A Gardening Question or two about winter.

If today stays dry, and all evidence thus far suggests it will, I will fleece and bootie up and endeavour to crack on with the pre-winter tidy up the garden needs. The summer lobelia will need to come up and the centre bed needs to be dug out, it’s full of bloody weeds and healthy looking nettles. The lawn is too wet to cut but that can wait until the weekend. I am going to collect the remainder of the chilis and dry them out. The lavender is fine although it is currently being swamped by the last of the summer bedding plants. All the jasmines ( I have white and red) need to be staked and wired up, or maybe I should just bite the bullet and go buy a wooden lattice for them.

Le sigh! So much work.

My question is on roses and the herbs.

How far back should roses be pruned and is this the right time to do them? I know the climbers need pruning but do the bush roses need trimming too?

Herbs- The mint looks fine, but the spicy oregano and the massive rosemary look woody in places, plus the oregano flowered recently and though the flowers have died off the stems are ugly and making the plant gangly. Should they be cut right back?

Oh and the raised beds, will these need a break? Mulch? Can I plant winter shrubs now or is it too late? What might make a good winter flower anyway?

All input gratefully received.

 

Ist, do no harm. 2nd, make as much money as possible. 3rd, Chemists and pharmacies are big business, so number two is vastly more important than number one.

Many moons ago a good friend of mine spent a number of years working in a large pharmacy slap bang in the middle of the main street of a busy town. She worked in the photo printing section, there was also a variety of make-up counters, a prescription drug counter, a place you could get your eyes tested, a place you could get your blood pressure tested, a place you could weigh your baby and tucked away in the corner- at least the year she first started- a section which sold Slimfast and other assorted foods heavily disguised as magic weight loss formulas.

Over time as weight loss products became more glossily common place that particular section grew and grew, and these days, between a cardboard cut out of Amanda Brunker and her fake plastic smile, and various Lipotrim and Slendertone and Alli and CelebritySlim and Slim-Slimmy Slim Slim advertisements, a body, even a slim one, cannot negotiate that aisle without knocking half the shop down.

Make no mistake the diet industry is big business in this country, and growing every year. The bigger we get, the more vultures are lining up on the wires ready to swoop on our unsuspecting pockets.

Whenever I do a post on Lipotrim- a hateful starvation diet that makes grown women cry and feel disgusted with themselves because after feeling faint they ‘let themselves down’ by having half a peach, or Celebrityslim- a hateful starvation diet that makes grown women cry and feel bad about themselves for ‘letting themselves down’ by having half a peach at lunchtime, I get irate people writing to me, claiming to be aghast at my insensitivity, accusing me of personally undermining their efforts, and my personal favourite, of finding ‘things easy’ ( ?) and so on.

That my ire is usually directed directly at the diet industry matters not a jot. When accused thusly I resort to an invitation. If Lipotrim or Celebrity Slim works for you, great, come back to me in a year or two and you can rub my face in it. I won’t mind. I’ll be happy for your loss one way or the other, and interested to see if the various ‘trims’  were behind it.

So far no one has ever come back.

This is hardly a surprise.  Starvation diets are not sustainable. Bodies need food to survive, a variety of foods at that. Subsisting on a gloopy drink three times a day is a sure-fire way to scupper the will to live, if not the will to lose weight. Even if the initial weight loss is dramatic- and it probably will be- it’s just impossible to maintain that rate of loss leading to guilt and disappointment.

The only diet I ever saw the Lilac One succeed on was Weight Watchers. I am not endorsing them either, but for the Biological Incubator it was a manageable way to keep track of what she was eating. She didn’t stick with it as the lure of Jelly Babies is too great for members of the Fatcat genus, but when she did attend she lost a pretty impressive three stone over about ten months and -waht I would consider to be more important- she felt great.

Time is the enemy of the crash dieter. Slow steady weight loss has been proven to be the most effective weight loss. A combination of altering eating habits and increased activity also seems to me to be healthiest for a body.  But for the crash dieter nothing whets the appetite more than being told you can drop two dresses sizes in a week, or lost up to a stone weekly. It’s like a call to arms and to this unrealistic end the diet industry leans its own considerable bulk.

alli is the newest of the over the counter miracle cures. It’s a pill you pop which allegedly reduces the amount of fat your body retains from your food by 50%. ( wait, what happened to Xenical?) What’s so great about that I dont know. What is wrong with having fat in your diet? You need a certain amount to keep ticking over. And which fats are they worrying about, there are so many, not all of them bad. Low fat does not necessarily equal good for you.

I don’t know much about Alli really, except to say it was designed to be taken by people with a BMI of greater than 28. So it was interesting to read that a journalist- with a BMI of 19- did the rounds of a few chemists to see if she could buy it and lo and behind of the 20 chemists she went into, 8 of them sold her the slimming drug.

And herein lies the central line of my dislike of all things diet related. They just don’t care, not the diet industry, whose families the dieters are putting through college, whose second homes the dieters are paying the mortgage on, and not the pharmacy bosses who willingly stock overpriced claptrap like Lipotrim, knowing full well it is just food, or who cheerfully sell Alli to any Joe or Jane straight off the street regardless of size. It’s business see, and business is booming in the diet world.

Unpopular though it seem to be, for weight loss there is really no substitute to decreasing calories taken in and increasing energy expenditure. Cutting back on carbs helps a lot too, white bread, pasta, rice, spuds, that sort of thing. But this takes a little time and a little effort and you won’t drop two dress sizes in a week. You will however lose weight and won’t find yourself weeping by the kitchen sink over half a peach.

Slow and steady can win the race. Don’t give the vultures your cash, don’t give them your body to play around with either. They will strip it clean, it’s what vultures do.

Twilight, the horror, the horror!

I am mildly hung over this morning, and there is only one person to blame. No, not myself, Stephenie Meyer. Yes, her. Right now I’d like to hunt Meyer down and slap her six ways from Sunday with a copy of Dracula, even Keanu Reeves playing John Harker didn’t have such a terrible effect on me. And I still remember him saying,  ‘I know where the Bastard sleeps’

I know I can seem I’m a little intolerant, but honestly, apart from charlatans I’m pretty much a live and let live person.  I like ginger and kickboxing and rum and  not being subjected to film like Twilight.

Have you see it? No? Of course you haven’t.

Allow me.

Skinny dull mouthbreather  who licks her lips/chews her lips, and presses right hand to right temple to emote, arrives at Twin Peak Town to stay with her police chief father while her mother tours the country with a husband who is not a police chief.

The mouthbreather is promptly given a truck and remembers she used to be friends with some red indians who are also werewolves in their spare time.

She attends school and becomes BFF with some Dorks.

While sitting with Dorks, a group of other dorks arrive in, a family, fostered it seems by a local doctor. They are clearly different from everyone because they walk in slow motion. There are 4 of them, 2 girls, one beef head, one startled faun and hello what’s this? Bringing up the rear another, number 5, moving, even, slower. I’m going to call him caterpillar eyebrows. CE for short.

CE and Mouthbreather must share desk in the biology class. CE is holding his nose because the mouthbreather is a skank and never showers or something. Instead of telling her to shut her fucking mouth and take a god damned shower, CE recoils from the stench-hound and flees the room. Quite right.

The mouthbreather is miffed and challenges him about it a few days later. He tells her something, she concurs with something. They go to the school car park.

And then in a ridiculous plotless witless stuntless moment of cabbage, a guy driving the A-Team van loses control and veers right at the Mouthbreather.

‘Oh please please let her die.’ I said, drinking some of my wine.

But no, Caterpillar Eyebrows, jumped across the car park, grabs her and stops the van with one hand. The Mouthbreather’s mouth gets a little bit more open and everyone crowds around the new skank who is not dead. CE  goes away.

The mouthbreather is taken to the hospital, where a member of the Council of Elron treats her for not a single scratch. This turns out to be CE’s fazer, I mean father. I knew he was because of the creepy contacts he was wearing and he too had a touch of the startled faun about him.

The mouthbreather is released from hospital. Some other utterly inane shit happens- I know it already seems so long and actually nothing has happened. I”m losing the will to go on myself.

Anyhoodle, despite the stench, the  Mouthbreather gets surrounded by bad men who threaten her with baseball caps. Caterpillar Eyebrows arrives in this scene in a car, driving James Bond Style. He growls at the men’s baseball caps and lowers his eyebrows most scarily. The men flee. Mouthbreather is rescued a second time by CE! So overcome with passion is she that she touches his finger and gasps. ‘Ack! Prrtt ttheepppt!’ She says. He’s cold to touch.

She goes to a ye olde shoppe to buy a book on ‘cold people’  * weeps softly* Looks through book while chewing her lower lip, finds something on cold people, then she TURNS TO THE BIG COMPUTER BESIDE HER….and googles exactly what she read in the book- which she paid money for.

* continues to weep*

We then learn that the MouthBreather is the only person in the whole world that has never heard of a vampire up to this point. Or something. But it doesn’t matter because…

“About 3 things, I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him, and I was not sure how dominant that part may be, that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.”

‘Gothy! How much longer does this go on for?’

‘This isn’t even half way yet. Isn’t Edward dreamy?’

I resist the urge to strangle her and go for more wine.

Anyway, the mouthbreather, in a fit of lip licking, makes CE tell her he’s a vampire, only he makes her say it, while he leaps around the trees like a demented howler monkey on crack. Don’t do it Caterpillar, crack is wack, ask Whitney. We learn he sparkles in sunlight. This upsets me terribly,  I wanted him to explode in sunlight. Gothy sighs in an alarming way.

The mouthbreather tells Caterpillar Eyebrows that he is beautiful. ‘Ack!’ She says, chewing her lower lips. ‘Ack ack!’

CE tell the mouthbreather that yes, he is a vampire, all his family are- quelle shock- but that they are vegetarians.

* cries loudly this time*

Anyway, he brings her to meet his family who are making her Italian food. They then wait for a thunder-storm so that they can all go play baseball. Somewhere between the third base and my last nerve, a trio of meat-eating vamps arrives, no doubt attracted by the stench of the mouthbreather and despite there being a whole slew of much tastier mortals around Twin Peak Valley, the blonde-evil- Vamp decides he want to spread pate de Mouthbreather on his toast.

Cue the entire vampire family flee, taking the Mouthbreather with them.

Then somehow Blonde Vamp gets hold of the Mouthbreather’s ma, gets the Mouthbreather to ditch the vegetarians to meet him,  Caterpillar Eyebrow follows, there is a rather dull vamp fight, the mouthbreather goes,

‘Ack, trittthppt, thrurrppt.’

And there you have it. Twilight, the movie. There are others like it. This one is mine. If I could have used it to blow the top of my head off last night I would have.

The only way this could have been any better was if Mariah Carey was playing the Mouthbreather role and Van Morrison was CE.

That would have been hilarious.  I hate everyone today. Yes, everyone.

Painting, Pissing and Snoring.

There was a fellow in Newtalk a few moments ago, English chap, had lived in Spain for a number of years and now lives here and he was talking about how the Irish could be Champion Street Pissers.

Of all the useful thing to be known as, I’d like to be outraged on my nationalities behalf, but I find I cannot. It’s probably true. It’s disgusting but not unbelievable, all a body has to do is walk though town on a weekend night and you can be sure you’re come across plenty of evidence to support what he was saying.

Last week in the papers some shopkeeper in Galway -driven half cracked from having to wash urine from the front of his premises, installed a box that electrocute weenie wagglers. Does it stop them? Well sort of, they widdle on the shop next door.

Seriously? What is wrong with people? If you’re leaving a bar, have a wee. Then have one when you go home. Not that hard. Right?

The marathon is the worst. you can see banks and banks of men pissing as they run the first two kilometres, this despite that fact that there is ample toilets at the start line. It’s disgusting. Is the male bladder so teeny tiny? Is it made from paper mache? The size of a peanut?

If you’re a dude who pees outdoors regularly, what the reason? Why do you do it? Why not hold on until you get to a bathroom?

I don’t know,  but if I owned a place in town I’d invest in an electronic devise too, but I’d set it to stun. Like when you stick your finger into a two bar fire just ‘to see.’

 

Painting- that’s what I”ll be doing in half an hour, front hall, stairs and landing. The kitchen. Boring, repetitive necessary work, work that the home owner must undertake if they don’t want to live in a hovel.

 

Snoring- what the paramour has taken up. Without fail he has woken me up every night this week due to sonorous sounds. It seems to be connected to his right arm. Oh yes, it does. Once his arm goes up over his head he releases a blood curdling nasal roar that could frighten a bear. Not good. There are only so many times I am prepared to push him onto his side before getting clingfilm from the kitchen and wrapping his head in it seems a better alternative.

Any suggestions to combat snoring? All advice considered, even if there’s a whiff of woo to it.

 

Golf Club Excludes Woman from Full Membership.

Golf, such a tedious game, the paramour plays it of course.

Anyhoo, Portmarnock Golf Club won a court battle yesterday to restrict full memership to men only. Some people are annoyed about that.

Not me.

Women can vote with their feet and wallets, there are plenty of other clubs. If Portmarnock want their club sexist and dude only I see no real problem, it’s THEIR club. To hell with them. Women, take your money and go elsewhere. It’s a free country. Same way if I want to start a Ladies who Lunch club, I want to able to have who I want in it and not be told I must include chaps. Are men going to start bringing high court actions against ‘Curves’ Gym, demanding inclusion? I doubt it.

Day 2 of week off. Exercise is addictive. Fatcats are Grumpy.

This morning I am going to attempt a return to the gym, my leg rules me out from running, but if I don’t go and swim or pool run or do some weight-training I may go out of my tiny mind. It is rather mystifying how exercise can be so bloody addictive. Three or four days without it and I start to get twitchy and ill-tempered- alright- MORE ill-tempered.
Today I have successfully been irritated by the cats, the wind, the paramour’s computer skills, my toast, butter, one of my pillows, the microwave and my right knee. I have spent many minutes glowering at things. I am afraid to turn on the radio lest Tom Dunne says something that could cause me have a short out, I envision blowing a head gasket and weeping impotent tears of salty rage should he mention his winter coat or something. I can’t risk it.
With a few days off I had planned to do some of the stuff that needs doing about the place, certainly the flower beds need to be dug out, the summer bedding plants need to come up. The lawn needs to be cut. I should do that. Yes, I should do that.
I really should.
Under the stairs needs to be cleaned out. The kitchen needs to be painted, as does the front hall and stairs and landing.
I should do that.
My office REALLY needs to be cleaned out, there are boxes of book here that were supposed to be dropped to Oxfam yonks ago.
I should do that.
The front garden desperately needs a clean up.
I should do that.
I was supposed to do a cull of the wardrobe, wash and donate any clothes to Age Action Ireland.
I should do that.
Bah, there are lots of shit I should do, but wallowing in ennui, all I can be arsed doing it sitting here, web surfing and tut-tuting over various news stories, none of which I have the will to comment on. Well except to note that the Virgin Mary’s message after all that kerfuffle was to pray. Imagine that?
This won’t do. I must hoist my reluctant self up, and take my reluctant self to the gym, where hopefully I can shake my reluctant self into action.
Oh and Shrek and Coleen named their baby ‘Kai’. Don’t say I don’t give you cutting news.

It’s like running through treacle having time off. I don’t now how folk manage it.

Pictures from Knock- more than words can say.

Sometimes I rant, sometimes I take a measured view on things, other times I let out a long breath and let the pictures do the talking. The rolling eye fellow is Kieth, the tearful fellow is Joe.

Cats are annoying and obsessive.

Bigger of Cats- -> Determined, loud, obnoxious. Right after this picture- he had jumped onto my desk to DEMAND I pay attention to his needs- I smothered him, oh no wait, I didn’t. I totally capitulated and let the bugger out.

 

I don’t know how many of you have cats, I don’t know what your cats are like. Probably your cats are charming and not in the least bit annoying. Well bully for you.

Of the three cats I own, all of them have some annoying quirk or other. Most of these quirks can be overlooked. Ignored even, or bought off with a tin of Sheba. But the bigger of the cats is not so easy to fix. He has a ridiculous obsession with doors and cannot see a closed door without freaking out.

This morning I made tea and came in here to work. Naturally Puddy came with me, the Marklar forgot who I was and the Bigger of the cats, who had been upstairs somewhere came down, sauntered in and horror of horrors- discovered the office door was closed.

He immediately took up his post to the side of it and started his usual guff. To the untrained ear it sounds like a variety of chirps and groans and plaintive wails, to me it is exactly this…

‘Why it this door closed, why don’t you open it, why is this closed? Why don’t you open it, are you going to open it? Will you open it now? how ’bout noooooooow, I can wait, it’s still closed why is it closed I want to go out, I want to go out I want to go out, I want to go out, phew.’

Less than one minute later.

‘Hey, why is this door closed why is it closed Are you going to open it, are you going to open it are you going to open it? It’s still closed, are you going to open it, I want to come in, I want to come in, I, hey are you listening to me, I want to come in, the door, it’s still closed, are you going to open it, how about now? Now? NURRROOOWWWWW? Phew.’

A number of minutes pass.

‘Hey, why is this door closed, are you going to open it? I want to go out. Stop throwing stuff at me, that won’t open the door, are you going to open the door. Are you going to open it nooooowwwww? Watch, it that was close, hey, the door, why aren’t we concentrating on this door, it appears to be closed, why is that? Are you going to open it? Why did you put that music on? Is it open, nope, I want to go out, there’s that seagull again!! I need to get him, Open this door this instant, I-hey! I want to go out, it’s looking at me, I can see it, open the door open the door, I want to go out…Fine, I’ll get up there and sit right in front of that thing you’re always looking at. Then you BETTER open that door. Don’t have me go ninja on you. I’ll shred your tights like last time. Look at that bird, look at it. I am so gonna kill him the minute you get off your arse and let me out. Open the door, quick open the door, open the door, oh phew. Oh hey, it flew off…’

 

Currently he is asleep in a patch of sunlight down the bottom of the garden. I’m going to get some work done, but I know he’ll be back up here in an hour or so and we’ll go through the same rigmarole again. Le sigh. Obsessive cat. I do love him, but by golly, he is hard work.

Ginger Day! Whoosh! Halloween! T- something to Supernatural Visit! Comment leavers are big Poopie heads and the Irish Rover!

— Halloween of Ginger’s past.

–What we expect to see Satdee.

Cad a tharla? Avast scurvy knaves, Gingerday is upon us.  Tomorrow is Satdee, when the much vaunted visit from a dead woman will lead Ireland into a time of milk and Manukau honey. Hurrah some of you say,  LOLZ, some others says, unlikely, sez I, yar.

Assuming the virgin Mary has other things to be doing with her time, I expect Two Stars and Maria to deposit twenty of their most favourite Euros into the kitty of a local shelter, old folk or animals will do,  I am a benevolent fucker, so you chose. If Mary does turn up, I will pop twenty of MY favourite euros into the local poor box. I will take a photo of my doing so, because unlike Joe Coleman I don’t just make shit up.

I want to say thank you for all the  alcohol based and non alcohol based remedies offered. I am PARTICULARLY enamored with the sound  Tom Yum soup and intend to make my scalp tingle with it this weekend.

I want to graciously thank and welcome all the new comment leavers, I like different opinions. I even like to hold my own opinion, which I usually try to back up with fact and empirical evidence. Will Manukau honey keep me cold free? I don’t know, but I’ll give it a whirl and get back to you. Does ice and rest help a sore tendon? Why lawks a mussy, it DOES! Does Sunitab leave me feeling as high as a kite? Oddly yes. Is Mattie McGrath a gobshite of the highest order, it would appear so. Is Tom Yum soup delicious? I will try it and get back to you!

People get very het up on the subject of religion. There’s no doubt in my bunged up head that religion can be and is personal to a lot of people. I don’t mind folk holding personal beliefs or defending them, why would? I hold lots of beliefs myself. But I have a deep and abiding loathing for frauds of any stripe, and people who deliberately go about setting themselves up as ‘mystics’ and ‘healers’ are the worst in my view. It isn’t that they do no harm, it is that they do. And as long as I can draw breath I will be against them. My reasons for it are personal, but they are mine. What I don’t do is go to their sites or clinics or places of worship  and disrupt them or call them lying cheating money grabbing toe rags.

This is what reasoned people do, they say what they think, why they think it, WITHOUT resorting to making a nuisance of themselves. This is why I can never understand it when people come in here and witter on at me about being ‘negative’.
‘Negative’, was there ever a more tedious mantle bestowed on a person who does not believe in woo? If I said to you, ’say folks, I was hanging out the washing earlier and a dragon landed in my garden, told me to stop eating mars bars and flew off again, ‘  would you believe me?

Course not, you’d all be wondering just how much cold medicine I’d been mixing with the alcohol based fixers.’ Would I then say ‘Ugh, you’re all so negative’ because you didn’t believe me?  Well I could, but you’d think me a nincompoop. Extraordinary claims need to be backed up, there’s nothing ‘negative’ about expecting the person making the claim to be able to provide even a tiny scrap of evidence- ‘because I say so’ is not enough. Fuck that for a game of tiddly winks.

There is nothing negative about not falling for a load of old hoey. There is nothing negative about realising there are amazing wonders in this world, we don’t have to look to the skies or rely on dead people to guide us morally or explain away good or evil. We should not  automatically ascribe power to the supernatural, when real flesh and bone people have such a fantastic capacity for greatness.

Not that any of it really matters one iota, folk are folk and will believe what they will. I believe I will go have some breakfast, I believe the Irish Rover is a cracking song. Not everyone will agree, but then that is what makes the world just so darned interesting. Have a good weekend folks!

Cold remedies required. But first, who IS that masked man!?!

‘How are you feeling?’ The paramour asked  this morning, keeping as far away from me as humanly possible in our bedroom.

‘Ib feelib pretty bimg actually.’

‘Oh, you sound bad.’

‘I feel bab.’

‘Ye-ah, you should take it easy to-day love. Have you much on?’

‘Sumb bibs and pieces.’

And then I gave up talking and fell back on to my pillow. really there’s only so much flubbing a gal can take.

I have a filthy cold. It has been threatening since Tuesday, but crash-landed in my head last night. Woke up at 3:15 am and had to take painkillers because my sinuses are so backed up my upper teeth were throbbing with pain. Blee. I blame supermarkets. I do. You watch next time you in a supermarket, the amount of people who cough and sneeze and DON’T cover their mouths is disgusting. You run the gauntlet every time you need to stock up the presses.
Truthfully I usually have a crash around this time of year, after all the marathon training and after finishing a big work project there’s nowhere for me to go but down. I will be dribbling and whooshing and partially deaf for the weekend, but hey, it’s only a weekend, it’s only a cold. It could be worse. I could be one of the two most utterly stupid people to ever walk the face of the Earth

Do we know of any genuine remedies that help the misery of colds? No eye of newt bollocks, but tried and trusted thing that help alleviate the ming? Perhaps speed along the process? Anyone, or as I said it, ‘adywub?’