'Best Before End' Trumps...(or how housewives manage to avoid hitting the bottle before noon)

Thursday morning. Ds1 is throwing up. I settle him on the sofa with a king sized tub trug and resign myself to a day at home.

A day at home.

So what do I do? Oh the choices are endless. I could feed the washing machine monster. I could find a way of fitting all the kids clothes in their drawers. I could burn chocolate cookies. I could poke out the gunge-slime from the rubber seals in the dishwasher with a take-away chopstick. Or I could solve the problem of life the universe and everything.

Well even though the latter sounds mighty tempting it's not really compatible with emptying vomit out of a tub trug at regular intervals and so I decide, instead, on the task of clearing out the kitchen cupboards. Not just any kitchen cupboard, but Baking Cupboard Hell Hole, that desolate-thingimagig-stuffed-flour-mite-dog-hair-infested-no-mans-land.

Yes. I may be some time.

So here is an account in pictures of the contents of my baking cupboard on Thursday 29th July 2010.

Somehow it looks much tidier in a photo than it does in real life:
















But as I start to remove items, the reality shows:




















I reveal what no good vegetarian should have in their cupboard (close your eyes). I find two packs. But to be fair we used them to make 'snot' one halloween, not to eat.




















There are strange things lurking. A regular item in our diet (not). Maybe some strange healthy visitor snuck it in there when I wasn't looking. Or maybe the kids used it for dinosaur world or coke bottle rattles or amunition for assorted weapons...




















There are indicators of a guilty 'we ought to eat more healthy' moment. 3 different packs of pumpkin seeds, signifying 3 separate moments of food health guilt.
At least one, as you'll note by the use-by date, occurred before 2003:















Ahah! I'd forgotten that wonderful game. The 'best before' game of trumps.

And so I start with Dried Stoned Dates....





















...July 2006





















I trump that with Mixed Dried Fruit (looking more dried than fruit)...
























...Oct 2004





















Well that definitely beats Green's Velvety Cheesecake mix...


























which has an almost edible March 2010


















Quick intermission (doesn't everyone have tattoos in their baking cupboard?)

Then back to the game. I trump Velvety Cheesecake Mix with Ready To Serve Custard (complete with layer of authentic kitchen grease and dust), September 2009.

Which thrashes last year's Classic Christmas Pudding, still in date with a best before of September 2010:

But I'll top that with Flaked Pudding Rice...

with date of Jan 2003...

Which trumps Tescos Walnut Pieces...

that is sadly only April 2004:

But both are trumped by my positively retro selection of Gram Flour packs...

The first with the date of December 2001

And the second ...

...with the super bbe date of 7th August 2001! Yay! We have a winner!

The only problem is that at this point I get bored.

And somehow all this has to go back in that cupboard:

Never mind, maybe I'll just ignore it and go tackle the lifeforms in the fridge.

I am taking on the world, one cupboard at a time.

Tubs, cobs and carrots

I intended posting up a few photos of our house-blitz, the decluttering frenzy, several days ago, but actually there's not alot to show for the days of work we've put in. Yes, the piles of stuff are less, and there is some sense of order in some areas, but, well, more decluttering needed methinks.

In amidst the decluttering dd and I decorated tubs with marbled paper that we'd made a few years back, with the idea of using them for pens, paint brushes etc. There's something a bit OCD about boxes and tubs with labels on, but it is oh so satisfying dont' you think? I think it's a sign that it's nearly Autumn; around the time I have an irresistable urge to buy stationery and colour-code the lego (or something else obsessional).

The kids spent Saturday having a sale of toys, books and games that they'd cleared out from their room. All day they sat at their stall outside our local corner shop, bless 'em. They'd made £18 by the end of the day, which , added to a further £11 I made from selling the educational items they were keen to clear out of the boys' bedroom (!), makes £29 in total (I'm good at maths, me). Anyway, they're planning to buy some gamecube controllers and memory card to enable them to play gamecube games on the Wii.

Allotment is productive at the moment, despite the weeds. Beetroot fab, carrots getting there (some carrot root fly, but not too bad so far), spring onions the size of golf balls, and new rows of mange tout and dwarf french beans coming along nice. Potatoes? Well I'm getting back more than I planted (just), which is a novelty lol.

The Italian courgette plants given to me by fellow allotmentee (yes, I didn't kill them off after all) are going into overdrive. Long crisp courgettes on climbing/trailing plants. And the plants seem resistant to moulds (so far). No way I'm going back to traditional British ones after this:

Successful carrots:

Sadly, the tomato plants which were looking so spectacular only a few weeks ago have been hit by blight and were destroyed almost overnight. If you live in a blight-free area and grow tomatoes then consider yourself lucky. I've been nurturing these plants since February and just when they get to the point of being productive the leaves turned brown, the plants collapsed and the fruit turned black and unusable. Same thing every year...

Tomato plants in July:

And tomato plants in August:

We've picked the sweetcorn, lovely sweet juicy cobs. Didn't bother to freeze much of it this time as the kids don't seem to like it once it's been frozen.

Some of our crop:

The leeks are looking poorly. Some I think have been hit by onion white rot, which has hampered our veg growth in previous years. Others are throwing up flower spikes so are mostly useless. It's a shame, as we rely on them as a staple winter veg, but the kids will be pleased that they wont be getting leek and potato soup every week!

I have other news too, including the boys' latest obsession in creating animations/games using the free software scratch, our new additions (fish) and the growth of our monster triops (still alive and swimming), oh and jam making sessions.

But maybe more of that tomorrow. I think I can see you yawning [am I boring you?]

Life is just too exciting...

We seem to have had a manic week of clearing, decluttering, labelling, tidying etc. The frenzy has built up gradually, starting with the boys' room, then dd's room, then the conservatory (leaning tower of craft junk and cupboard). Of course all the rubbish from the kids' rooms has ended up on my bedroom floor. For some reason that seems to happen everytime we have a clearout...

Anyway, today was the most exciting of all. I was labelling tubs with 'elastic bands and paper clips' and 'marker pens' and 'staples'. Sometimes I wonder how I cope with such a high-powered, buzzing, fast-lane existence.

Anyway, photos tomorrow.
What? You don't want to see photos of my decluttering? Tough.

What do you have on your table?

Perhaps you have this...

(dd's trainers with the dog rattles stuck in them)

Or one of these...

(Triops eggs in water)

Or perhaps a few of these...

(plaster of paris moulds and brooches)

And how about several of these....

(Airfix model planes)

Not forgetting one of these...

(Quartz crystals and a potassium salt solution to grow crystals)

Plus the pieces of one of these...

( a semi-dismantled remote controlled car)

And then perhaps a few items from the leaning tower of junk shelves...

And perhaps you have all of it on your table at the same time and it might start to look like this...

As you can tell, we've had a busy day...plaster of paris, airfix models, setting up a triops tank, starting a crystal kit, taking apart a remote-controlled car (plus reading out a few chapters of 'Dragon in the Cliff', driving out to see if we could buy some fertile chicken eggs, baking pizzas and bread and trying to sort out the shelves in the conservatory). I'm shattered! So much for a quiet day at home!

The short and fruitless life of a crispy cockchafer

I spent most of Friday trying to tidy our bedroom. Do you ever find yourself nagging the kids to tidy their rooms and then quickly shut the door on your own bedroom so you can't remind yourself how bad your own room is?

Well, our bedroom is the transitional place for stuff coming down from the loft and stuff awaiting to go into the loft. But the trouble is that most of the stuff that has come down from the loft has stayed in the bedroom, and ditto for most of the stuff that's supposed to be going up into the loft. It's like a doctor's waiting room where the queue never gets any shorter and people still keep piling in through the door.

Our bedroom is supposed to be a child-free space, or at least a child-clutter-free space. Somehow the house gremlin keeps leaving lego and bits of toys that need mending, and screws and screwdrivers, odd socks, flannels, woolly hats, lolly wrappers, bags of seashells, shopping receipts, take-away menus and other assorted junk in there; when piled up on top of the sleeping bags, not-quite-fitting kids' clothes, dirty clothes, clean washing that never got put away, suitcases and carrier bags of wool, several Sunday newspapers from the previous month, six pairs of size 9 shoes (blame dh for that one), a large mirror, two 10"photoframes, 4 full-size guitars (dh), a large box of photographic slides, some glass paints, and a carrier bag of music cassettes from the 1980s, it makes it quite difficult to get to the bed every evening.

So on Friday I had a clearout and a rearrange of furniture. Furniture moving is my 'thing' at this time of year (look back at past blogs and I'm sure they'll be an entry for around this time of year involving furniture rearranging). It's cheaper and easier than decorating, and less likely to end in world war 3. And there's something about swearing and cursing at furniture that wont fit in the space you want it to fit into that is very good for the soul.

And I got the vacuum cleaner out! Now for those of you who exit the house every morning in a uncreased white linen suit with smiling happy CLEAN children and their neatly wrapped nutritionally-balanced lunches, drop the kids off with their prearranged equally elegant playmates and pop off to the gym via the nail bar, then you'd better stop reading now. Please.

Because after I'd vacuumed up most of the under-bed fluff (and that was even before I'd got to the bed, this was just the stuff lying around on the floor) and after I'd found the missing bit of toy that I was meant to superglue back onto it's source but had lost about 3 months ago (alas I recognised this missing part 0.2 of a second after it had gone up the vacuum cleaner and it is smaller than my fingernail and the colour of under-bed fluff) then I stuck the vacuum under the chest of drawers and sucked up a May bug.

Do you know what a May bug is? It's one of these...(also known as a Cockchafer)


They are kinda chunky and crunchy, especially if you step on one, and they have a nasty habit of letting their pheromones go to their head. So...in early Summer they set about swarming trying to find a mate. They fly around like some clumsy missile, bashing their head on windows until they find an opening, then tangle themselves in someone's net curtains, before falling down dead and crispy behind an item of furniture.
If they're lucky they might have had a bit of a May bug kiss and a cuddle en route, but I'm pretty sure most of them are too stupid to even work out that little bit of their life purpose, and are far too easily distracted by marvels of the modern human world (like net curtains).

So, that's the short life of a May bug; they do have a maggoty bit in their life cycle, but we wont go into that. Dh calls them June bugs, which is probably more approriate because I've never seen them in May, usually in June. Either way, May or June, thats at least a shameful 7 months that this poor crunchy creature has been curled up among the fluff on my bedroom floor.

And the moral of the story is..?
I'll leave you to figure that one out (answers on a postcard to...)

Anyway, clearing the bedroom has had it's benefits. In between the 3 year-old bottles of gone-off perfume, and bizarre hair products that I've never used (the products are bizarre, not my hair you understand), I found an opened pack of lollies that I'd banned the kids from having because I figured the chewy ones would pull their fillings out. Chewy things do that. We have experience.

So I'm now, as I type this, chewing my way through Matlow's Drumsticks (original raspberry and milk flavour). I don't care about my fillings - they're the real MacCoy super-strength mercury type and will stand up to any chewy sweet you throw at them (plus all the other things that I tell the kids they shouldn't eat/drink). At the same time I'm watching a Red Kite out the back window. I guess this is proof that I can muti-task.

"Rather yummy these drumsticks are" (said in a Yoda-like voice).

Just wishing that I'd banned the swizzels too. Though they're not half as good since they took all the artificial whotsits out of them.

The Tardis Car

We spent the morning outdoors with other home ed friends (one of whom is majorly pregnant, so I had visions of us acting as midwives down in the woods!). The kids came back filthy, which I like to think is a sign of having had a good time. However, it did make me look at the state of our car when we got home and realise that it really does need a clear out and a clean (inside).

Once the boys had been ferried off to their music session at a local Montessori school and dd1 was happily occupied with a friend upstairs I set about taking some of the clutter out of the car.



Hmmm....It's not good. In fact it's so bad, I have to list the items in order to shame myself that the car wont get this bad again. This is a list of the initial bag of items I have exumated from the car (there is more to come). I'm just wondering how all this fitted into the car (plus 5 people and a dog). Perhaps we've acquired a people-carrier version of the tardis?:



2 chip wrappers (and some left over chips - from today)

A bottle of ketchup (almost finished)

A bottle of brown sauce (very sticky)

two bottles of tap water

a pack of chewing gum

a pair of gardening gloves

two branches (no, not twigs or sticks - huge branches that were jammed across the front passenger seat)

Lots of tissues

A cardboard cloud that belongs to a pop-up Kipper book.

Two packs of sparklers (these are at least 2 years old, though they haven't been on the dashboard qute that long)

A toy car

An empty cassette case of 'driving music'

A slice of cork with a cup hook screwed into it

Two empty coke cups

A child's umbrella

A pair of muddy wellies

Two coats, a mac, a small vest, some pants and a bag of assorted spare clothes, mostly muddy.

An empty box for slides (we don't do slide photography anymore)

A car aerial (not from our car)

A book of local places to go

A spiral-bound road map, torn and muddy

A cassette of 'The Waterboys'

A bus ticket

Empty coke can

A white plastic strip for covering wiring

A tin of sweets (those expensive ones that they sell in motorway service stations)

Three felt-tip pens (mostly with lids missing) and 3 pencils

A dalek-shaped cookie cutter

A ticket to an ice disco (dated 12 December 2007) that we've never been to

A shop display leaflet that dd1 took off one of the display bikes in Halfords

Two black straws

Some unchewed lumps of chewing gum

A Charlie and Lola colouring pack

Two hankies (filthy)

A cassette of 'The Clash'

A felt-tip pen lid

A tescos receipt for Pringles and diesel

3 green shiny foil bottle tops

A box of nappy sacks

A parking ticket from October (stuck to the dashboard)

A discount voucher for ready brek (we don't eat it)

Two empty smartie tubes

A Micromeg purified water cartridge (huge and empty - came from the scrapstore)

A white pump thing with an arrow and 'flow' written on it (plus some weird tubes coming out of it)

A large scratch card (not the winning one obviously otherwise I would have paid for someone else to be clearing the car out)

A crayfish claw

An empty pack that once contained glowsticks

A rubber dart from a toy gun

A cardboard tube from the centre of a cone of machine wool

A birthday candle

A business card for dh

A tesco carrier

A pair of old glasses that are no longer worn

A pair of yellow sunglasses
A plastic boy on a plastic skateboard

A business card from a restaurant I've never heard of

A piece of card from a cigarette pack (we don't smoke)

A price tag from a batman toy (not ours)

A padlock that we don't have a key for

Another cork

A red plastic ball

Lego (assorted items including the head and arms from a Lego skeleton)

A clothes peg

A parking ticket for November

A piece of netting attached to 'missiles'

Some red straw-like things attached to attaching things

A plastic coin

3 pennies and a 20p piece

A small blob of bluetack

3 hazelnuts picked up from the pavement

A piece of flint

A long purple strap, used sometimes as a dog lead

An envelope for collecting pumpkin seeds



If this is representative of my life (or the state of my brain) I think I should be worried!
I sometimes wonder what my car would look like if I didn't have kids, or if I didn't home educate...

An Artist in the Family and our Successful Money Making Venture

Dd1 has suddenly taken to drawing. In fact she has taken to all sorts of craft and arty things, with a particular fascination for hama beads [If you want a taste of true multitasking, try ironing hama beads in a small crowded 1930s kitchen while trying to cook dinner, get ready to go to work, have 3 conversations with 3 children at the same time and deal with a puppy that wants to put his head in the oven]. Anyway, thought I'd showcase some of her work:

Butterfly and flower, made using a normal circular hama bead thingy.

She came up with the butterfly design on her own (not bad for a 4 yr old)

Lots of pictures of the dog. He even has toes!

Flowers and butterflies (seems to be a popular theme)

Today, my decluttering moved on a bit by teaming up with my sister to do a car boot sale. The car was full, and I mean absolutely and totally full! All the seats in the people carrier were down and we still had problems squeezing in the sacks and boxes - I could hardly see out my rearview mirror it was piled so high! It was a long day, around 6 hours, but we had a constant stream of customers right up to the end and with a bit of haggling we shifted a lot of stuff. We certainly came back with a lot less stuff than we went with and between us we made over £100 which was fantastic and well worth the effort - my share will pay for the fees for our camping holiday and half a tank of diesel to get us there!

The decluttering continues, but a bit like one of those plastic picture puzzles with shifting squares and only one space, I seem to be moving stuff from one room to another to another...I'm guessing that all the junk will end up in one room at the end (probably the loft or the garage!)
As you can see, that precious space I made on the shelves a few days ago has already been filled!



I don't think our family is ever going to be compatible with minimalist living!