Fabulous food find today was a HUGE – SEEDLESS watermelon from Costo in Aberdeen at £2.99. Absolutely fabulous and the kids are hugely impressed with how much there is in the bowl after I sliced it all up to put it in the fridge for nibbles.
Watermelon works out at about 30 calories per 100g (according to my iphone diet calorie checker). A whole kg worth of water melon would only set me back 300 calories. Now that is a stomach filling prospect.
We tried to find a way to amuse the kiddos on Tuesday, which saw us visit Transition Extreme. It is a skatepark for BMX’ers, skateboarders and climbers
My boys need to do the training before they are allowed to enter the park, so it was disappointment all round as I booked them in for next week as there were no slots left for this week.
Leaving TA with dejected faces, I took them to Codonas. It has long been the little carnival that is resident in our little home City.
I’m sharing some of the pictures of the only sunny day we’ve been privy to for three weeks now.
Beware.. When you buy a Codonas wrist band for the day, you get a ticket entitling you to a free kids meal for every adult meal purchased. When you try to order it, you are pointed to a large board with a corrected statement that says you only get a kids main course.
They refuse to honour the ticket.
Apart from that, it was a lovely afternoon for the boys.
It should have been a wonderful experience. It should have been 8 hours of pampered bliss.
After months of anticipation, waiting for the 24th of June to roll around on the way to Cybermummy 11, I tentatively stepped aboard the 7.52 from Aberdeen to head down to London. I was hoping that the trip was going to be full of excited tweets, and maybe a little work along the way. I splashed out and treated myself to first class tickets, and convinced myself that I was going to have a spectacularly wonderful journey, on the way to a spectacularly fantastic conference full of bloggers.
My first impressions went really well, and the seating suited me perfectly. Being an insular blogging tweeter, my chosen single seat meant that didn’t have to make polite conversation based on get out moments of unintentional eye contact. I settled in for the 8 hour trip, and very smugly, I opened my laptop to begin a marathon tweeting session. All seemed to go well until I tried to connect to the free wi-fi. After trying on and off for 2.5 hours, the guard did eventually say that the wi-fi and the promised power in the socket was out of order. My heart sinks with the realisation that IT IS NOT GOING TO WORK AT ALL. The reason I chose first class and paid more mullah was for WiFi and POWER. AND to top it all, I didn’t have any books with me.
Faced with the prospect of 8 hours on a train with very little, and patchy mobile signal, no power and a laptop that wasn’t going to last for an hour, I could only see the endless journey ahead of me while I stared out of the window. I religiously checked and rechecked the power point to see if it had come back on again. The woman and her daughter in the quad seat at the other side of me. eyed me sideways as I plugged in and out every fifteen minutes to see if it would come back on again. I’m sure they thought I had checked out of the closest hospital for the day.
On the map when I chose my seat at the point of booked, it showed a toilet right next to the seat I had picked. I worried slightly that the door would open onto where I was sitting, and that a toilety smell would invade my long journey. I needn’t have worried, as the entrance to the toilet, was through the carriage doorway. I breathed a sign of relief and smugly smiled at my decadence.
The man across from me, who got on at the first stop past Aberdeen, asked for a cup of coffee when they were taking orders for breakfast. He obviously just wasn’t with the programme as he stared at his ALL DAY menu, but was told that there would be no coffee again until after Dundee. I secretly giggled at his long face as I reached down and extracted my secret stash of juice to see me through the journey,
I gave up hearing the guards announcements by Edinburgh, but was pleasantly surprised on the way back up again on the Sunday, to be able to hear ALL of the announcements. I think some of it is a male thing. Deep voice + loud train = mumble, garble, burble.
On the way down, I ran out of juice in my phone, my laptop, and my emergency back up phone battery. Whats a girl to do on a train that has no wi-fi, or power working, and was daft enough not to have anything installed worth reading on the phone? Yup, you’ve guessed it – she sits and refreshes the content on her screen every 30 seconds and wills the wi-fi into life – just to make sure she isn’t the only idiot on the train staring out of the window when technology is boop boop booping for everyone else.
There was no wi-fi on the way back up the road again either, so I guess it’s just me who seems to be internetty challenged on trains, and I am grateful for the lovely Kathryn Brown from Crystal Jigsaw who played a game of cat and mouse with me while she planned waving a yellow flag from her farm, while I watched from the train (yup, I missed her). (ps, if you haven’t read her new book, you should, it’s fab). Kathryn – please forgive me for mentioning you in this post.
After holding in the desperate need to pee for as long as possible, the time finally came when I had to face the dreaded toilet. The bitter disappointment I felt when I entered the cubicle, will stay with me for life. There, like a vision of misery, was a soaking wet floor, with lots of bits of someone else’s toiletry paper adorning the floor like a decorated tapestry.
Now, forgive me for being a woman with too much expectation from others, but is it really too much to ask, for men to PEE IN THE TOILET. I have to say, that the biggest no no for me would be when I put down a toilet seat, and am then confronted with PEE LINES.
NO human should be subject to PEE LINES. Am I making myself totally clear?
And if they do pee on the toilet, or miss the pot altogether is it too much to ask for them to CLEAN IT UP AFTERWARDS…………?
Being the slightly obsessive toilet freak that I am, I take toilet roll from holder, and try to squirt a healthy dose of soap from the dispenser.
THERE IS NO SOAP
My bladder is going into overdrive, and the need to pee overtakes my need to sit on a sparkling like new toilet seat, but while I am in there, another train dweller begins to batter on the toilet door, and whang at the handle, and as I get ready to venomously spew out “whats your problem”, I open the door in a rage, to look down at a smiling junior battering ram. I laugh at the silliness and I ignore the pain pressing on my bladder, walk out of the toilet, and head back to my seat. I take my hand sanitiser and march back to wait in the now queue to the loo. At this point, the man opposite with serious liquid envy seems to snigger as I pass. I straighten my back and swish my hair with a flourish to get my own back.
A healthy dose of santisier, and I once again run back to my seat to grab the make up wipes that hide in the bottom of my never ending laptop bag. When I’m done, the toilet seat ends up as shiny as a new pin.
I ignore the “water” on the floor, and try to tell myself that it’s the result of drip dry hand shakers.
The piece of sodden loo roll scrunched up with what looks suspiciously like fresh blood fills my shoes with shaking feet. I seethe as I consider the fact that somebody needs to open up a school that deals with teaching men to pee straight. Women in their millions would book their men onto it, and we’d all live happier at home, on trains, and enjoy friends coming to visit.
With hours of a train journey still to go, a new obsession takes over. Every half an hour, my body decides to make me suffer with the necessity to visit the room of a million smells. Even Mr fluidly challenged begins to think it’s funny. Every male that passes me on the way to the loo, I eye up with daggers, convinced that the possibilities will make them pee straight in the loo.
Will MEN please learn to PEE IN the TOILET !
It’s about time I introduced one of my hobbies – my smelly heaven of candlemaking. I absolutely love the scents and smells of burning candles. Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter, I love, love, love them.
I started out by buying the ready mades you get in supermarkets, but they just didn’t cut it for me. They either burned right down the middle, or they burned too fast, or the scent was just awful.
I soon cottoned onto the partylite / yankee type candles which burn pretty well, and smell pretty good as well. The only thing was, that the amount of candles I wanted to burn, I pretty much would have had to rob a bank to pay for my growing habit.
My next step was to move onto looking into how to make them for myself. My first attempts at candlemaking were a complete and utter disaster if I am honest. They either ended up too large, or too small wicks, or the wrong mix of scent to wax, and then I CRACKED IT.
I found myself a fabulous formula for my wax and additives, and my candles all turn out fantastically. I even make them with soy, and potter about decorating some of them. I will put up more pictures over time of things I make, and how to get the best out of the ones you buy, but for now, this is just an introduction to my “hobby”.
If anyone is interested, I may even give you the recipes for some easy start candles to make yourself. Apologies for the dark photographs as the only camera I had on hand this morning was my phone.
Actually can’t complain. Lunch for me and the boy for £6.99 – and it’s quiet. Heaven.
Pizza Hut gets my thumbs up today. Staff were fab. Union Square should take a bow.
10th November was the day that the council in Aberdeen voted once again on the budget cuts.
The statement is here for anyone local to Aberdeen http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/council_tax_benefits/council_tax_home.asp
As with the other statements which will be being released up and down the country, they make for quite light reading, touching on issues, and promising to deliver on what looks like good practice.
Some of the main priorities in Aberdeen are :
Initially, the council were planning to remove 50% of the PSA (Personal Support Assistants) in classrooms across the city, in both primary and secondary provision, and that is in an area where inclusion has been heavily carried out with PSA support. This was after already losing 300 at the last round of cuts.
There are children being excluded for not being able to cope now. How much is that going to increase when more support is taken away, is anybody’s guess. Excluding is easy where the staff cannot, and will not take responsibility for the issues that arise from placing children inappropriately.
Our children in mainstream schools now share classes with the ASN children who would, probably in our generation have attended the stand alone special schools, or childrens institutes in the area. We have a high PSA ratio in our schools, as they are now there supporting the children who need help. I have heard many excuses surrounding why they should be cut, from people outraged that they are pinning up things to make classes look pretty, to sitting “babysitting” children with bad behaviour.
Both of these arguments are irrational. Yes, teachers could pin up the sticker charts, the projects, the work that the children are doing, but then we are eating into teaching time. What do you really want?? And as for the “babysitting…….. From my perspective, in a school where there are children not coping, there will be bad behaviour.
The other options for those children struggling without support are limited to quietly not receiving much of an education, and exclusion. With the right support, they are living a full life, and integrating with the school. I thought that was the whole point!!!!!!! Maybe I misunderstood the point of integration / exclusion all these years. Any arguments, or issues people have with PSA’s should be taken up with the individual headteachers who allocated them, and they should not be not used to denigrate PSA’s overall.
One of the options tabled was to cut music in schools and another was to amalgamate two secondary schools, which was sensible in terms of the school roll. Both of these options raised high profile campaigns, that parents AND the children themselves fought. The councillors very quickly decided that these options were going to cause them some problems, and might likely affect their future election prospects. Both issues were taken off the table.
Taking those issues off the table, meant that for education, there needed to be cuts from somewhere. The other potential eduction cuts that run deep in Aberdeen included
Now, I am not being unreasonable to say, that doing all of this up front, without the training of the staff who are left to cope, is madness. All I can see are the unsupported children struggling, and with no prospect of assistance. These children then add to the social care system, but sorry, that is being cut as well.
And in the process, hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country are being made redundant in the name of paying back the debt our banks got us into).
Now who, in the cutting process, is going to be left to pay the debs off?
The demand on benefits is increasing with the redundancies. With less money to spend, more people are having to give up their small businesses – oh wait, that means yet more on benefits again.
Now forgive me for being pessimistic, but the people making these decisions don’t live in the real world. They live in their comfortable, well paid little bubbles, with their comfortable and well paid little friends, living their perfect little lives, with nannies, cooks, cleaners and bottle washers on tap.
Those of us in the general public can’t fight the upper classes, but we have to live with their bad choices. I have nothing but respect for the parents in the constituencies who decided to boycott school for a day in protest at the education cuts. All power to them.
Looking at how people find my blog today in the statistics package, I was struck by how many people find it by asking the words “how to be a scottish mum.”
I’m not really sure how to take that. Then I had to think about what makes a scottish mum different from say, an english mum, or an irish mum, or an american mum etc etc. I could not think of anything, and then it got to me thinking about how some people must portray us as the scottish stereotype.
Would we be pictured in some peoples’ heads as wild and wiry, long haired, tartan wearing lovelies, such as the Christoper Lamberts onscreen wife in Higlander 1? Are we seen as knife wielding, redhaired, freckled wild women who fight for their families ala Liam Neesons onscreen wife in Rob Roy?
The truth is quite mundane these days. There are very few tartan wearing women, and even fewer who live in the wilds, in their little mud huts unwashed and jigging around swords with their tartan sashes and fighting for their families and lands. That is the stuff of history and fiction, rather like the American Wild West.
Yes, there are some communities which are living in the more traditional type houses, and a few even still living without running water and electricity, but these are very few and far between.
I can tell you about some scottish women in the recent past and what motherhood meant to them, but it might take a whole book to tell that story, and one day very soon, that is what I am going to do.
In the short version, my family came from Skateraw, around Newtonhill in the North East of Scotland. Life was hard. The menfolk were fishermen and the women had to be hardy.
The cold winters were the hardest. The women might have several of the family menfolk in the same house, all working at sea in the fishing industry. It was a very steep hill down to the pier where the boats set to sea. The womenfolk always went down to meet the boats, and carried the fish up the hill on their creels.
The next day, they would leave early, before light, and walk to Aberdeen with their creels on their backs, and sold as much fish at the market stalls as they could. Every day, they would make that walk until all the fish was sold, a round trip of more than 10 miles every day. Their families were well fed, as there was always fish to eat as long as a family had men at sea.
Inbetween walking to Aberdeen and back, these women had to provide food for their families, and wash the sea salt loaded clothes, which would take much more water than they could carry in one or two trips to the communal taps. The clothes had to be ready at short notice for their mens sea chests.
Sadly, many young children died, as when the mums and grandmothers had to work, there was no-one to look after the children, and often young children succumbed to fatal accidents. Many fell into the house fires where the supper was cooking, or down the cliffs into the sea. It was a tough existence, and many a fishermans wife had a broken heart for the tragic loss of her “wee ones.”
When the boats were ready to be loaded out again, the womenfolk had to pick up their men and carry them to their boats, to ensure that they managed to get aboard with dry feet. Imagine the dainty womenfolk of today managing to carry their six foot husbands out to a boat in freezing water, yet these women did it.
Once their men took off to sea again, the women then began the chores of fixing the nets, a thankless task that was both difficult, and caused many a raw blister.
This was only 120 years ago when my great grandmother was young. The speed we have moved forward in since that time is incredible, and todays fishing industry, and the expecations and duties of scottish mothers has been transformed. Back then, a toonser woman would not have wanted to marry into a fishermans family. They might have been well fed, but they sure had to work hard.
So how can someone be a scottish mum?
I don’t have the answer to that. I am a scottish mum, but have no idea that the difference might be. Perhaps we cook some slightly different foods, perhaps we have a funny accent.
Maybe there is something that differentiates us, but I don’t know what it is.
If someone has any suggestions, then I’d be happy to listen to them, and now, finally, when someone finds my blog in the search for how to be a scottish mum, they will actually find a post related to what they are looking for.
I’ve become aware of a campaign running to save services for ASN in Aberdeen. What I have read so far is almost unbelievable. Being a parent of ASN, this is something that affects me daily, and is an issue that affects all children in every class when PSA’s are taken away.
I am not yet sure of the full extent of the cuts, but I will be planning to find out by tomorrow. In the meantime, I am aware that even such a small thing as putting a link up to the petition being run, might in some small way, help with this campaign.
Here it is:
Save ASN Services Petition
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41203.html
Absolutely lovely, I made extra and will add garam masala ect to make s lovely smooth curry sauce
Nice post!
Looks delicous...thanks for sharing the wonderful receipe...