wet weather jobs

It rained this morning, good steady rain that soaked into the ground, and without an accompanying battering gale.  The rain gauge now says we had seven millimetres, which added to the five we had overnight a couple of days ago makes twelve, or a whole half inch.  I am very grateful for it, and so are the plants.  Half an inch isn't anything like enough, and I'll be out there again next week with the hose, but it has provided some respite for things that were beginning to gasp at death's door, and loosened the soil in the railway garden enough for the Systems Administrator to be able to do some weeding.

I could have got on with a few jobs in the greenhouse, scuttling over to the pot shed when I needed containers, but didn't.  Non-gardening tasks have been piling up, and have to be tackled sometime, and the SA had nominated me to cook tonight's supper, so I needed to go to Waitrose.  Waitrose on a Sunday morning is less pleasant than at most other times.  In fact, with all their pick your own discount labels flapping around along the fronts of the shelves, and a higher than usual quotient of screaming children, I might as well have gone to Tesco, saved myself a few bob, and not had to wait until Waitrose's sedate ten-thirty opening.

I am not at all convinced by the Pick Your Own Offer offer, letting shoppers nominate ten items from a list on which they'll get a twenty per cent discount every time they buy any.  It feels as though Waitrose have belatedly entered the last retail war, when things are moving on.  I can't remember everything in my top ten, for a start, and nor can the SA who has a different selection, and the offers are terribly specific.  The SA picked coleslaw as one of the ten, but found at the checkout last week that the twenty per cent off only applied to a different sized pack to the one in the SA's basket.  I know I chose my preferred brand of breakfast cereal, Dorset Cereal's Simply Delicious muesli in the blue and brown box, but Waitrose had run out.  The sign on the shelf advertising that I could get twenty per cent off if I selected it as one of my favourites merely added insult to inconvenience.  Who knows, I might have chosen some other cereal as a change, but reminding me that I could have had a discount on the one I actually wanted put me right off buying any.  As marketing campaigns go this one seems calculated to generate FOMO, big time.  That and the stress of additional choice, what sized coleslaw should I buy and which kind of minced beef did I choose?

The traffic going the other way was building alarmingly by the time I left, with queues at every roundabout and cars nose to tail practically back to the university turning at the top of Clingoe Hill.  Accident, broken traffic lights or freak statistical outlier, I don't know why it was so bad, but I was glad I'd gone down when I did and not half an hour later.  That's the trouble with Colchester's traffic, you just never know.  Sometimes you can wizz from one side of town to the other in ten minutes, barely needing to touch the brakes, other times it's gridlock.  After being caught out by a jam you may go through a phase of building in a big margin for error on days when it matters if you're late, then after weeks or months of not being stuck in stationary traffic the appeal of always being half an hour early for medical appointments and trains starts to wane, and you take more of a chance.

Back at home I unleashed my inner Domestic Goddess, and made a lemon cake, mainly for the beekeepers committee though we'll finish it if they don't want it, honey ice cream for us, some meringues to use up left over whites from the custard for the ice cream, to be eaten with strawberries, and a garlic flavoured lamb stew which is still cooking, as are the almond biscuits that were to use up the other left over whites.  Any further egg whites will probably go down the sink, as there's a limit to how many meringues and macaroons anybody could want.  I know you can freeze egg whites, but that's only a prelude to throwing them away in two years' time instead of now.  The lemon cake is not the lemon drizzle biscuit recipe, which I am thoroughly disillusioned with by now, but another from the same book which seems to work reliably.  It is essentially a Victoria sandwich mix with added lemon zest, cooked in a loaf tin and with lemon syrup poured over the top.