Lazy slug...

That is what I have become.  I haven't even checked back on this thing to see when the last time I actually did some exercise was.  It would be too depressing.  I have been walking a bit (though lazy, drag me from bed mornings mean not as much as I should be), including a nice long walk last Saturday with my Flâneur, Wastrel and SAM, the latter of whom had come down for dinner the night before.  But other than that - zilch.  I haven't even been to the pool, and I love swimming!

Eating has been a bit of a theme as I cooked a lavish three course meal for my Flâneur for his birthday on the 19th.  It was a little stressful as I had chosen to be a little bit more complicated than my usual "shall we have pasta...".  I made goat's cheese and red onion tarts to start (served with some salad to pretend it was healthy), following by shoulder of lamb stuffed with an apricot stuffing (which was much nicer than I had anticipated).  Was a bit pissed off that the annoying butcher, who pointed out it's called shoulder in Scotland when I asked for neck (which I'd seen used on Masterchef, how was I to know that's what 'the English' call it!), that he had said to me - oh if you're stuffing it, with this piece you wont need to tie it.  Well that was not true and as I checked on it part way through I realised it had sprung apart and the stuffing was starting to char.  So I had to take it out the oven and try and tie string round a hot piece of meat in a desperate attempt to make it cook properly.  Anyway, this was accompanied by dauphinoise potato (recipe on the potato council website, of all places), and asparagus (cooked in butter...hhmmm...).  By this time I was pretty well stuffed as we just don't eat that much anymore, having cut our portions down quite considerably.  But we weren't done, as I had decided to have a go at making chocolate mousse.  

The recipe for the mousse came from Jamie Oliver's "Happy Days" book, and apparently served "4".  As I wanted some for the next night too, I thought I'd do half the mix again and therefore have enough for 6.  Six piggies that would be!  It was a huge amount of mousse that I put into frankly the most enormous glasses I have (they're champagne bowls), and there was still some left over to make two other reasonable sized portions.  I felt really quite ill half way through, but ploughed on none the less.  ;o)  Maybe this is why I am so large....

All this was washed down with some very lovely Californian Zinfandel and some yummy Prosecco.  Hmmm....  Thankfully had taken the next day off, boy did I need it.  My tummy felt a little sore.  Spent most of it cleaning the flat though.  Just don't get the chance to give this place the clean it needs what with working and everything...

Had a lovely visit from Wastrel and SAM and was very pleased that my Flâneur was cooking and that he was doing fish!  He did a fine Japanese spread including gyoza (yummy), sake glazed salmon, greenbeans with a soybean paste and toasted sesame topping, Japanese potato salad and of course, rice.  Washed down this time with a nice Sake and green tea.  Oh, and of course, finished off with Mousse.  That's what we all were - fished off by mousse!!  Only SAM and I managed to finish ours.  Urgh...

So, yes, eating has been a real feature of the last two weeks, but not really exercise.  On the plus side it is now Lent, when traditionally I give up chocolate and sweets.  It's been pretty tough these first few days as I begin to realise just how much of a habit it has become!  This is the 9th year (I think) that I have done this and usually by Easter I don't really want chocolate, so hopefully this will be a real chance to cut right back.  I shall have to just make sure I don't gorge on Easter Sunday and therefore fall with a bit fat bump off the wagon...  Flaneur is under instructions not to buy me more than 1 Easter egg and to make sure it's a really good quality one...  

Lent should help with the weight loss though which appears to have very frustratingly stalled.  Not exercising probably has something to do with that, but I am bumbling along still at the X-1 stone 3lb mark, sometimes a bit lower, occasionally a bit more (v. depressing), but mostly just at the 3 mark.  That's still my stone marker, but it would be nice if it went down a bit, at least to get me into the X-2 stage... Sigh!  Am determined to get back to the exercise this week coming though - I will be at the pool on Monday, I will!!

On the sewing front, I did finish the front of my quilt, which was very satisfying.  Sorry no pics at the moment - have to down load them from the camera, which involves using a different computer...  Anyway, it doesn't look much different from the picture of it all laid out on the floor!  It's blooming massive, but looks great.  I'm really really pleased with it and now just need to get the wadding and backing fabric and finish it off.  It really hasn't taken me half as long as I expected...

Lovely Gift

In our house we don't usually do Valentine's day. It's over commercialised and we don't need one specific day to show how much we love the other. We do usually like to have a nice dinner together, but don't do presents. We sometimes do cards, but only home made and neither of us really had the time this year.

Dinner was great (although today the flat is smelling a little too much like grease and I've got all the windows open to try and air the flat and get rid of it), and similar to the dinner we did the first V day we spend together (which was our 6 month anniversary, a time when you marked such things!). We did what we like to refer to as our 'Japanese feast'. Between us we made:

avocado maki sushi

cucumber maki sushi

meat gyoza (yum yum yum, my favourite!)

ginger pork

savoury deep-fried chicken (Tatsuta-age; marinaded in soy sauce, honey, ginger and garlic, covered in potato starch and then deep fried for a few minutes, totally yummy, but the source of the grease smell in the flat today from the deep frying).

All washed down with a lovely Sake we bought in Japan last year from the hotel we were staying in - their house sake from their super posh Japanese restaurant Kozu. Not massively healthy, all that meat and frying, but all very tasty!! And nice to spend the time cooking together and spending a long time over a meal.

After dinner we cracked open a bottle of Prosecco, which my Flâneur (the new name in here for my fiancé who objected to me calling him 'the' fiancé due to some odd family connotation with the word 'the' before a person's name or description), had bought to make Prosecco truffles. He didn't really have the time, so we just drank the fizz! Very nice one, but not as good as our favourite, which our local wine shop hasn't had in since Christmas. Hope they get it back because it's lovely!

Anyway, over the prosecco, my Flâneur produced a present for me, which he said was not a Valentine's present, but a 'just because' present. He said he wanted to get me a wee something because I'd not had a good start to the year. So lovely of him. (sniff). ;o). And so generous!! This is what he bought me:

Hardly a 'wee something'! It's a travel backgammon set, which rolls up for easy transportation, and is made from beautifully soft suede, the spikes from black and white leather, the pieces are dark and light wood. So gorgeous, so sumptious, so lovely and generous of him! It's something that I have coveted for some time but was just too pricey to justify getting for myself. I love him so much! Just have to teach him how to play now...

Quilt...

Well, the exercise has been taking a bit of a back seat these last three weeks or so, which is pretty shocking.  Never going to lose the next stone if I don't get back to it, so will be back at the pool tomorrow, snow willing!  Well, that's a bit of a hope really, because although it's snowing quite heavily now, it's unlikely to get so bad as to stop me getting to the pool tomorrow, this is Edinburgh, not London!  I did try and go swimming this week, but was hampered by the queueing system at the Uni pool - they only let 30 people in at any one time, so if you go at a busy time you have to wait.  The queue was too long that I decided to try again another time.  Monday's are particularly bad apparently, so I'll just go back to my usual pool tomorrow.  

I do love the snow though - I am like a small child, getting all giggly and excited by it.  Was very jealous of all the snow down south.  I live in Scotland surely it's supposed to be worse here! 

Anyway, what I have been doing in the meantime, while not exercising, is starting work on my quilt.  I bought the fabric in the middle of last year to make a patchwork quilt and it has taken me this long to finally get round to doing anything about it.  The fact that I had to cut nearly 200 pieces out was probably a big factor putting me off...  It's an Amy Butler design and is her 'brick path' quilt from her fabulous free patterns she puts on her website (www.amybutlerdesign.com).  As well as liking the look of the finished design it appealed because I thought the structure would be easy for someone who has never made a quilt before and who is still getting to know her sewing machine.  I picked some fairly muted colours for the quilt, mostly creams with some goldy colours, but just to make it a bit more interesting there are some really nice reds in there too.  

It took me several weeks to cut all the rectangles out (mostly because it was as tedious as I had imagined it to be and back breaking stuff), but it was a fairly impressive stack of bits when I was done... 

That's them all stacked up after I undertook the mammoth task of laying them all out on the floor to work out where they should go.  As there were, I think, 7 different fabrics and the quilt is 11 rows by 18, it was important not to get two of the same piece of fabric next to each other, and also to make sure that it has an element of the eclectic about it, so that it doesn't follow too much of a prescribed pattern.  I'm very lucky that our living room has a big floorspace so I could undertake the laying out exercise being able to see the full quilt and get a sense of what the finished piece will look like:

It's a big old quilt being roughly double bed sized (it should be 72" by 72" when finished).  I pretty pleased with how it looked laid out on the floor (it took several hours to complete that).  Here's a close up of some of the fabric:

I'm particularly fond of the bits with birds on (you probably can't appreciate them in the picture), but love all the fabrics and how well it will go with whatever bed linen I put on the spare bed.  Our spare room is also the fiance's study, so anything to make it less of a work space when we have visitors is a big bonus!

I completed the laying out stage two weeks ago and now am on to the sewing stage!  I have so far completed the sewing up of the first 9 downward rows, sewing the short ends in each row together, creating 9 long strings of fabric.  I'll not sew the downward rows together until I've finished them all, but it's nice to see it starting to come together already.  Very excited to see the finished thing!

Update

Was at the doctor on Friday morning, who was singularly unhelpful. Not my usual GP and not sure I'd want to see her again. I was expecting at least: maybe it's a virus; if not: you need to get better sleep, here are some leaflets; but instead I got: maybe you've been overdoing it, everyone gets a bit sluggish every now and again! Goddamn her. I felt like she wasn't taking me seriously at all. I was a little overwrought with the whole thing, it having been a pretty big deal for me to go to the doctor about it, having been kept waiting 30 mins for my appointment and still being tired, that I'm afraid to say I did blub a bit in her surgery. When asked if there was anything worrying me, I nearly snorted: yes, this!

Anyway, I think she felt guilty because now she's agreed to do some tests, just to rule a few things out. I'm to go back for blood tests next week, so we'll see what happens. I'm feeling much better this week, so maybe whatever was working on me has worked it's way out, but I'll feel more re-assured after the tests.

On the upside, I had a lovely weekend away in Perthshire with my five best pals. We had a lovely relaxing time chez Wastrel and SAM, with good food, wine and company. A delicious fondue and champagne awaited us when we arrived, which started the weekend perfectly. I was also able to give SAM her belated birthday present and another apology at missing last week’s fun. Saturday was spent getting up leisurely, then heading out to a spot of historical interest nearby, only to find that it was shut for Winter. Blooming Scotland. Someone joked that that should be on the posters that greet you at the airport: Welcome to Scotland, Closed until April. Brilliant. But we spent a good amount of time wandering around the graveyard looking at the unusual names of the local deceased, before heading to the local pub across the road. This was quite a find as the food was really nice pub grub. I had haddock and chips. The fish was really tasty and the batter nice and light. You got a fish and a half and initially I thought I couldn't eat it all, but that turned out to be a foolish thought - of course I could! Although in the end I was prevented by a blasted migraine. Thankfully I had my Sumatriptan tablets with me and was able to stave it off to just a mild headache, but it was annoying none the less. I had really wanted to finish that fish!

Back at the house Wastrel gave me a much appreciated massage (she is a qualified therapeutic massage person), which was both relaxing and soothing for my head. Meant I slept well that night too. Thanks so much!! We played a game designed by the multi-talented Wastrel for HMcM's Christmas a few years back, and then ate delicious roast lamb with trimmings. Hmmm... lamb, one of my favourite meats. Yum. Oh, followed by Sticky Toffee Pud. Delicious. Possibly not so good for the old diet all this fine dining, but you need to indulge every now and again or your life just gets too dull.

Sunday was again a leisurely start, culminating in lunch in Perth at this lovely little French place (you'll notice names escaping me totally today), which did just delicious food. I had a 'salad' (ha!) Paysanne. More potato and bacon than lettuce, but that was the point. ;o) HL and I then hightailed it off to the station for the train back to Edinburgh leaving RF, Wastrel and SAM with the Perth shops. Well, the ones that were open. It wasn't a bad journey back to Edinburgh, even though the train was quite busy, and HL and I had a good chat about life and plans and our boys. It really was a lovely weekend but it was good to be home on Sunday evening. Even better that my dearest had made the flat look immaculate, having done a great job cleaning and tidying after having had his friends over on Saturday. The challenge now is to keep it that way! Ha!