit. I thought it looked lovely and she would always warn us that it had just come out of the oven and not to eat it until it had cooled down a bit. Once I couldnt wait and learnt the hard way how hot jam burns your mouth!! Most of the women down the road would be doing the same, and the one thing that you didnt do, unless there was illness in the house , was put out washing on a sunday!
Sunday was seen as a day of rest, even if you were not church goers and only disorganised or slutty housewives needed to hang washing out on sunday. Well it wasnt a day of rest either for wome of course, with sunday dinner to prepare etc. People would go out into the vegetable garden to collect some home grown veg to go with the dinner , and so we could not have had fresher vegetables. It was usually our job to go and collect veg for mum, and I loved the runner beans and peas, not so keen on the boring cabbage and brussel sprouts in season. Ah a long time ago, and after sunday lunch we all listened to the radio for things like Round the Horn, and the Navy Lark. It just shows how good the actors where when you thing that Ronnie Barker and Lesley Phillips were on those programmes and then continued for many years on radio and tv. I miss the plays that they used to have on the radio. They were always worth listening to and you could get on with jobs as you listened. Suppose that is where I started the habit of listening and although much has altered I still enjoy radio 3 and 4 , learning new things every day, and having the chance to hear great concerts and orchestras that I couldnt affort to go to live.
Well Mick , hope you are having your quiet day and good to know you are on the mend.grandMattie, you sound as though you have set yourself a mammoth task with your new blocks. Hope it goes well. I am with you and not interested in the Bond books , never my cup of tea. You will be pleased to think it is september tomorrow and things getting back to school and jobs and people around. I hope it also means that you get some more help in the church. Even if they do not normally help you would have thought that one or two people could see you struggling and offer to help for once. I think they are rather taking you for granted and other people should step up and take a turn. Greyduster, hope the jam making goes well. I had a lovely victoria plum tree in my last garden and miss ifs bounty for jam and crumbles etc. Dear Susan56 so sorry to hear you are back in hospital. Hope they can improve matters for you and that you will soon be home. Glad you can now look at all the posts and see what we are up to. Kalu, know just what you mean, as you get involved in a job you forget to have a break. I am a great one to talk as I do just the same but one idea I did for a while and should start doing again is to have a timer that buzzes. I set it up for whatever so perhaps 30 minutes or 45, and when it buzzes you stop and have a rest. When things are going well you cannot believe you have been working nonstop for that length of time, but of course you then pay for it the next day. So although I am irritated by its buzzing it is a useful reminder .Hope your ankles improve today.
So wishing everyone a calm and peaceful sunday I shall now return to my sorting but not before making a welcome coffee , why not join me?
. Go gently maryd. 
