Finally some good news in my Arabic class

There are only 2 tenses in Arabic, the past and the present. What a piece of luck! I thought our teacher was joking at first, but he doesn't joke about important things like that.

This is like going on a journey and finding out where we are going as we turn each bend. Up a slippery mountain or across a shady meadow. Mostly it's up mountain passes.

I could google all about it, but I like the surprises in a wierd way. It is rare in life to encounter a new language, so I'm appreciating the unexpected nature of all this.

The right moment

It's funny how telling someone something at the wrong moment can make them nearly froth at the mouth. If you catch the right moment they are glad to have something simple pointed out to them.

So a reminder about internet food shopping was just the thing for my father today. And I was glad to be reminded that I like washing up and that it was time for this job after the shared lunch at the Wallingford Quaker Meeting. We worked and chatted in the kitchen and had a lovely time.

H likes to be told that it is time to get up and earn his early waking money. T told us just now that he was on the train back to Didcot, so that set in motion all the arrangements to meet him at the station and go for a pizza.

4 stunning knitted blankets

I handed over 3 bold and simply designed knitted blankets yesterday. I found a 4th afterwards so that one will go too.

Our knitting group meets once a week to sew together squares other kind strangers have knitted and donated. The leader of our group sends the blankets to Oxfam to be sold at festivals in the UK or directly to St Anne's Hospital in Liuli in Tanzania (our village and theirs have a link, don't know why, there must be some personal history behind this.)

From the random colours given to us we piece together whatever we fancy. I make up my own design and have stuck to it for a whole year. I loved the blankets I made so much I couldn't bear to hand them over for a few months! I have taken them to church on freezing days and shared them over our knees. I spread them out at a craft show on the most boiling July day last summer. H has spent time on the sofa under them and so have I.

I am in a bit of a quandry. The leader asked if I had a preference as to them being sent to the Hospital or sold by Oxfam. In my heart I would like them to travel the world and liven up someone else's home, accompanying them home from hospital. But another bit of me says that the squares were freely given with no word as to their final use, so I must hand my part of the work over freely too. So that was my decision, let others make the decision, it is a free gift.

Also, a person here in the UK is exactly as deserving of a beautiful blanket and who am I to say that one particular person here should not buy one of the blankets I stitched together?

Finances come into it as some designs fetch more I assume. So that's an odd feeling, that designs which are not so appealing to the UK eye would be given abroad and we would keep the more attractive ones.

Suddenly allergic to wood

Well, not literally. I did some clearing of my desk. Got to the point of just having 3 piles of paper on there. Decided I hated the sight of untidy papers, then decided that I hated the sight of the wood of the desk, and the table next to it, and the big kitchen table...

When I told 2 friends in the afternoon I got some knowing glances. Apparently sudden and irrational rages and irritation are appropriate to my age, 49. So we had a good laugh about that.

The papers and the wood of the desk seem more reasonable and less irritating this evening.

Dandelions mean spring

As I was driving along I could see all these bright open flowers. My dark glasses intensify colours so they looked stunning against the intense green of the grass verges.

At a traffic lights I could smell cut grass or something, so I put my nose out of the window and made little sniffs to get the full sense of it. Delicious!

Old posts are wonderful

I really love reading my old posts. I have just been transported back to the stormy summer of 2010, when T and H were 3 years younger (14 and12) and there were 2 deaths within about a week of each other.

The things I wrote about are so much of that time and so different to what I write now. I am very glad I wrote them. Funnily enough the glimpses of all those stressy moments are particularly enjoyable. I think 'Oh, wow, yes, that's just how it was!'

All in black

I was wearing black from top to toe today. So I was soaking up all the sunshine which came my way.

2 small black lambs were happily walking about near their mother. Often only one of a pair is black.

Really my mood is 'arrggghhh': a howl of horror at the difficulty of remembering all the non-matching endings in Arabic, ie feminine singular with something plural, dropping endings when doing something to do with numbers, and masculine endings when the thing is feminine or perhaps the reverse. Clear as mud...

The only solution is short sessions of homework. 2 weeks being stirred up by events in London with my parents is not helping my studying one bit. Maybe the worse option of being woefully unprepared for my classes will help me settle to write out each new aspect of the language which I need to understand.

Chucking stuff is easy now!

With everything going on at my parents' household I am finding it much easier all of a sudden to chuck out stuff and simplify parts of our household. I binned a whole load of old paperwork, put some pretty things in the charity bag and free-cycled some of our large heap of logs. The log pile was taller than the children of the family who came to collect a load.

Give, simplify and stop worrying about the kind relative who gave me that beautiful wall hanging which has never quite fitted it here. Pass it on with a light heart.

In London they have a need for household help two times a day at present. Lots of phoning, no emails though. Both parents in one piece, cheerful and in the same location.

Time passing, ashes to ashes...

This is like a retweet, but of someone else's blog post.

Here

I hope you like this and that I will find a good format for RTing blog posts.

Our sky

Now the old half of the Didcot Power Station is no longer generating power or steam we have our sky back. When I look out as I drive I know that all the clouds are real ones and are part of the weather passing over us. I like that feeling.