Belated Spring Wishes

Hello Friends,
I'd hoped to post this in time to wish you all a Happy Spring Solstice, but our laptop has developed a bizarre problem which makes typing almost impossible. Yes, a naughty homunculus living within is inserting square brackets after every couple of characters. When these are deleted, s/he takes umbrage & exacts revenge by producing scores more brackets, rows of the bloody things & on one occasion, a full screen! So far, the Big Hairy Half of the Relationship's inspired high tech response to this has been to remove the 'a' key. Result? Well, yes, if you were looking for the added frustration of being without a major vowel to go along with the chore of having to delete around 93,000,000 brackets every time you want to type an email, then that's job done! Grrrrr!

So a quick post from me this week, with some pics of our garden to celebrate Spring:

These pink primroses breed like Easter bunnies. The original plant was given to me by my Mum for my old garden in Nottingham. I potted it up when we moved & it has founded a dynasty. I divide them up most years for heaps of free ones.

More free plants (my favourite kind!) are our wild primroses (Primula vulgaris) which self-seed all over the garden, including in the lawn.

The bulbs are looking cheery too. 

And the flowering currant is livening up a dull stretch of hedge.

In the greenhouse, the sweet peas are pretty much ready to plant out............

.......and there are seeds sprouting up all over.

I've concentrated on flowers today, but the veggies are cracking on too. They can wait till next time.

Now, for those of you who may have been wondering how Albert Whiskers has been getting on with the bargainmongous claw-scratching pad he helpfully tested last time....... I'm afraid I have to report that he is still chiefly using it as a cat-nip delivery device. This means that instead of contributing to his bed & board by guarding my broad beans from the robbing beaks of wood pigeons, he's been spending rather a lot of his time like this...........

Oh well, I suppose at least to our knowledge, he's not going off to the all-night garage afterwards for carry-outs of crisps & dodgy pasties......
Till next time,
Belated Spring Solstice blessings to all,
C x

In which Albert Whiskers road-tests a bargain cat scratching pad........

Hi Friends,
Well, you may know that since we adopted Albert Whiskers in Summer last year, the state of our rugs & carpets have taken a distinct turn for the worse & a couple of them are now looking distinctly trampy. I declined to part with £20 for a cat scratching pad which was little more than a piece of cheapo carpet glued onto a twist of metal but the Big Hairy Half of the Relationship then spotted an environmentally sustainable & very affordable option, which Albert Whiskers will be putting through its paces. If it's any good, I'll finally be able to start choosing new rugs.

Well, he's ready & waiting, so here we go. The item being tested is the Catkins Compact Catnip Card Scratcher from Petface, Ltd. Cost £2.99 from the pet department at a local garden centre. I like the sustainability of this. There is no plastic, just cardboard, which can be composted or added to our household recycling collection.  

It's described on the packaging as 'Claw & paw-friendly' & comes 'complete with catnip for extra claw attention'.

The bag of catnip certainly got him off the sofa.

In fact a couple of seconds after this photo, he made a grab for the entire bag & if this hadn't caused me to drop my phone, I'd have had an action shot. 

The lid of the scratcher has a perforated edge for easy removal, & catnip is then sprinkled on top & shaken into the corrugated card folds.

So what did Albert Whiskers think of it?

Well, he......... 

....licked it, 

....leaned on it,

....played with it,

.....got stoned on it,

....sat on it,

......& posed on it (while slightly ripped to the whiskers).....but did he sharpen his claws on it? 

No, he did not! The only time those claws made direct contact lasted for about 5 seconds & that was only so he could spend the next 10 mins inhaling catnip off his paws. 

The next morning, I presented him with the scratcher again. He ran straight up to it.......then stopped approx. 2 cms away & PROCEEDED TO STROP HIS CLAWS ON THE RUG with even more gusto than usual. Aaaaggghhh!!  So the results of Albert Whiskers' testing of the Catkins Compact Catnip Cat Scratcher? As yet, we have seen no evidence of him using this product as a scratching pad. He has certainly had fun with it, but not in the way we hoped would save our rugs from further destruction. We will persevere, but if it doesn't happen, will need to accept that we may just have spent £2.99 on a big card bong.

Until next time,

C x

My February De-cluttering Challenge

Hello Friends,
I've been out in the sunshine digging over a border this morning, so I thought I'd illustrate today's post with some signs of Spring, rather than pictures of what I'm actually going to write about.....which is clutter!  So here's a lovely early iris to enjoy before I start talking tat.

During February, I challenged myself to a month of MinsGame  The idea is to start on the 1st of the month by de-cluttering 1 item. On the 2nd, it's 2 items, on the 3rd, 3 items, & so on, until the final day of Feb when, after 28 items have been chucked, the challenge is complete. I adapted the rules a little. The rules state that the de-cluttered items must be out of the house by midnight of each day, but this wasn't always practical for me, so I set up a 'De-cluttered Items Zone' on the spare bed & anything that had been officially placed in it, could not be reclaimed. I can report that during February, I shed a total of 406 items. 16 items were listed on ebay, 182 items went in the household recycling, 23 winged their way to the charity shop, 44 were given away, 55 were shredded up for the worm composter (nom nom) & 86 went to landfill. I'd have liked the landfill quota to have been a lot less, but there are materials which cannot be recycled & the only way to get around this is really to think twice about buying such items in the first place. Here's another tiny glimpse of Spring, while loins are being girded to talk rubbish:

Now, I totally understand that other people's clutter is not exactly up there on many reading lists, so if you've about reached your limit, do sign out & go & make a cup of tea or something, because I'm nowhere near done with rubbish yet! What I really hope to convey is just how much I enjoyed doing this challenge. As each day's growing batch of tat was sorted into charity bags, bin, etc, I felt a growing sense of achievement. Just halfway through the month, I noticed how much easier it had become to find things in my desk drawers, without having to move half a dozen inconsequential items each time. I kept a list of everything I de-cluttered. As the list grew, I was amazed at how much real TAT I was finding. I'm not a hoarder. You won't turn on your TV one day & see me on one of those programmes featuring homes so stuffed with horrible crud that the owner has had to resort to living in a square metre of space between the freezer & the half century of yellow newspapers. I like a clean house & I'm quite tidy.....which is why I was surprised to see just how many of my de-cluttered items were not even remotely fit for purpose. I'll just show you our first cheery clump of daffodils, then I'll tell you about the 406 items which were ejected from 'Hagstones' during February:

And here they are: 1 top, 1 money box, 21 magazines, 5 out of date catalogues, 1 make-up bag, 1 manky make-up brush, 1 pair rubbish tweezers (couldn't remove an eyebrow if their survival depended on it....which ultimately, it did), 1 prehistoric herb tea, 1 fridge magnet which wouldn't stick, 2 pairs of slutty tights, 1 hair band which wouldn't go round my head, 1 bra, 1 shrug (neither of them up t'job in the boob department, unfortunately), 1 useless hair styling spray (like spritzing hair with superglue), 1 dried out felt-tip, 3 ornaments, 1 tin, 7 frowsty lavender hearts, 1 (too titchy) washbag, 3 pendants, 1 bookmark, 1 shoddily altered (by me) velvet bag, 2 rusty pencil sharpeners, 1 unidentified piece of wooden dowling, 19 leaflets, 15 broken earrings, 1 badge, 1 scarf, 1 craft knife which didn't cut, 1 ribbon-curling gizmo which didn't curl ribbon, 2 gunky freezer boxes, 1 light-pull, 12 plastic bottles, 1 dry-cleaning bag, 91 photos, 4 news cuttings, 4 books, 1 pair of gloves, 4 old cheque books, 2 broken bird feeders, 1 blue bottle (glass, not dead fly!), 2 items of plastic cutlery, 1 candle with no wick, 7 postcards, 24 packets of seed, 7 empty film cannisters, 1 utterly irrelevant CDrom, 1 ancient concert programme, 54 unnecessary documents, 1 skankrous stained glass window sticker, 1 defunct loyalty card, 1 dried-out Tippex, 6 plastic wallets, 1 box, 1 broken choker, 26 old birthday cards, 1 brooch (never worn), 1 packet reindeer sequins, 1 disgusting foil baking tray, 1 grotty cash bag, 1 strange small plastic duck, 1 glue brush with no bristles, 1 unidentified metal gizmo, 1 business card, a pair of scissors which didn't cut properly, 1 Pritt stick (dessicated), 2 defunct vouchers, 1 craft instruction for something I will quite literally never make, 3 pictures, 4 old gift-tags, 1 motivational quotation, 1 horrid plastic book jacket, 1 pair of gardening gloves (with ONLY ONE THUMB, for heaven's sake!!), 1 joss stick holder which doesn't accommodate any size of joss stick I have ever purchased, 4 coasters, 1 frog game, 3 bottle stoppers, 1 odd length of chain, 1 salad dressing bottle, 1 lid-less mustard pot, 1 lah-di-dah fancypants hairbrush (for which I paid a shocking £18 only to find surprise, surprise, it was no better than my bog standard ordinary one), 1 ancient tea cosy, 4 equally ancient cloths, 1 pill box with a hole in the bottom so all the pills fall out, 1 remote control, 1 cracked spice jar, 1 aerobic step (not a friend to thighs), 1 manky bracelet, 1 non-working watch, 1 colour wheel & 3 letters.

And that, friends, is 406 items of tat de-cluttered by me from the People & Cats Republic during February!! The reason I've itemised everything is to demonstrate how, even as a non-hoarder & organised person, I still had all this stuff cluttering up drawers, cupboards, not to mention my head. So many of these items were broken, out of date or just plain unfit for purpose. I mean, gardening gloves with only one thumb, gizmos that didn't work, odd earrings....so much of this stuff was just rubbish. For those of you who remember The Rise & Fall of Reginald Perrin, I have to say that some of these items put me in mind of the Grot Shop! I found doing this challenge enjoyable & empowering. In fact, now that it's finished, I quite miss it. I'm now turning my attentions to clearing the remaining beds in the garden so that's helping my continuing urge to straighten & simplify. 

I should add that I have been very honourable during the course of this challenge. I have only de-cluttered items belonging to myself or the general household. I have not de-cluttered any of these.......

....and tempting though it was, neither have I binned this..........

........a favourite mouse which some very good friends of ours bought for Albert Whiskers. Needless to say, it's been well & truly ripped open & the stuffing is hanging out, but he really enjoys fetching it out for a game, so I hadn't got the heart to make it Item 407!

So, if you too are getting tired of seeing the same weary old clutter, I can truly recommend doing a month of this challenge. You've seen the tragic list of stuff to which I had inexplicably given house room, what will you find?

Till next time,
C x