cazmanian_minx

It's the 26th of July.  I should not be sitting here with two fleeces on contemplating lighting the woodburner and wondering if the horses need rugs on because it's due to rain pretty hard later.

It's not all bad news though.  I was so pleased with Jack this morning.  I try to give him a run on the sheep every few days (good for training and stops him taking off while I'm mucking out to go and find them!) so today we fetched them up from next door's bottom field, into their middle field, through the gate into my house field, down into the shelter field and then I went and stood at the top of the hill in next door's middle field and got Jack to bring them back from the bottom of the shelter field, to the house field, back through the gate into next door's middle field, up into next door's top field and into the pen, without moving from where I was standing.  He then stayed on guard at the gateway to the pen, keeping them in there with the gate open, while I picked up a barrowload of old manure from that field, and stayed on guard while I went and gave Bella and Lucky a good scratch and some ewe nuts, before calling Jack in to circle slowly behind them and push them back out into the field.  For a dog who's just coming up to his first birthday, he's doing absolutely brilliantly. 

I should be working right now, I've got about 45 minutes left of a file to type up, but I suspect I have PMT and the speaker has a very strong Chinese accent and I keep wanting to headbut the monitor, so I'm going to do the ironing and catch up on a bit more of the Blacklist instead.

Down to 15 files on the PhD, the small agency stuff has been done, the mortgage application all got sent back and we should get a yes or no in principle early this week.  The 24 x 40-minutes job came through, 15 interviews already with me and I had a rare moment of being an adult and took up small agency's offer of loaning me two of her other typists who weren't busy and shipped 2 hours out to her.  Thank the Gods I did, because the deadline, which was Friday, has now come forward to Wednesday and I still have another 5+ hours to come in on it. 

Plus I now have an interview with Terry Waite to type up, due Wednesday, which I'm saving as a treat for when I've got through the bulk of these network management software interviews :)

It's always a bit of a gamble, seeing a band you've loved for the best part of 30 years live, especially when you've not seen them for a decade and the previous three gigs you've been to of theirs were all corkers. Add to that a slightly dodgy performance on the One Show last week and I was worried I was going to be disappointed.

I needn't have been. When they opened with Breath of Life, followed by Drama and It Doesn't Have To Be, we knew we were in for a storming night of basically 'Best of Erasure', which made sense, given they're off on tour with Robbie Williams next week and are obviously going to play all the hits. They slotted them in around about two-thirds of the new album, which I'm not over-keen on on a first listen, but pre-ordering it got me access to the pre-sale for the gig (which sold out without going on general sale) and the album charted at number 6, so £9 well spent :)

We did have a bit of a drama when a small air-conditioning unit caught fire and the venue had to be evacuated three songs in. Everyone dutifully shuffled outside, but three fire engines, a lot of police and a crowd rendition of A Little Respect and we were allowed back in, with the police helping the O2's staff check tickets so we could get in as quickly as possible.

I think everyone assumed that the set list would be cut short, as we got back in around 9.50, they were only due to play until 10.30 and the O2 has a curfew of 11pm, but they bounced back on and defiantly played through the whole set, finishing just before midnight and probably incurring a fine for the curfew breach as a result.

Tickets for the post-Robbie solo tour go on pre-sale on Wednesday and this time I'll be trying to get one for London to go and see them at the Hammersmith Apollo again - roll on 23rd February 2018!

Took this with my phone and am quite pleased at how it turned out.

Mick's away until late Wednesday night, which means it's time to get my head down and work like a demon for a few days. This is what I want to get done before he gets home:

• Laundry (I'm up-to-date with ours, but mother-in-law's needs doing)
• Ironing
• Finish plastering little bedroom
• Plaster north double bedroom
• Get some rocket and peas planted
• Persuade the sheep to eat the docks in the vegetable patch without chomping all the garlic (I've got a net frame to go over it which should hopefully keep them off!)
• Sort a couple of boxes of books for the charity shop when I'm in town on Wednesday
• Get accounts sorted for accountant

On top of that, I also have four hours of transcription booked in and a tonne of stuff to do for my IFA client, so much as I'd like to do something about the impending implosion of the Sky box, which is now down to 11% available, it's going to have to wait, although I might get a bit cleared doing the ironing!

Thanks to Helen and Ruth alerting me to the change in TOS on LJ and pointing me in this direction.

It's been about 5 years since I had a personal blog, but I do miss it, so hopefully setting up here will give me the impetus I need to start writing again.

We temporarily have four horses. Darcy and Yeveed moved onto the derelict croft next door (where Merlin came from) a few weeks ago when their owner needed some temporary grazing for them and Hazel said he could use hers. Last night he knocked on our door to ask if we had any wire cutters as Darcy had managed to get his front feet over the stock-proof fence and was completely stuck.

We went to have a look and found Darcy (15hh-ish of extremely solid cob) looking rather sheepish, but he'd been sensible, bless him, and stood still rather than trying to struggle out of it and injure himself. The problem was that the fence was right underneath his belly and if we just sliced through it underneath him, it was going to go 'ping', whack him in the stomach and then probably curl itself round his back legs. We ended up cutting through it on either side of the fence posts (which were rotten anyway - that's how he'd got over it in the first place) and taking out the whole section underneath him before asking him to step backwards.

Obviously that left a large gap in the fence which he knew was there, so as it was almost dark Mick suggested that we prop the fence back up to fool the sheep and put the horses in our top two fields. Graham's coming back this morning to fix the fence, and Mick said Darcy and Yeveed can stay with us until his new field and stables are ready next week.

I've been a good wife today. I topped up the log basket, washed Mick's new shirts so he could wear one of them on Friday (they're not dry yet), emptied the kitchen bin, did the ironing and had a cheese and oat loaf just finishing baking when he got in from work.

I'm finding myself getting increasingly domesticated as I get older. Not to the point of being terribly tidy or cleaning the house as often as it needs it, but things like baking, gardening, decorating and so on certainly appeal a lot more than they used to. Maybe it's because I'm happy and it's some sort of weird nesting thing. Don't know.

What I do know is that I'm disproportionately excited that next week's Great British Bake Off is going to be GINGERBREAD HOUSES!!!!!! :o) And I've added another show to my guilty pleasures list - The Valleys. I watched the first episode while I was doing the ironing and it's actually even better than Geordie Shore. There's a new series of Geordie Shore being trailed in the ad breaks as well, which is great because it means the Charlotte and Gaz saga will continue for a bit longer.

At half past nine this morning, in a south facing room, there wasn't enough light to power my calculator. But I have a woodburner, I have home baking and I have trashy telly and so winter holds no fears ;o)

It's been almost two years since I had my initial Invisalign appointment and after Gods knows how many sets of aligner trays, it's finally done :o)  Not DONE done, but my teeth are now in the place they should be - all that's left to do now is make them stay there and let the bite wear into a straight line again (one of the front ones was tilted, so now it's straight it has a bit of a point on it!).  Getting them to stop moving is actually going to take longer than it did to move them; I have to keep wearing aligners 24/7 (apart from meals) for 12 weeks, then I have a year of just wearing them at nights, followed by a year of wearing them on alternate nights and after that it goes to 'as often as needed for as long as needed' which in practice means try them on a couple of times a week and if they're feeling tight, wear them overnight.  Pictures of the new smile will follow once I have five minutes to stick the camera on the tripod - I need a new profile picture anyway, this one is nearly 5 years old.

It looks like the next Jones family medical procedure may be a hip replacement for Mick.  A few years ago he managed to accidentally do the splits on the kitchen floor in his flat - the resulting muscle wrench pulled his hip slightly out of alignment and now the joint has started to erode.  The NHS up here finally agreed to x-ray it to see how bad it was, but just shrugged and said there was nothing they could do until it became completely unbearable and hopefully it would last another 10 years or so.  They've put him on a cocktail of anti-inflammatories and painkillers, which don't really work any more, and it's become not only a quality of life issue but a safety one as well - I worry about it giving way while he's balancing up a ladder working on field shelter roofs, for example, and it hurts him too much to ride the quad over bumpy bits of field now if he's sitting down, he has to do it standing up.  Anyway, since there's no guarantee that if he grits his teeth and bears it until he's 55 they won't turn round and tell him it can't be done until he's 65, we're investigating having it done privately.  It's not cheap, but not beyond reach - between £9,000 and £12,000 depending on where you have it done, which is less than the truck cost him! - and by going private we can ensure he gets a surgeon who specialises in doing this operation in younger patients.  Apparently there's a very good one in Glasgow.  He has an appointment with the GP tonight to ask if they'll refer him once we've saved up for it, so fingers crossed. 

Over the past few weeks I've started playing poker again.

I started about six years ago - I could work out exactly when if I could be bothered to go to Quidco, because I only signed up to get the £32 cashback for registering a new account with the 32 Red casino website.  This was in the days before they got wise to the cashback tricks and started making minimum wager requirements to get it, so all I had to do was give them my details and deposit a tenner to get £32.  I played a couple of games out of interest, won about US$2.00, took my tenner back out again and more or less ignored it over the next few years.  Occasionally I'd go on, play a sit and go tournament for a few pence and then forget about it for a few more months.  I never put any more money into it and slowly the balance on the account crept up to a fiver. 

Last month I got Victoria Coren's book For Richer, For Poorer out of the library - it's the story of how she became the first woman to win the main event of the European Poker Tour, taking home a prize of half a million quid and I read the whole thing in two nights.  I've been playing regularly ever since, mostly in Freeroll (free to play) tournaments, and have slowly been improving from finishing in the 200s to finishing in the 100s, to top 50 - and last night I won!  I beat 323 other players to win last night's Freeroll Fight and won €21,53.

OK, it's not half a million quid.  But I'm learning to read tables better (and yes, you can sometimes tell when someone's bluffing, even when you're playing online - it's all about the speed of their response), to calculate outs and bet accordingly, to be cautious when there's a possibility of a straight or a flush on the board and to understand how sometimes cards that you'd play if you were on the button should be folded if you're in an early seat.  The Freeroll Fights go on through the month, every weekday evening.  There are 20 in total, you get points according to your place and the top 32 players at the end of the month go forwards to a final tournament where the site puts up €1000 in prize money to be split between the top 10.  I'm currently 64th in the table.  If I can keep playing and learning and improving, I might get a chance of a seat in that top 32 one day.

1. I don't have a broken foot :o)
Or, at least, the surgery is 90% certain it's just soft tissue damage.  I was putting Finn's fly sheet on him this morning while he was standing at the little gate between us and the neighbours when I saw Merlin stalking up the field with his "I'm going to nip the pony on his arse" face on.  Rather than stop what I was doing and chase Merlin off, I figured I had just enough time to do up the last two straps on the neck cover and get out of the way.  Wrong.  Finn's only exit route was through me and he barged past, knocking me onto my back on the stone dyke wall and treading on the side of my foot in the process.  By 3pm it was getting worse rather than better and feeling numb and tingly at the same time so I thought I'd better get it checked out, but two medical professionals had a gentle prod round and declared it probably unbroken.  Now waiting for it to turn 50 Shades of Purple.

2. My husband is the most wonderful cook
Supper last night was home-reared Gloucestershire Old Spot pork, smothered in Reggae Reggae sauce and then left to cook very slowly for about five hours until it just fell apart in its own juices. 

3. The Great British Bake Off has inspired me
I've been trying to make morning rolls and softies, admittedly without much success so far (they always come out with the crust too thick), but yesterday's test batch got soaked in the remains of the pork juices while they were still warm and Oh.My.Gods...  I've got the breadmaker back out now as it's much better at making bread than I am and I'm sure I can make a cheese bread that's a) tastier and b) cheaper than the tiny thing you pay £1.80 for at the Tesco bakery.

4. I'm nearly through my teeth straightening
I change to the last set of Invisalign aligners tonight and need to make an appointment to get the brackets taken off my teeth in a fortnight's time.  I am so, so chuffed with how well this has worked, not only do I smile properly with confidence these days, but it's made it a million times easier to use floss and keep my gums healthy.  I'm not properly finished yet though, I have to continue wearing them all the time (apart from meals) for 12 weeks, then it's a year of nights only, a year of alternate nights and then keep checking the fit and leave in overnight as required if the aligners start feeling tight.

5. I'm starting to really love riding again
I might not be so keen on my pony today ;o) but I rode three times last week and although he's still being testing, especially out hacking, it's not meant in a nasty way and he's not doing anything that frightens me - he's just being a typical Welsh Section D cob and trying to work out what he can get away with not doing.  For example, I've been teaching him to stand still while I mount by treating him with a bit of carrot from the saddle once I'm up and I wanted to check that he understood he needed to stand still while we were out hacking rather than just in the school.  So he stood like a rock, he got his bit of carrot, we set off down the road with me feeling very chuffed at my l33t p0ny sk001ing ski11z and about 10 yards later he stopped dead, looked round for another bit of carrot and started chewing my boot when I told him to walk on instead!  20 minutes later we'd only managed another 70 yards as he demanded carrot and I demanded we went onwards - and I'm afraid at that point he got a smack on the bum and told to effing well get on with it, after which he was an absolute angel for the rest of the hack!  I hate using a stick on him (I'd already tried slapping it against my boot and waving it around his bottom, both of which usually send him forwards), but I think a small tap is probably kinder than thumping him in the ribs with my legs.

6. We had a lovely first wedding anniversary
I can't believe it's been a year, but it has :o)  We went back to Melvich hotel for a meal and the chef had put my favourite dessert on the specials board.

7. Business is going well
After a run of - well, not bad luck exactly, more some poor decisions on my part stemming from being bad at saying no, things are picking up again and the cash is flowing in the right direction.