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michellekstone

Aug 1

It's been an exciting and busy week this week starting with two more comedy events, our last of the Red Imp Edinburgh warm up season.

The first of these featured Robin Ince as the headline act. Robin Ince is a very clever and very funny man, and I really wanted to listen to him. However after several nights of poor sleep, a stressful day at work, a large potato-based dinner and a pint of cider, I was very tired by the time he took the stage sometime around 10pm. Despite him being a very funny and very interesting man, I was nodding off during his show. I wanted to listen to him, but I also desperately want to be asleep in my bed.

For our final comedy night, I decided to celebrate not having to go out anymore midweek by sampling the "cocktail of the month" at the Trades Hall, the bizarrely named office milk. it was small but delicious, and although I have read the publicised list of ingredients, I don't know what Chambord is.

This week was also the week of our annual big barbecue. The one where I invite "everyone I know". The one where we spend several days cleaning our house so we can pretend that we live in a clean house all the time when in fact we only clean the house like this when we have people coming to stay or visit. The one where we fill our fridge with barbecue food and alcohol, and lay in enough snacks to feed at least twice the number of people who are coming.

We had up to eleven people which is quite a lot, but given that we'd bought in enough meat to feel 20, we have several meals worth of leftovers. Given my suggestion to guests who wanted to bring something that we didn't have any salad, we know have an over abundance of leaves and tomatoes and cucumber. And given that several people brought wine, we ended up with more bottles of wine than we started with.

And I won't even start on the many dips that we bought but left in the fridge and didn't use; and the many crackers we brought to use with the dips but didn't open…

But I think it was a good event. I got to see people I haven't seen for a while, and the weather played ball with warmth but not outright sunniness which can be exhausting and dehydrating.

The only negative thing is that at events like this you have to be like a shark, constantly on the move, opening the front door, organising drinks, bringing out more snacks, bringing out more drinks, getting your guests to make the salad because you are cooking the BBQ…

(because yes, I do the cooking when we have a BBQ. At our first BBQ, back when we had more Antipodean friends in London, Husband-then-Boyfriend had several of our male friends give him some heavy criticism for letting "the woman" do the cooking, because Antipodean BBQ cooking is very much a male thing, and I had a cluster of men gathered around the grill, watching me cook with a critical eye, ready to leap in I guess, if it looked like I was letting the sausages get too crispy.)

Covid cases are on the increase again so I'm wearing my mask on public transport again despite the heat of summer making the inside of my mask some kind of lower face sauna.

Starting to think seriously about preparations for Safari trip coming up later in August including things like applying for visas (never easy!) or searching out medical information to find out what vaccinations we need. Yellow fever vaccine is required for Kenya. Fine, I had a vaccine sometime in the last 10 years. However Husband had his vaccine in 2008 and his vaccine certificate expires in 2018 despite the advice from health authorities that yellow fever it is a single shot vaccine that you need to have only once for lifelong protection. So why does the certificate have an expiry date?

Adventures in fermenting resumes! I woke up my milk kefir grains which I've been keeping in the freezer for some months now. They've been hard at work this week producing a strange slimy kind of kefir. Have I kept them in the freezer too long? Am I feeding them the wrong kind of milk? Is it too hot for them? Nevertheless I'm drinking the slimy kefir they are producing, which does improve after a day or so in the fridge, becoming less slimy and more fizzy. I'm not sure it's a lot of good for my stomach, which is making strange noises since I started my morning kefir regime.

I should prepare some water and get my water kefir grains a run as well. They have also been sleeping in the back of the fridge for many months now. I just need to get some fruit to ferment with the kefir water and I can make some kind of natural fermented soft drink.

I wore my wedding shoes to work this week. It's been more than ten years since I got married, so I've had these shoes for some time. They are bright pink peep toe shoes with some spangly beads on them. I carried them into the office in a bag and put them on when I got there. I was swanning around the office thinking how cute I looked in these pink shoes.

And then I thought, Hmmm, these shoes feel loose.

And then I looked down and saw the reason they felt loose was because they were falling to pieces. The glue that held them together had obviously perished in the past years while these shoes saw quietly in a box under my bed. The sole was separating from the base of the shoe, the peep toes were becoming unstuck from the sole, the whole shoe was reducing itself to its component parts and I was at risk of finding myself walking barefoot through the office with pieces of shoes trailing behind me.

The judicious application of sticky tape was good enough to hold them together for the rest of the day. (Yes, I could have put my 'walking to the station' shoes on. But no, I didn't.)

My next mission is to get the shoes repaired.

"How old are they?" Husband asked. "And how much did you pay for them?"

Yes, I've had them for a long time and yes, they were cheap (but a perfect colour match for my dress), but these are my Wedding Shoes. You don't just throw out cute, happy memory shoes like these. You get them fixed and you keep wearing them. At least, that's what I hope I will be able to do.

Wishing you a week with no unexpected breakages, dear readers.

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