I Love To Go A-Wandering

Welcome to Melissa at Redoing It – with DIY and PSE. I’ve been stalking you following your blog for a while now and I have one thing to say to you – I want your house.

Sigh.

 
I decided to have a bit of a tidy up and do a little housekeeping on the computer. Over the years, we’ve taken hundreds of photos and although I’d set up topic folders – family, friends, building work, holidays, weddings and so on – we’d got very a little lazy and ended up uploading the photos any old where things became a wee bit untidy.
 
Of course, going through photos inevitably meant tripping down memory lane.
 
Significant Other had far greener fingers than I do (not difficult, a two year old could do better than me), and I think he’d have found the blogging world - regarding growing things - fascinating.
 
When we moved here, there was a greenhouse in the garden. The first year, we did nothing with it – it was a bit of a dumping ground. The second year, we cleared it out and Significant Other started growing things. Not only did he use the greenhouse, he cleared the garden at the side of the house and planted veg there too.
 
He grew peppers, strawberries, cucumbers, onions, spring onions, beetroot, sweetcorn, rhubarb, horseradish and tomatoes.
 
Ah, the tomatoes.

He was very successful with the tomatoes; he grew seventeen plants - beef tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and ‘ordinary’ tomatoes.

That summer, I perfected the art of making tomato soup and we also had tomatoes with almost everything we ate.

SO: No tomatoes?

Me: Um, it’s a roast.
SO: Aw, just slice me a tomato. Please?
Me: O-kaaay.
SO: You not having any with yours?
Me: No, I’ll pass. I’ll have a tomato for dessert. Maybe I’ll have it with custard. Yum.
SO: Stop taking the piss. You don’t like custard.

The following year the greenhouse was pulled down.

We’d decided to pave over the area where the greenhouse had stood. Significant Other had been a little over-enthusiastic in laying the foundations, so when my dad came to lay the paving, parts of it were too high.

Out came the kango breaker drill. Being the hands-on-I’ll-give-anything-a-go-just-let-me-get-my-hands-on-it-and-I’ll-show-you-how-to-bloody-do-it type of person I am, to give my dad a break from using it, I helped.

Perhaps flip-flops were not the best choice of footwear – my mum had a fit when she saw the photo, and I had to count my toes afterwards to put her mind at ease (all present and correct) – but, and it’s an important but, I did wear gloves. You see, what people don’t realise is: kango + gloves = total foot protection. I'm not stupid.

Another photo I came across was one of Youngest Daughter.

A couple of years ago I’d got up at some unearthly hour to get myself ready for another day of copping a load of abuse fun-filled, trolley pushing, coffee serving day in the sky, when I saw my youngest offspring asleep.

To save her any future embarrassment, I wasn’t going to take a picture, but quickly thought ‘nah, sod that’, grabbed the camera and snapped away.

By the way, the room the photo was taken in was the forerunner to The Pit – she was just honing her skills in readiness to really go for it later.

She’d been out the night before and came home absolutely rat-arsed a little worse for wear. The bed was clearly a hop, skip and a jump too far, so she just lay down on the floor, covered herself with her dressing gown and passed out.

My daughter.

I feel so proud right now.