Shoshiplatypus

Well, here we are with another WOYWW – What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday. So what’s on YOUR workdesk this week? As usual, my real desk (in the studio) remains a dumping ground but I have been doing other creative stuff, namely working on my famous slippers that you are all so anxious to see.

I finished embroidering the little felt flowers, so I spent some time arranging them in position and pinning them on.

You can see the leaves I made. Then I got my curved needle out and sewed them all onto the slippers. This was quite difficult to do because of the shape of the slippers but I managed in the end. I tried to make the slippers a matching pair with the colours and arrangement of the flowers. In the process I discovered that one slipper is slightly bigger than the other! They are hand-made so I suppose one has to expect some variation. I haven’t noticed any difference when wearing them.

I still needed to sew down the leaves, because although they look quite nice floating, I don’t think it’s so practical. After doing this, the next step was to add some embroidery, which is what I am currently working on. This is what I’ve done so far.

The slipping bit…

The other day while I was still on the baby food regime because of my wisdom tooth, I made a salad for my hubby. I put his plate in the fridge ready for his supper, and in the early evening I opened the fridge and the plate fell out! I grabbed it and managed to save it from falling on the floor, but it tipped up and the cling film slipped. Quite a bit of the salad slid down into the front of the fridge, and unfortunately down in between the inner and outer doors of the freezer below, which was very difficult to clean. Not much of it was wasted and the only difference was that the plate looked a bit messier than before!

I went to the sink for a cloth to clear it up, and when I returned, my slipper (no, not one of the new ones!) slipped in some yoghurt dressing that had fallen on the floor. Down I went, bashing my back on the counter as I went, and ended up in a heap on the floor! It was quite bad enough that I’d nearly lost my poor hubby’s supper without that happening! He heard me cry out and came running, and helped me up, after which I proceeded to clear up the mess.

So that was one bit of moistness. Now for another.

The pantry

Thank you all for your concern about the damp in our pantry last week. The roofer came to have a look, and said there was absolutely no problem. He looked inside, and outside at the roof which he said looked completely fine. Apparently the builder should not have put in a ventilator at the bottom of the pantry which led directly to the outside. You can actually see the light through it. He said all this was doing was drawing cold damp air in from the outside, and when this hit the warmer air of the kitchen it was condensing on the wall, especially on the side nearest the cooker where it got warmer. This had encouraged the growth of some mould.

He said all I needed to do was close the ventilator and clean off the mould and spray some anti-mould stuff on, and all should be well. What a relief! Over the next few days I worked on one section at a time, taking everything out and cleaning it, and giving all the shelves and walls a jolly good clean as he suggested. It’s all looking lovely and sparkly and new again now, with only a little staining on the wall. The pantry was due a spring-clean anyway, and from now on I shall just keep an eye on it and make sure there isn’t a problem in the future.

It was a good opportunity to go through all the food in there and organise things a bit better. This was a much easier task than it had been before, with the awful cupboards that went back too far, and I used to lose stuff at the back. This is how it looks now. I’ve just got the spice rack and the small shelves behind the door panel on the right to do now.

More moistness…

The new loo

We have a new loo. In the kitchen.

Well… Shoshi’s never been the conventional one, has she. Now I can do the washing up while sitting on the throne.

The plumber came this week, and has fitted our lovely new loo! He’s done a great job and I’m thrilled with it. The little sink on top of the cistern is such a clever idea. Not only does it save water, but it solves the problem of hand-washing in such a small room where there’s no room for a separate basin. The days are now over when hand-washing has had to be done at the utility room sink.  The whole thing is going to be a lot more civilised from now on.

Here’s the old one coming out.

The brackets that held the old cistern have to come down.

This is how he left it on Monday.

Yesterday he completed the job. He has put in a new mains tap because the old one was jammed and useless, and he’s made a wooden panel for the back of the loo with a hole to work the mains tap. To complete it, he’s made a new PVC windowsill which extends the full width and neatens the whole thing. Once the panel is decorated to match the room, it will look great. He’s even moved the skirting board so that it looks as if it’s always been there. I shall put a ring for a small towel, so that the towel hangs down over the hole in the panel. The soap, spare loo rolls etc. can go on the windowsill.

I am so pleased that the floor is not damaged. I was expecting it to show where the old loo had been, but he’s done such a neat job. When the silicone has dried, I shall be able to clean the floor.

Here’s the little sink on top.

He hasn’t connected it to the hot water supply because this would have added a lot of work and expense. Anyway, it takes too long for the water to run hot. This would waste water, when one of the advantages of this system is that it is a great water saver. The waste water flows into the cistern, which overflows into the loo, and you flush as normal. Clever, eh?

You can see there’s now a wooden panel behind the loo, and how he’s extended the windowsill out, and brought it to the wall on the right hand side. This gives more room to put things, and it makes the whole thing look really neat.

He had some excess windowsill left over, and I saw him cutting it up into smaller pieces ready to throw away. I asked him to cut off the right-angled bit and give me the pieces, which I thought they might make rather nice little panels for doing art on! The plastic is quite nice and thick, and it will be easy to sand the edges smooth.

You can see how he’s cut a hole to give access to the new mains tap. This is where the towel ring will be, so that the towel hangs down and covers the hole. Otherwise I could make a little flap to swing aside. The panel will be decorated to match the rest of the walls.

Now all I’ve got to do is get the decorator in to tart it all up. I want to do something unexpected and fun in there. It’s always been such a glory-hole and so horrible. I might ask him to box in the pipe above the windowsill just to make it neat, but if he paints the pipe it may not look too bad.

We can’t use it for a couple of days until the silicone etc. all dries fully so for now we’ve got to go upstairs.

Hopefully from now on, everything will be nice and dry in there. The old cistern had an intermittent leak, and we had to deal with some occasional flooding. Watch this space to see the final transformation of the smallest room in the house – Maybe something like this? Perhaps some stars on the ceiling? Advance warning – be prepared for Extreme Shoshification. It’s a good thing my hubby is so longsuffering…

Website

I was continuing to have problems logging on, but I’ve discovered the reason for not being able to log in to WordPress. It was an over-zealous security plugin which I have now disabled, and I am using an alternative. There are ways of tweaking it once you find which element is causing the problem, but this requires the knowledge of computer code, which is beyond me! For some reason Bluehost has gone off me and won’t let me in, but again, I have found an alternative login route by keying in a different URL. Hopefully all will be well from now on.

There are still problems making my home page work, as well. For the life of me, I can’t get it to scroll down below the fold. I tried to install parallax scrolling which is really cool, but this doesn’t work for some reason, and it certainly won’t work if I can’t scroll at all! I have abandoned this for now, and maybe I will try again in due course, if I can sort out the main scrolling problem.

What I want to do is create several pages which can be accessed from the home page – for instance a portfolio, my dad’s obituary, and maybe some favourite posts from my old blog… All future projects! In the meantime I have been working on transferring my Cancer Diary across, and I am incorporating into this the posts from my Gutless Bag Lady blog which hasn’t been active for ages. I am hoping eventually to have quite a comprehensive website of life chez Shosh. It’s fun working on it, except when the software won’t do what I want, and I end up tearing my hair.

At least the blog seems to be working OK now. Thank you everyone for pointing out the problem with the “comment” button last week – this is now nice and clear and you shouldn’t have any further problems with seeing it.

Kitties

The Kitties haven’t been that impressed, being shut in the flat while the plumber was here. He’s been in and out and leaving the door open, and we didn’t want them getting out and onto the road. As usual they have been sleeping a lot, and the favoured place these days is the cat tree. Lily has recently taken a liking to one of the little houses on the tree, something she’s never been interested in before. Previously she’s always gone on the top layer, no doubt to emphasise her superiority over Ruby.

Health update

Teeth

Where my wisdom tooth was seems to be healing up well, and over the past couple of days I’ve been back on normal food again, and just being careful to chew on the other side. It aches intermittently but I think that’s probably a normal part of the healing process and I’m not worried about it. I haven’t taken any pain relief for several days, and have been very good about not interfering with it, and doing my regular salt-water mouthwashes. All seems to be well.

My poor hubby was in the dentist’s chair yesterday, after a filling fell out, but it turned out to be a minor repair. He usually spends far more time there than I do. My recent adventures have been a bit of an aberration. I asked him to report on my progress while he was there yesterday, and to make sure it was OK for me to start using my electric toothbrush again, and to eat normally. The dentist said that was fine, now it’s been done over a week.

Blood

I’ve got to go to the GP’s surgery later today for a blood test in advance of my 6-monthly oncology appointment next week. They always give me a letter to take in at each appointment, so the GP knows what bloods to order. I’m not worried about this, as I’m sure all the cancer has gone. We are still waiting for the CT scan appointment in Exeter but I expect that will come in due course – I was told I’d have to wait about six weeks for an appointment.

Bible Study

My Bible study group resumes next week after several weeks’ break. I have managed to prepare quite a few sessions during this time, but this week I decided to revamp a couple of the next ones to come up. They were too long, and I had also discovered some more information I wanted to include, so I have split them up. Nothing like giving myself extra work to do!

We have got a new member joining us, so I may recycle a couple of old sessions to bring her up to speed. A little revision for the others won’t go amiss, I don’t suppose! They were basic groundwork sessions from the beginning, when I first started the group, and one or two other people have joined us since that time, so they missed those sessions.

Cat funny – a musical one this week:

Here’s a bonus funny for you – a non-cat one, but I couldn’t resist it!!

If you’re hungry, you can always gnaw your toes off.

Have a happy WOYWW everyone!