This Week I……

Hi there!

Look, I’m back again to fill you in on all the exciting happenings in my life this week!

I actually had some lovely messages and comments after I resurrected This Week I telling me they’d missed them, so at the moment I’m feeling positive about keeping them going and making more time in my life for blogging again.

Right now I am at my Parents house as it’s my Dad’s birthday, I feel a bit like I’ve had a mini holiday and quite refreshed. We won’t be able to head home until a bit later in the day as it’s another warm one and we’ll have the Pugs in the car, so I’m looking forward to a relaxing lunch in the garden.

But first, this week I……

Made another good lunch

Now, I really don’t want to turn this into “This week I …had lunch” but I have tried 2 new meal prep lunches in a row and they’ve both been a big hit. Last week it was pasta and pesto, this week it was a couscous based greek salad.

You will already know this if you read my “Photo an Hour” post earlier this week.

If you fancy trying it then it’s cucumber, red onion, black olives, feta cheese and cherry tomatoes all chopped up and mixed with cous cous, dressed with a home made dressing of olive oil, white wine vinegar and dijon mustard.

Found some lovely alcohol free beer

To start the week we were supposed to be having red pepper and aubergine bake, except due to an online shopping fail it turned out we actually didn’t have half the ingredients, including, importantly, aubergines.

So, as the weather was nice, we decided to have a BBQ instead.

As I am making a concerted effort to stick to at least 4 alcohol-free days a week, but I knew I would fancy a beer with a BBQ, I picked up some alcohol-free beers, and I can heartily recommend this one from Brooklyn. I swear if no one told you it was alcohol-free you wouldn’t know it.

I bought it in Tesco, but I’m sure you can pick it up elsewhere. For those of you who like a drink but want to cut down on alcohol, I can also recommend the Black Tower alcohol-free white wine, and Sainsburys TTD Sparkling wine.

Failed at Dinner. Again

Turns out even when we actually DO have the ingredients, we still can’t manage to actually eat the planned meal this week.

We were going to have Homity Pie, Mr LLL hadn’t made Homity Pie before, but he made an excellent start, even if he got really irritated trying to make pastry and poke it into a pie tin without making holes in it.

Then he knocked a jug of water all over it, so we threw it all in the bin and went to the pub and ate MotherChips instead.

This was not one of my alcohol free days.

Had Party Rings at practice

The best Team Captains hand out party rings after roller derby practice. Party rings make it worth missing the England Women’s World Cup Quarter Final.

Had a Haircut

I was supposed to have my hair cut last week, but I had to reschedule when I realised I’d managed to book it while I was going to be at a wedding.

So I was looking quite shaggy dog when I got there, and now I am not.

Good story huh?

This was also a day where I ended up dressed quite inappropriately. The day started quite overcast and almost a little chilly, so I got all excited and put my new Joanie Clothing top on (yes, I own this in all 3 colours now, I like it). Of course, by the time I left the hairdressers at 10am it had decided to be another scorching hot day with not a cloud in the sky as I sweltered all the way home in sleeves and black tights.

Learned not to leave treats in my coat pocket

For at least a year I have been able to leave dog treats in my handbag and coat pockets without fear as the Pugs did not realise they were there.

Then, one foolish day I left the flap of my handbag open and Waldo detected treats inside. I steered him away, closed my bag and thought nothing of it. However, Waldo has now discovered that handbags are a place to look for food, which meant that a few weeks ago I came downstairs to find the contents of my bag strewn across the room and the handful of treats I had stashed in the front pocket all gone. So I stopped keeping treats there.

It seems Waldo has now realised it’s worth checking unattended clothing for food, however. I foolishly left my varsity jacket, with a few treats in the pocket hanging from the back of a chair.

Unable to get into the pocket to extricate the treats Waldo decided the next best thing to do would be to try and suck them through the fabric, turning the treats into a disgusting mush and meaning the inside of my jacket pocket now looks like this.

Fixed the Dishwasher

Or, more accurately. Mr LLL fixed the dishwasher.

For the last couple of weeks our dishwasher has been leaving a gritty residue over everything. Not every time, and sometimes it’s worse on one shelf or the other.

I have changed the salt and rinse aid, put dishwasher cleaners through, descaled the rotor arms and nothing has worked. It has been driving me a little insane and I’ve been frustrated that a device that is supposed to make my life easier has been such a pain.

We even pulled everything out and tried to make sure the drains were clear in case it wasn’t draining away properly.

Then Mr LLL noticed a pumpkin seed poking out of one of the holes in the rotor arm. He pulled it out, then noticed that the arm was still rattling. He removed both rotor arms, made tiny slits in them and from them removed about 15 pumpkin seeds.

Presumably although the arms seemed to flow freely when we ran tap water through them, when water is pumped through under pressure in the machine those tiny seeds were enough to block the holes.

How did 15 pumpkin seeds get in the rotor arms? I don’t always rinse plates before they go in the dishwasher as I am lazy, but we do scrape them, and it seems impossible that 15 pumpkin seeds would have escaped the scraping. And if they did escape the scraping does that mean that every single one made it into the rotor arms or did 30 pumpkin seeds somehow escape the scraping?

Who knows? But hopefully the dishwasher is now fixed.

Made an epic birthday breakfast

On Saturday my Dad turned 65 so we headed down to Kent to celebrate with him.

He had a hip replacement a week ago so we couldn’t venture far from home, but we planned a little party in the garden as the weather was so nice.

In the morning I made an epic avocado on sour dough toast breakfast so he could experience how millenials ate these days. It was a big hit.

I also made everyone wear party hats at 9am.

Later there was also cake.

Developed an epic bruise

Lastly, to finish the week, I can’t resist sharing my new epic bruise.

On Thursday night at practice there was a bit of an ankle disaster. I was at the back of the pack, blocking a jammer facing backwards, and got pushed forwards into the people behind me, there was a bit of a pile up and my ankle got caught between 2 people moving in opposite directions. It really felt like it was about to snap. I screamed “ankle!”, everyone stopped, and my ankle was thankfully saved from disaster.

It is sprained, but I’ve had worse, however it did look like an epic bruise would appear just above my ankle. On Friday I was disappointed as it didn’t look very epic at all, but I think it was quite deep and over the last few days it’s started to develop. It looks really fetching with nice summer frocks.

And that was another week in my life. How was your week?