"keeping tooth decay at ba..."

This chest of drawers has been around longer than me, but I was the one that ruined it by sticking Super Ted stickers on it when I was about 6.

This weekend - arboretum

On Sunday we went to the arboretum

there's an aviary full of budgies and cockatiels

it was like being on holiday, wandering about gardens, being super hot, smelling of suntan lotion, carrying liters of water.


the slackline was over 6ft high, and about 15ft long - I didn't get to go on it though since I've killed off my knees.

The weekend - more boating

Thanks to Gem, more photos of boating. Including - proof that I did some rowing

scraggly heron

geese in a row

This weekend - the watersports centre

This weekend - Boating at Highfields

This Saturday me and Gem went to the summer exhibition at the Djanolgly centre, then we went boating at Highfields.

the fish in the pond at the Djanogly arts centre.

we took the other route to avoid the traffic jam
under the bridge
polly washup on the bridge

refreshments after a hard hour of rowing

Daily outfit

brown belt from ebay - I think it's 70s
home made octopuses pocket watch (a shell with a bit of chain threaded through the hole left where the join to the other half of the shell used to be)
DIY french manicure - eg white eyeliner pencil scibbled onto fingernail tips, coat of varnish, some smearing and chips - ready to go!
wrap around skirt with massive birds on it - vintage, probably 70s

Living proof

People who kill spider plants* can still grow vegetables.

chillies
tomatoes

courgettes
spinachblueberries

*they're not actually dead, just went a little peaky looking and very pale for a while...

Daily outfit

halterneck dress - vintage

black tshirt - people tree

grey cardigan - monsoon

yellow belt - parcel ribbon off a chrsitmas present

butterfuly - clip on from Sherwood Forest visitors Centre

shoes - Doc Martens, second hand off ebay

Courgettes for tea

Courgettes are in season now, and there seems to be a lot of them flooding in from the allotments of colleagues at work (one of the bought in a courgette cake he made yesterday based on this recipie - it was yum).

I happily took a free courgette, and combined it with two of my own to make a huge amount of stuffed courgette for dinner.

First you have to boil the courgettes for 4 minutes - then scoop out the flesh and fry it along with onion, mushroom and garlic.
add some breadcrumbs, feta cheese, an egg, fresh mint and tarragon and mix it all together.
fill scooped out courettes with you mixture and bake them in the over for 15 minutes at 200oC
we had ours with bugar wheat and salad - there was way too much.

the recipie I used, I modified it slightly.

Flock

I'm in a really cranky mood today, my knees are aching so much for some reason - it's painful to walk. So bad that I might have to cancel my caving trip tomorrow (sob).

Often when I'm cycling home from work a flock of pigeons zooms back and forth over head - every time it passes I feel so happy and uplifted.

Photo by The Pack, from Flickr. Click the image to be taken to the photographer's page.

Video of flocking parrots on the BBC

Whole Flickr group of bird videos

Strikingly similar

The new Trent riverside development looks an awful lot like my old uni

Mid morning snacking

Samosa
Originally uploaded by Transparent Reality

This morning I couldn't get out of bed; I tried but there were some disconcerting stabbing pains going on in my stomach.

I bundled myself back under the covers and my boyfriend brought me a piping hot water bottle (my proven cure-all for stomach problems). He then popped out for an hour - during which I slept, waking occasionally to find my arms and legs were really heavy and a kind of numb.

By the time he'd got home I'd decided to drag myself to work, and was justting getting up when he came in through the door, paper bag clutched in his hands, with two hot samosas inside from a nearby shop called the Tall Frog.

We sat on the bed, tucking into our freshly made samosas, before both dashing off to work.

Property crush

Sometimes it's nice to run off to a fantasy world in which you can afford to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on 1970s properties.

Like this one in Gloucestershire:

Or this one in London:


Or this one in Kent:

This would be your theme tune.