Age Mellowed?

This facebook post has popped up from two years ago

6 December 2015 at 18:11

As we were finishing our post prandial coffee the cat could be heard crunching on the chicken bones she had excavated from the kitchen bin, scattering bits of rubbish over the floor.

I commented on the mess and wondered who would clean it up, considering himself had left the bones within reach "to give her a treat".

"I'm off upstairs" he says making for the kitchen door.

"You are a bastard, you know that don't you?"

"Oh yes, but considering how I used to be I'm positively lovely."

All together now

So like the home life of our own dear Queen

APRES MOIS LA DELUGE

Facebook’s timehops has brought up these gems from three years ago

5 December 2014

Talk about absent minded bloody academics... 

Because of Ferretfingers's aversion to music and adverts I listen to tv using headphones and at the moment I have a lovely comfy pair which blocks out most extraneous noises.

So there I was watching “I'm A Celebrity.Get Me Out Of Here!” and I hear this bellowing of "Ben! Ben!" from upstairs - loud enough to get through.

Take off the headphones and bellow back "WHAT?"

"I've flooded the bath"

Then I hear it.

The kitchen is having its own personal monsoon season.

Go upstairs and the water is out of the bath and the bathroom and working its way past the toilet door. He's standing there with the plug in his hand.

We have a lot of towels (thanks to bringing back all his mother's and brother's when we cleared the family home so I empty half the airing cupboard and he mops and wrings them.

I dash down to the kitchen and put buckets and bowls over where it's coming in worst. Fortunately the ceiling is boards not plaster so it just runs through, all over the work surface and under the microwave and onto the floor.  Fester comes down and there's more mopping and wringing.

 

Eventually I bring myself to the point where I can actually ask what happened.

"Oh it was a combination of football and cycling on the telly" by which he means the laptop which he watches while putting lists of pits into the pc.  He'd started running the bath then got absorbed.

So now we have the washer spinning the towels prior to them being washed tomorrow - together with all the stuff we got out of the laundry basket for emergency mopping. The dehumidifier and fan heater are going full blast on the landing to get the carpet dried out (no they're not sitting on the wet bit). The kitchen floor is covered in old clothes to catch and mop up the remaining drips. And the last time I had the lights on there was a worrying spitting noise from one of the bulbs.

Thunderthighs has wisely stayed in the loft, apart from popping his head out to say "My it's warm up here."

They do say "Tomorrow is another day"
 

Yes - another day when I'll be clearing up somebody else's mess.

I'm going down to my sister's on Sunday - God only knows what I'll find when I get back

Mrs Leftfooter - Well at least he had his clothes on....Wait! Don't reply to that. xx

Bentonbag -  Actually he did - hadn't got ready for the bath

The next day I posted

You'd have loved this afternoon.

In order to get the kitchen lights to function without sparking, steaming or spitting Fester was stood below them drying them out with the hairdryer.

"Is this our hairdryer?"

We've only got one hairdryer.

"So this is the one I use to dry the radio when it falls in the bath?"  (NB the radio falls in of its own volition - no hairyarsedbastard drops it)

Nevertheless we still only have one hairdryer.

"That's funny - I thought it was green"

The kitchen lights are now functioning perfectly.

6 December 2014 at 16:01

So this week:

Ferretfingers hurled the tivo remote to the floor and it no longer functions;

Fester flooded the bathroom, half the landing and most of the kitchen;

and today the washing-up-bowl sprung a leak (only 18 years old I bought it when Thunderthighs was born).

Sneaky the last one.

I was sterilising jars for apple jelly.   

Laid them in the bowl.   

Boiled kettle, and poured boiling water around and on jars to heat but not crack.   

Filled and boiled kettle.   

Came back to bowl and thought "I'm sure the water was higher than that."

Took about three kettlefulls before I was certain.

Felt like one of those arithmetic problems about filling a bath with the plug out ....

Unlike last night .

LD:NorthEast My AGM Highlights

Last week Learning Disabilities NorthEast held its AGM and I was asked to say a few words about my highlights of 2016/17.  Here they are ...

 

Hello, I’m a member of the Board and last week our CEO David asked me if I had any highlights over the past year I could tell you about.

The first thing that came into my mind was last year’s Christmas Carol Service when, for the first time, one of our service users, Alison, did a reading.  Previously all the readings have been done by the great and the good, like our MP, or the Mayor, or high-ups in the Council.  When Alison got up and did the reading I realised that we’d done the right thing, and a good thing, and I felt proud and humble to have been involved in the decision.

The next highlight is our new Treasurer Jeff.  As a board member I’m partly responsible for all the financial things being dealt with properly; which is a worry because I know next to nothing about finance.  Now we have Jeff I can rest easy that all that is under control, and I know he’s worked really hard improving systems and getting the money sorted properly.

Earlier this year I went to an LD:NorthEast do and David and Jacqui were there.  I hadn't even got my coat off, almost before we’d said Hello, they asked me “Do you knit?”   

“Yes, why?”   

Maureen and Val, the volunteers at Knit and Natter were both ill and nobody in the office knew how to cast on or cast off.  So the next Friday I went along, and have been to Knit and Natter almost every week since.   

At the start our Ladies were doing squares for blankets for Africa.  But since then we’ve expanded into teddies (although Canny Annie’s always done teddies) twiddle muffs and kitten blankets.   

We’ve presented a basket of blankets to Cat Rescue.   

We’ve got twenty trauma teddies ready for Northumbria Police to give to little children in scary situations.   

And we’ll soon be delivering a hamper of twiddle muffs, to help calm people with Alzheimers, to the Freeman Hospital, along with some teddies for the children’s ward. 

Some of our work is also going to be sold in aid of LDNE funds.    

It is so good that our ladies can see their work is valued, and that they can contribute to other people’s welfare.

Finally there was the Tomorrows Lottery Celebration Tea Party.   

Because I’m on the board I got to sit at the front with the Mayor.   

As some of you will remember we had a lovely lady come to sing for us and she encouraged people to get up and dance.   

At one point I looked back into the hall and there was this big semi-circle of service users and staff, hand in hand, dancing together.

As the mum of two autistic boys it would be really easy to feel sorry for myself, but at that moment I realised how privileged I am to know all these beautiful people and how there’s no way I would want to miss out in being part of LDNE.

Radicalisation?

Facebook’s timehop brought this up today.  I thought it was worth sharing.

11 October 2015 at 10:46 ·

On Friday afternoons Ferretfingers attends a local education authority Allotment Gardening course in a nearby community centre.

I am his ‘enabler’, driving him there and back and hanging around 'in case there are any issues'.  Which means I sit nearby reading, crocheting or writing a letter, because part of the point is to get him to do things rather than say, pathetically, "Mummy help".*

The other men in the group range in age from early twenties to forties.   All are learning disabled, except for Russell who is so severely physically disabled the speech he has is unintelligible.   All bar Raymond require an enabler (or two) to get them safely there to 'access' the course.

The tutor is required to incorporate British Values and Anti-Radicalisation into the curriculum.

There was loud laughter from the enablers when this was announced.

Now call me disableist (and I know we say Ferretfingers is as cunning as a bag of rats) but I'm having trouble trying to work out the likelihood of this group plotting the overthrow of Western Civilization.

You do have to wonder at the mentality of the education/council/Ofsted bureaucrats that pass down these sorts of tick-box one-size-fits-all requirements to the people who actually do the work. 

Does nobody at management level have the common sense to say "Oh for goodness sake let’s get off this daft bandwagon"?

And while we're at it

When the IRA were bombing bits of Britain in the 1970s, 80s and 90s I didn't notice people going around Catholic schools, Kilburn, Liverpool, Glasgow and other heavily Irish areas looking for 'radicalised young people' and requiring educators to include British Values in the curriculum.  Maybe then the powers that be realised it would create more problems than it solved.

*Ferretfingers is still on the course but my sitting back didn’t last long.  We work together with him doing all the heavy lifting.  Sadly it looks as though the course may not go on for much longer.  Management of the community centre has passed from the local authority into the control of a ‘child poverty charity’.  The charity intends to charge the education department for any rooms it uses in the centre.  It doesn’t look like education will pay.  So when the weather is too bad for gardening or poly tunnel work what do we do?  There is also nowhere for the tutor to leave files etc and all the required paperwork has to be done in the open public areas.   

Using the third sector to combat austerity is really working for us: isn’t it?