We have it, I just don't know how to pronounce it.

A little over a week ago Mark bought ingredients for pesto and focaccia, intending to recreate the food we had on holiday. Then he didn't actually get around to it while I was obsessing about promised Italian food, so I ended up making them. (Never, ever proimise me cheese, Italian food or trips to New York and fail to deliver - I will obsess about them at the slightest opportunity).

Focaccia needs baking at a very high temperature. This is how I discovered our 23 year old Samsung oven no longer heated up past 140 degrees, and produced very, very bad focaccia.

The oven had been limping along for years; the door wouldn't shut entirely so it's lost heat for at least 6 years, probably more. Last month I discovered only half of the grill worked, but as we have an air fryer, that seemed manageable. 

After some very scientific research and testing (I read Good Housekeeping's recommendations, then I went to John Lewis to open and shut doors and twiddle dials) we decided on our oven. Wanting one that would last pretty much forever, we bought a Miele.

The difficulty in ordering one in person is that no one seems to know how to pronounce it. There was MEE-leh, my-EL-eh,  my-EL, MEE-lay, MEEL, MEE-luh. Each person I spoke to said it differently. In the end I was basically just pointing. "I want that one with the actual buttons, please."

It arrived promptly enough, but there were complications. We'd gone down from a double oven to a single, so Mark needed to build a shelf for it part way up the larger cavity left by the old one. This does mean we have space for an extra drawer, though, which is great.  Also, it needed wiring it. These felt a bit of a faff, so to be perfectly honest Mark procrastinated a few days before doing it just before Bonnie and her friends arrived for the Easter weekend.

There was a hitch - no power. Mark uninstalled it, connected the oven to a plug and turned it on, which showed the oven itself was fine. So it seemed to be the wiring. 

I'll be honest, mid afternoon before a 4 day weekend when you're feeding 7 people is a sub-optimal time to discover you need an electrician.  

I hit all my local WhatsApp chats is an urgent plea for a good electrician but the recommended tradesmen were either busy or on holiday. Mark finally found a bloke at 3:30 on the condition that Mark went to fetch him as his son had taken the car keys. 

 David the Sparky was very lovely. He explained the wiring was just fine but had been over-tightened, leading to a dodgy connection. He fixed that, tested it and put it back in place and was driven home clutching half a dozen fresh eggs as well as his fee, with about an hour to go before the young people arrived.

This morning I thought I should get to know the oven - technology has moved on a lot in 23 years! So first I made a dozen carrot and pecan cupcakes using the Hummingbird Bakery recipe at 2/3 proportions, then a batch of dark chocolate and orange cookies from BBC Good Food. Seeing as it is Good Friday, I've got dough for hot cross buns proving as type. You know me - go big or go home.

HAPPY EASTER - but Zach ate the A cupcake from Happy so I improvised

The new oven is amazing - it gets to temperature extremely quickly,  has a myriad of setting I don't yet understand and probably will never use, has a self cleaning function and can be operated remotely by my phone. What a marvellous modern world we live in, as Captain Jack Aubry says.

 I did the cupcakes on Conventional and the cookies on Fan Plus, and think I'll try Intensive Bake for hot cross buns, and see if I can find a difference in them at all.

 As for the name - I think I'm going with one online suggestion -  Miele rhymes with Sheila. 

 

NB - Mark more than redeemed himself for procrastinating three days with the oven by mowing the lawn today while I baked. First mow of the year! It all looks lovely.

Sort your (life?) fridge out

I absolutely love Sort Your Life Out on the BBC. Dilly, the organiser, is my hero and I go around labelling things like a fiend - my chest freezer is awe-inspiring, I promise you. However, I'm not exactly living up to the decluttering queen's standards day to day. Quite frankly, I'm very messy and fairly lazy. 

With my knee pain worsening over the past two months, the kitchen has descended into chaos lately (along with the rest of the house, god help me!) I though I'd best  have a bit of a sort out. In doing so, I found an awfully nice lunch.

Zach says that to have an ADHD diagnosis, your quality of life has to be suffering because of your struggle to concentrate or remember things. We decided that means I have Mark's ADHD.  He's vague and drifts off to something else partway through, but I'm the one whose life is affected. The number of unlocked doors, cupboard doors left ajar, half-done tasks is substantial and I have permanently bruised shins from walking into whatever drawer he's left open.

So while it's great that he thinks "I'll put that leftover lemon juice from the cocktails in a little tub in the fridge to be used up later," the system falls down because he doesn't label it and he forgets about it entirely the second he closes the door. (See also tins of baked beans, sliced tomatoes, mashed potato, gravy, ready sliced cheese for burgers). 

Mark had put a third lemon juice in the fridge while the previous two were going manky, so I figured a proper sort out of the fridge was overdue.

I chucked a bunch of mystery items (seriously, LABELS, dude!) and checked the many (so, so many) pickles and condiments (entirely my fault)for Best Before dates and emptied out the meat and vegetable drawers to check  the state of things.

I noticed the spring onions were looking a bit pathetic and the lettuce had seen perkier days so needed using up. There were three tubs of mashed potato, and in the meat and fish drawer was a tupperware with some salmon I poached a couple of days ago and didn't need all of.

Hurray, free lunch! I mixed the salmon flakes with some of the mash, finely chopped spring onions and a tablespoon of capers - I like putting capers in, it's like including tartar sauce.  I separated an egg, adding the yolk to the bowl and whisking the white. 

Giving the contents of the bowl good mix, I formed four patties. These were dipped in the beaten egg white then into a bowl of the sourdough breadcrumbs I keep in the freezer. (Every time I get to the nub end of the loaf it's usually going a bit stale, so I put it in the blender to make breadcrumbs and add it to the bag. It's very handy)

Spring onions at 1 o'clock, capers at 7

 I put the fishcakes in a hot frying pan with a bit of vegetable oil and fried them for about 3 minutes on both sides, flattening them a bit to be sure they'd warm through.

I shredded the lettuce, and using the most recent lemon juice, did a quick vinaigrette. It was really tasty - a 10 minute lunch for two using up odds and ends. It was very satisfying.

OK, not elegant but very tasty

 

I needed a nice and filling lunch because I was going to have some rather unpleasant dentistry that afternoon and who knows how long until I'm on solid food again! It was the nicest part of my Monday, other than Mark very kindly buying me flowers to cheer me up after the wisdom tooth came out.

 It was nice to feel I'd made at least one small area of my chaotic house tolerable - especially as Miss B is coming home for the Easter weekend bringing two friends to stay, and we are going to need to fit a LOT of food in that fridge. 

CBT-ing the shit out of this

Material reality is a right pain the the arse, isn't it? I might feel very much the same inside as when I had the kids 26 (and 24 and 20) years ago, but my actual physical body tells a different story.

I have always had fairly useless joints. I was forever twisting an ankle and falling off boots with only a very modest heel even in my teens.  I could still put my foot behind my head in my mid 30s but I couldn't walk in anything higher than about 2 inches without risking breaking my neck (yay, hypermobility). I'm a klutz, but I'm ok about it.

My hips and knees went all to hell during my pregnancies, each worse than the last.  That resulted in being on crutches and a lot of pain for most of Bonnie's pregnancy, and things never quite went back to place. I also have osteoarthritis and have struggled with (often acute) knee pain since my 30s. 

A lot of that was my own damned fault - I hated exercise, I love food and drink, and the only healthy lifestyle choice I've ever made is never smoking. I treated my body more as an amusement arcade than a temple, and I took pretty lousy care of myself for a variety of uninteresting reasons. I also worked standing up for 10 or more hours a day for the 8 years I had the baking business in my 30s and 40s, and the knees got worse and worse.

Over the past 10 years I've been trying to tackle this in a number of ways. I found pool-based exercise classes for people with similar problems and I approached them with zeal. I was going to three a week at one point and my basic mobility was really improving. I can stand up without leaning on the arms of chairs and my balance is far better. I lost a significant amount of weight which has helped with joint inflammation - my knees aren't burning hot by mid afternoon anymore. 
This is very good.

But. There's always a But.

More and more often I was missing Aqua classes because of pain and injury. Falling awkwardly when a rug slipped on a polished floor put me completely out of action for a couple of months and noticeably affected me for over a year. A too-vigorous class leaves me sofa-bound for two days. My knees give way numerous times a day. I try not make a fuss but the pain is sharp and debilitating. Days here are punctuated by yips and short shrieks like I have a particularly piecing form of Tourettes.

Anyway, here I am at 56 years old. I have done what I can to fix the pain from my knees - and, increasingly, hips - but each year I'm getting worse and worse. I can no longer get to the end of the road without a crutch and am desperate for a sit down at least 4 times if I try walk to the coffee shop 200m away.

My life has become small. I can't stand it.

Being a total hypocrite who pushed her Dad into getting a mobility scooter and an elevator in his house so he can go upstairs, I have flatly refused to get a walking stick. I have a crutch, because a crutch is something people use when they are recovering from an injury. Like a broken ankle or or ACL tear, say. A crutch feels like it might well be temporary. A walking stick? That's permanent. We don't need that.

Having walked across the very compact city centre of Leeds twice in the last few months and been couch bound for several days after, I really can't pretend this is going to go away. I can't pop to the shops, or post a letter, or pick up a prescription, or just live my life like a normal person. 

This is stupid. I love being out and about, I love being around people. I can't self-identify as a physically mobile person, I can't wish myself better and I can't alter the material reality that my joints are shot. And it's only going to get worse as I age. Exercise is great for maintaining the best mobility I can have, but it can't fix the degradation of the joints that's already there, nor make me younger and less broken.

What I can do, and what CBT has always been wonderful at helping me do, is reassess.

This is where I am now. I can't change the past, I can't change the state I am in. I can, however, accept this less than ideal reality and decide to problem-solve my way out of it. This will not be pleasant, but it will be effective. 

Okay. So I can't walk much at all. In old school terms, crippled. (We laugh when Dad calls his Blue Badge his Cripple Sticker... it's funny because it's true.) I can ride my beloved Vespa but I struggle to put it on its stand when I get where I'm going. I am a permanently disabled person who won't be striding up  the big hill at Fairburn Ings to watch the starling murmurations nor walk along the Giant's Causeway. 

NB - Those example do rather break my heart as I love murmurations and it's been my longtime ambition to see the basalt columns of the Causeway. And Petra. A woman can dream.

But I can do something about some of that. I can accept where I'm at. And that really, really hurts.

It's hard to give up the belief I can get better, that there's a life without joint pain and lousy mobility. One day (actually, in about 5 years or so I expect) I may qualify for NHS knee surgery and that might change things, but right here and now, it doesn't. And it's hard to accept limitations are real, and not wish them away.

So what would allow me to do what I want to do? There's an easy answer to that - a scooter or electric wheelchair. It's not the same as being about to self-propel, but it's a damned sight better than self-excluding from everything.  

I don't claim disability benefits or anything like that, so I don't have hoops to jump through to access mobility schemes. This is actually an advantage. I can work out what best suits my ambitions for my life and buy it. No having to prove to strangers just how broken I am, like when I got the Blue Badge. Gods, that's a depressing procedure. I'm glad I won't have to do that.

I also have been in vociferous denial that this is a permanent state of affairs. Every year I start mapping out our trip to the Giant's Causeway and every year I have to push it back because I've had a setback and I can't walk enough yet. 

YET.

For heaven's sake, Jay! It won't get better, so have a cry then book a wheelchair-accessible trip and go see the wonders of geology from relatively close by. It's not clambering on the rocks, but it's still pretty damned cool. As the Rolling Stones told us, we can't always get what we want. Close will do.

I have a choice. I can remain in denial that this is my life and I can miss out of loads of experiences and a better quality of life. Or I can jettison a stubborn mindset that a) being disabled is a 'lesser' thing (it isn't, it's just more difficult) and b) that ignoring it will make it all go away at some point.

I was pretty ruthless when pushing Dad to install that elevator between the dining room and his bedroom. I even used the  - frankly unethical, although true - argument that Mum would have insisted on his getting one, so if he wanted to respect what she would have wanted, he'd better stop messing around being stranded downstairs all damned day and get the lift installed.

I was right, obviously, and it vastly improved his life and his ability live in his own home. Now I need to apply the same standard to myself.  

I have been to try a few mobility scooters and chairs. And today I've referred myself to a mobility organisation for an assessment to discuss which  chair or scooter would be most appropriate for what I want to be able to do. 

It's a small start, but I hope it's a productive one.