Calendar for July

I love this picture. LOVE IT. It's better than a flower, in my opinion. Flowers are so damn obvious. It's from Dottycookie, who is officially one of the nicest bloggers in the world. She's like a little holiday every time you go there.

I think the picture has something to do with science, but that's not really my forte. Pretty, though, isn't it?!

This month - in a couple of days in fact - it's my two year blogiversary, so I shall be giving some stuff away. It's not very exciting stuff, but I have very little imagination and I don't make anything really so you'll just have to attempt to look impressed. I've spent far too long trying to work out how to put fireworks or confetti or music on the blog for a day or three, but I can't work it out, so it'll just be me and my small mish-mash of giveaway items, looking like a car boot sale in the rain.

Please come, otherwise I'll look really pitiful.

Also I have something Very Exciting planned for July. Are you excited? I'm excited! Really, it's exciting!

Staying alive

I know I'm not the only one who is barely around these days, so I'm not going to grovel about it. Half my blogroll keeps turning up apologising after long spells of tumbleweedy silence. We're busy. We don't know what the hell we're doing. We're having an existential crisis.

For me: I've been doing a lot of yawning. Yawning, and faffing (which we know I'm good at), and cobbling meals together out of sweet FA because I forgot in my excitement about local shopping that I go into town to work, not to float about weighing my own dried fruit.

We saw some art. The Lattes were very impressed, not least with the colouring sheet provided, and Eldest even acknowledged that Fabian Miller had 'put a lot of effort in'. We got all whole-experiency and shot out into the garden the day after with our photosensitive paper, which The Grandmother bought us ages ago and in true Coffee House style we had put in a pile and forgotten about.


Impressive, eh? Littlest's effort, with the key and the fish, is less well developed since she held us up by throwing a load of soil all over the steps, meaning that her paper half-exposed itself while we were clearing our way onto the patio.

What didn't work so well was the suggestion made in some literature hanging around the gallery that we stick a photographic negative to a leaf and leave it out in the sun.

After two days we had a wizened leaf with a negative stuck to it.

Whether that is art or not I have no idea.

Give us this day

Bread is letting me down.

The great Anti-Supermarket experiment has cracked because of bread. (Though, to be fair, we're talking about the lovely little North West chain of supermarkets, with the friendly smiling real farmers on the sausages, not the evil Big Supermarket).

Just for the record, when did bakery shops stop selling bread? When did they turn almost their entire business over to sausage rolls and gingerbread people?

My new thing for today is... giving it up

I don't want to go to the supermarket any more.

I don't. The supermarket sucks. I sit down every week, make a plan of menus for things I actually won't want to cook, buy a load of stuff, pile it into the kitchen and then towards the end of the week go searching for my ingredients to find them going a bit weird at the back of the shelf.

Not to mention having to take a four year old who constantly badgers for yogurt drinks and Babybel cheeses and cereal bars and far too many apples and look look this juice in the little plastic cartons with the tiny straws look look look

No more. I go into town to work, I shall Pick Bits Up. I am casually optimistic that this will not mean living in a Mother Hubbard type establishment with no food to be eaten. We shall eat like kings! We shall dine on seasonal vegetables! We shall eat all kinds of new and different things as I create meals day by day with cheerful spontaneity! We will save thousands of pounds!

I actually don't know about any of these things. But small victories have already been won - the discovery of loose muesli, in various yummy-looking different mixes, which is sold by weight in the health food shop. Freedom from the tyranny of Cheerios! At least now when breakfast is swept up from under the kitchen table, it will be a more organic and less uniform shape. And it will not adhere to the floor.

Ah, so what if they don't actually eat it. Buying it is far more fun.

Greetings from the House of Pain

Tinkerbell from Coffee Lady on Vimeo.

You think that's disturbing? You weren't the one who found Tinkerbell's head. She was still smiling.

Marv's missing head is still at large.

A Round Tuit

I am queen of Faff. If you want faffing done, call me. But be warned - I might not get around to your faffing, because I am too busy faffing for myself.

(Do blog posts themselves qualify as faffing, or are week-long gaps between blog posts evidence of an even higher form of faffing than that? Just a question.)

One of my recent Twitter conversations (Twitter is a fantastic tool for faffers) went like this:

• LadyoftheCoffee (that's me): Faffing. I am SO DAMN GOOD at faffing. I should be given an award
  
  
• marmaladekiss: at least you know what you're doing. Some people faff and call it work
  
  
• LadyoftheCoffee I shall become a freelance Faff Consultant, going into people's offices and reorganising their time-wasting strategies
  
  
• eurolush I have just looked faffing up in the urban dictionary . Well done. You are now officially wasting my time.*
  
  
• LadyoftheCoffee I warned you. I'm a professional.

Faffing should never be confused with pottering. Pottering is a relaxing activity, which possibly involves rearranging bouquets of flowers and fluffing cushions. Faffing results in the alarming realisation that the time you had in which to do a job is done, and you have nothing remotely life-enhancing to show for it.

However having been offered a spell of freelance work on top of my part-time job means my home faffing habit must go out of the window. That is, if I wish to achieve anything at all, and not sit in a pile of mismatched laundry with dust and unread books gathering at my feet.

I recently read someone recommending The Procrastinator's Guide to Success to people with a faffing problem. I have visited the link many times and wondered whether or not to click 'buy', but never actually made the decision.

The fact that I am failing to get on with ordering a book that claims to help people get on with things is a pitiful state of affairs.




(*This is not a direct quote, but taken from memory, since Eurolush is no longer a Twitterer. Gah. Maybe that's the kind of focus I need...)

Calendar for June. Eventually.

So last night I had the oddest dream.

I had driven for miles to get to some parenting camp or other which took place in various locations. When we arrived we were just about to sit down when the Littlest Latte said: "I want to sit with the other Littlest Latte' and sure enough there was her identical twin sitting at the table.

(The Littlest Latte has completely different colouring to myself, Mr Coffee, and the Eldest Latte. Sometimes I look at her and wonder if I brought the wrong baby home. A less secure man than Mr Coffee might have a few niggling doubts about the state of his marriage.)

The two identical Lattes became inseparable. They had the same face, same mannerisms, same everything. I tried to take photos to prove it but whenever I did the camera just recorded photos of Mr Coffee on his performing arts degree in 1989.

I met the doppelganger's mother but she seemed disturbingly unconcerned at the proof that our children had clearly been separated at birth and did not belong to us at all. She was content to talk vaguely about genetic reasons for strawberry blonde hair.

On our way to to the next part of the course Mr Coffee realised that we were driving past the house of Knitters Knitters, who had told us that if we were passing we should drop in. When we did the house was empty, and we wandered around it awkwardly. It was palatial. In the laundry basket was the long scarf she has been blogging about recently, which Mr Coffee ran his hand across and pronounced to be the softest garment ever made. It swirled with blues and greens. We wanted to steal it, but that didn't seem kind.

Then she returned home, wearing a strange garment with butterflies that lit up at intervals. It was only then that we noticed the fluttery wire butterflies which were all over the walls of the house. I thought that these would be difficult to dust.

I was further concerned about cleaning the place when I saw that the bathroom was a huge wet room with a series of raised lily pads all the way across the floor. Well that's hardly disabled accessible, I thought.

All this dreaming is just proof to anyone who needed it that reading blogs isn't good for you. But this doesn't stop me recommending a visit or six to Driftwood's wonderful blog, which provided me with my calendar image for June.

I love Driftwood's blog. I love it when she goes to York, which brings back fond memories of my time at university there, and I love it when she bakes, or takes pictures of the sea, or whatever else she does.



And don't snipe about me for being late. Yes, I know how far into June we are.