Katie and her mental meanderings

get baking.

Just made some rather nice carrot cake cookies. They don’t look anything like in the picture, though – they are much flatter and more spread out. I added a little extra flour because British plain flour isn’t as strong as US all-purpose flour, but I should perhaps have added even more extra. They are quite cake-like. And I used two carrots for a double recipe.

I’m thinking of making some rhubarb cookies too, but the mountains of rhubarb I thought were in the bottom of the fridge turn out to be two measly sticks, which are only 1 cup uncooked – and the recipe I saw calls for 1 cup cooked, and I think one egg. You can’t halve eggs…

I’ve been busy today! It hasn’t been great weather but it didn’t rain, so I stained (quick-drying varnish), and put together (with help from The Spouse™) a mini-greenhouse my dad bought for my birthday. I also pruned the autumn raspberries (should have been done in about Feb, oops), the roses (ditto, and how have they got aphids already? how, I ask you?) and watered the whole garden (all 3 beds of it) with anti-slug nematode mixture. Let’s see if it works.

In the greenhouse now are lots of organic tomato plants that came in the post (i.e. I didn’t grow them!), plus a load of my pots and a bit of my compost – the shed is breathing a sigh of relief and the logs and barbecue are feeling a bit more comfortable.

Leaping back into exercise when you’ve left off it for months, that is. OK, I’ve been running, but I hadn’t been cycling and my bum is sore, my legs hurt, and the yoga today was too hard also.

I know I haven’t been posting much, and I kind of felt that such a long absence meant I needed to write something Significant. So hopefully the last post will suffice.

I found out on Easter Day that my friend, who is just a few days older than me, died last Wednesday. I have talked about her in the present tense several times and corrected myself, and likewise forgotten to correct myself, so I'm leaving that first sentence. She and her husband have two under-fives. She had stomach cancer, picked up when the younger one was 6 months old – she thought the exhaustion was just from being a new mother again. The older one started school in September. This is just wrong, beyond wrong.

There is a wake tonight and I am nearby, but not sure whether to go – the funeral is tomorrow, we had a long journey today and have a long one late tomorrow after what will no doubt be an emotionally harrowing afternoon. She is a friend from my old church, and was a large part of making me feel extremely welcome and making the place into a very tightly-knit community. There were only a few people that I got very close to, though, and she was one of them. She had a fairly late miscarriage before the first of their children, and was very comforting to me after my first miscarriage. And she was generally lovely, artistic, warm, welcoming, just a wonderful person. Even if she hadn't been wonderful, this is just wrong, I tell you. Wrong, wrong, wrong.