Quick farewell.

Off to Amsterdam tomorrow. No time to blog. So here are three of my best pix from June, just to give you something to look at while I'm away.

Summer strawberries up the allotment. Plus girl. (She likes strawberries...)



Woolfest. Dazzling as usual!



And the Boys. Are they not adorable? Look at that cuddle! I'm thinking of putting this one on Lolcats. Any suggestions for a caption?

Good times and bad times - Pt1.

I've been a bad blogger recently. I have been doing endless amounts if blogworthy things, but do I post about them? Nope...basically I've been too busy doing to have much time or energy left to blog. Oh well...

However, there have been a few things lately which are compulsory blog fodder. Woolfest, the allotment, recent meetups, recent acquisitions and yup, some bad times. So let's do that one first.

I turned 50 last year so am now old enough to be called in for routine screening mammograms under the national breast screening programm. Everyone seems to have a horror story about these so I was not looking forwards AT ALL to this when I got an appointment for three weeks ago, because I've got big boobs and couldn't quite imagine how the squashing bit was going to take place without much pain. Well, it was fine. FINE. It did not hurt. Bit weird, but no pain.

The pain arrived two weeks later when I got a recall letter. They don't tell you why in a letter, obviously, apart from that you have something that needs double checked and that 7 out of 8 women don't need anything more than a second check. Which leaves the other 1 out of 8, obviously. My appointment was six days from the receipt of the letter and yes, I was worried.

Anyway I was there at 9am on Monday and yes, the mammogram showed I had a lump in my right boob. Tiny lump the size of a pea that even the doctor couldn't find manually but it was there. More mammograms, and an ultrasound. Then yet more mammograms because Pea was sneaky and kept wriggling off screen. A lot of waiting around....

Finally the verdict. The doctors are 99% sure it's a benign calcification. Nice word that, benign! However they decided to do a needle punch biopsy to confirm the diagnosis 100%, which was fine by me too. In half an hour or in two days? I went for the half-hour option.

I'm not saying this hurt either. Lets just say that being clamped into the mammogram scanner and told to stay Absolutely Still for nearly thirty minutes is the kind of experience that I don't want to repeat in a hurry. At the time, it was fine, if boring. But two days on I still feel stiff and achy and I have a really sore neck, ouch. I want to say again though for the benefit of anyone going for this procedure...it DID NOT hurt. The bit that did hurt was when they rotated part of the machine and my thumb got caught in it, but that was my own stupid fault, lol.

Anyway, the doctors are happy to let me go off to Amsterdam next Monday for three wweks. They're happy to give me the biopsy results over the phone. They used the expression "confirm the benign diagnosis". They said "99% sure". I know the way oncologists tell you things and the words they use to qualify themselves every second sentence. I'm happy..well, 99% happy!

Normal service will resume tomorrow, or even perhaps tonight if I get the photos crunched down to blogging size. I never did show you the things I got from Woolfest, did I?

Oh, and go for your mammograms when it's your turn, ladies. It's less bother than a smear by a long way, and given that breast cancer is a lot more common than cervical cancer well, it would be daft not to go, surely?

Automatic watering and a felted cat.

It's hot here. To have temperatures of over 25'C in Scotland is pretty rare, I can tell you. Usually we're still wearing cardies in July. So it's a bit of a shock all round, especially to the veg patch. For the last few years we've practically been cutting drainage trenches round the veg beds in an effort to keep them from flooding.

This year however it's been very dry the last couple of months and the allotment is turning into a dustbowl. I've never seen it so dry, not at the start of July anyway. I don't normally water crops...I prefer to keep them sturdy and self sufficient. But this year it's different.

Anyway, after yet another hour with the hose last week I took a thought and went hunting in the shed. Eight years back one of our local DIY warehouses shut down and sold off a lot of their gardening stock f0r really silly prices, like the water butt I have for £1. I bought a lot of stuff, including eight rolls of "leaky" ie drip irrigation hosepipe, reduced from £18 per 15m roll to 10p, mostly because each roll had a load of useful hose fittings which are expensive. Me being me though I'd shoved it all in the shed and forgotten about it.

So now I have 120m of leaky hosepipe set up over my favoured beds on the allotment, linked together by short runs of scrap piping. It sounds a lot but really this only covers five beds so I've only put it on beds with thirsty plants. When I visit the allotment I connect up the hose end to the tap and hey presto, the beds water themselves. Cool, eh? I just wish I could put it on an automatic timer but that's not allowed. But it's a fun system. I have plans to extend it further next year and maybe link it to the water butts, but then again, it will probably rain solidly for the next five summers....

On a lighter note, Paws is really suffering in this heat under his huge bear coat. He lies in front of the fans and looks pained. Ollie, with his lightweight coat, is fine, but Paws has started to felt. He has really fine fur round his britches, it's obviously an area that gets a bit of friction and he's sweaty. Thus, he's felting. I do comb him most days but he's never been keen on getting his nethers combed (would you???) and now he's matting up. I'm keeping the felted bits at bay by a combination of clipping them out and combing the bits he'll let me comb, but still. A felted cat, lol. How appropriate!

Going Batty.

You have just got to watch this, especially the bit at the end with the nursery-inna-box.



Baby bats are given dummies/pacifiers? And they swaddle them! Who knew?

(Thanks to Fuzzarelly for the link.)

Woolfest 2009.

Yup, off to Woolfest tomorrow. I'm getting to be Head Prefect on the Scottish Fibres bus again. I enjoyed doing it last year because everyone turned up on time and there were no problems, but there's no denying it's a worry. What if someone doesn't turn up, they don't contact me and I have to leave them behind? Bad enough on the outwards leg but what if someone gets locked in a portaloo in Cockermouth???? Do I abandon them to their fate?

Fingers crossed.....

Anyway, I'll report back soon. I've packed my camera, knitting, sarnies and *ahem* a modest amount of cash. What am I going to buy? Well, the only thing on my list is a pair of sock blockers, but I'm sure I'll come back with more!

Ma boyz iz famush....

Forget bragging about the kids, my fur boyz just made the front page of I Can Has Cheezburger!


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I submitted the picture a wee while back with my own caption but what I didn't know is that other members can recaption pictures and resubmit them. My picture got resubmitted thirty-six times to date, lol.

Have to admit, the front page caption is a lot snappier. Thanks, Lummox. My boys are now in the Lolcats Hall of Fame forever, lol!

The best laid plans....

Oh well, so much for my allotment plans yesterday. Around 11am I got a phone call from the school saying that Lad was throwing up and could I come and get him please? So that was me stuck at home for the rest of the day, ho-hum. All that get-it-over-with housework time wasted!I could have gone out in the morning and done chores in the afternoon. Oh well...at leasst Lad is none too ill. There's some sort of bug going around but as long as he doesn't eat he isn't puking. he's a bit tired and grumpy, that's all. So he's home today.

I wasn't planning to go out today because Washing Machine Repair Man is coming back again with the final part for the tumble drier. I had to cancel a spinning group day because of this, which was acceptable, but last night guess what? I discover that Hubby is working from home today, which he neglected to tell me about in time for me to ressucitate the spinning plans. Bah. So now I'm at home with a grumpy kid and a Hubby who expected a quiet child and wife free day alone in his office. (Because I was supposed to be at spinning.) If I go out and leave him with WMRM and Grumpy Child he will get narked. If I stay in I will probably disturb him even more. AND because I thought I had a day stuck at home I have volunteered to look after Princess's Best Pal after school which means even more noise on his supposedly quiet day.

Domestic comunication? We haz itz.....notz...

Anyway, yesterday was not a complete wash out on the gardening front. I got some more pots planted up, and finished getting the late sown seeds into the propagator. Plus potted on the courgettes etc. I have a very small greenhouse but at this time of year it's worth its weight in gold.



It really is just a slice of a greenhouse set against a wall. Neat design though. I did think it would be more than big enough when I ordered it but with hindsight, I wish I'd got a double width one and put up with it sticking out into the garden more.



Not even enough room to sit or stand inside if the potting tray is in place.




Variety of courgette and squash plants. (As usual, too many, but they'll all get homes.)



Different tomatoes...



Sweetcorn. This needs potting on too. It's too early for it to be planted out.



Salad trays.



Potting tray/bench.



Potatoes left over from the allotment planting, in pots. These will not yield a lot but they'll be earlier than the allotment ones because of the shelter.



And the last of my 50p per tray Pelargoniums and other plants for colour. I'll get them potted up today.



Oh well, on with the day...