New paintings and regular art updates.
What would your life be like without music?
I love singing harmonies in choirs.
Stiring sea shanties,
Soaring melodies
Deep, soulful folk songs,
Some pop songs from yesteryear.
Voices mingled
Low and high meld together.
Sopranos and Bass, Alto and Tenor
Winding and twisting around
Yes singing lifts me.
For years I drew seahorses on the sand
A holiday tradition.
He would watch while I drew
Happy in admiration
Sunny, bright days,
Soft sand
Holding hands.
I started doing this
30 years ago
Seahorses gallop into the waves
Dragging my memories
In the undertow
Last week I walked towards a beach
Did not step onto it
Did not pick up a stick and draw
Did not depict this watery creature
I don’t know if I ever will
Again….
Sand particles washed and blown
Away…
Has my tide turned?
I don’t know…
Tasty 1970s food before real foreign food was a thing. I particularly liked the chow mein vesta made (I don’t know if it’s still manufactured).
This is my faulty memory, I thought it came with prawn crackers but when I saw the photo I remembered they had a little packet of thin strips of noodles that you had to fry so they puffed up into little squiggles of crispy noodles. I’m guessing that the food was cooked In pans, certainly it was before microwaves, and it was unusual to have anything like this (except dehydrated mashed potato). I remember the jingle ” for mash, get smash!”
Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.
One day hubby turned up from his work at a pottery with a very large casserole pot. He’d bought it and wanted to cook for friends.
We decided to make a chicken casserole and invite a few friends over. I was working that evening so he said he would prepare it. I told him what to do, put the chicken in the casserole pot, add carrots, potatoes, onion and a clove of garlic.
I came home to hubby and our guests. He opened a bottle of wine and we decided to serve the food. Unfortunately the smell of very pungent garlic wafted from the pot. My hubby had put in a whole bulb of garlic in by mistake. We were only young and were not used to the strength of the garlic. The flavour was too strong for us. I think we ended up having fish and chips from the chips shop.
My windscreen wiper motor broke down on the way back from Birmingham once, so we titd a string to one wiper, put it through the driver and passenger windows and tied it to the other wiper, We got cold and wet but at least I could see what was going on. Hubby pulled the string side to side while I drove! We got some peculiar looks on the way home! Especially when we stopped at traffic lights… People were laughing at us!
I remembered this after reading about the woman from America who invented windscreen wipers in the 1890s after seeing a tram driver struggling to see the road through his window in a snowstorm in New York.
What are your favorite types of foods?
Our mother would take us out for meals occasionally when we were children. Sometimes it was Indian, but mostly Chinese. I like the flavours, the textures, the combination of ingredients. Duck with hoisin sauce, chicken chow mein, special fried rice, beef with spring onions and black bean sauce. All kinds of other things. I just like it, although I have read that the Chinese food in the UK is not authentic.
Mom got us to use chop sticks which added to the unique and special feeling it was to eat out. In those days the only other form of Chinese food was Vesta Chow mein which came in a box and you added hot water to it I think, and fried prawn crackers. But they were good memories.
Auroras again. Last night at 2am. Looking West. This is a 60 second exposure taken on my phone camera which stacks images when my phone is set on night exposure. Midlands in England. How can I be so lucky? Never seen them until this year.
How did I know it was happening? I saw the weather forecast again so I decided to look out at midnight, but that photo was mainly blue with grey white splodges. So it was overcast. Then when I looked again just before bed the sky was darker and something seemed to be happening so I took a few photos ( I can’t explain how dim it was and I basically just risked taking a picture.) the main problem is trying to keep the camera still by leaning against something as my Parkinsons is getting more shaky
Do you see yourself as a leader?
There are too many people who think they have what it takes to be a leader. But you can do other things, like being a follower, a loner, a supporter.
If you care about people or things think about using your compassion and being a supporter in some way. That could be financially, or morally, or emotionally. By supporting others you can reinforce friendship, but also possibly productivity, or yours and theirs emotional wellbeing. As the saying goes, love one another as you would like to be loved yourself. X
Why does my phone switch itself off when I try and take a photo? I think I might have too many photos in my phone memory and I don’t optimise them enough. When I do try and do that the picture sizes are reduced but the originals stay on the phone. So I have to go through them all to remove duplicates. This also means that all the photos are stacked under one date (today’s), but I have to do it. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to do it now. It also means that the photo sizes here will be reduced.
My dilemma is that a lot of pictures here are large and they are taking up a lot of space, so I sometimes have to take off photos from my blogs to give me a bit more room to add new pictures here. So if you find a blog of mine here without a picture? Well that’s the outcome of not being able to afford a better package on WordPress. X
What’s your favorite word?
Tranklements is an old fashioned word meaning bits and bobs, a collection of odds and ends, shiny things like a magpie would collect.
I think it is an old historical word from the Midlands of England. Certainly I’ve only really heard it used in The West Midlands around the Birmingham area. I think its a dialect word.
In context you could say I’m just getting my tranklements together if you wanted to gather your lace making kit or a bag full of knitting stuff. Or bits of costume jewellery, a bag full of paints or makeup.
I like it because it sort of explains what it means just in the sound. It should be used more often!
Mallaband-Brown