Seasons of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

When we bought this new house we inherited a productive vegetable garden.  Over time it will probably be expanded, at the moment we are working out what to do with what is in there.

There was a lot of basil on the verge of going to seed, so of course I turned it into pesto.  That was fun.  The jar (please ignore the label, it did once have commercial pesto in it, but be assured that that green stuff is all mine!) is approximately one-fifth of what I made up last weekend.  The rest is in the freezer.  This jar is now almost empty, having gone into soup all week.  (A favorite Italian-inspired cafe I visit frequently put me onto the idea of a decent dollop of pesto in many soups being a wondrous thing).

I had planned to cook a pressure-cooker lamb thing with roasted rhubard last weekend.  And George was delighted because he (a) likes rhubarb and (b) wanted me to use up what was growing in the garden.  So I went down and cut the rhubarb.  While cutting it I politely asked him if he was 100% sure that it was rhubarb and not ruby chard grown bigger than it should have been allowed it.  He was adamant (and he is the gardener among us, I am the cook).  So I dutifully threw away all the leaves, rhubarb leaves being poisonous of course, and roasted the stalks with butter and sugar.

Roasted ruby chard stems with butter and sugar does not taste bad, as such, it just doesn't taste of anything except, well, butter ... and sugar.

And a large bunch of squeaky fresh ruby chard languishes in the bottom of our green waste bin :(

The house is coming together, slowly.  There is still all the stuff in storage.  When that comes out, I will be able to organise my craft stuff to some extent, and we will have thousands of books to reshelve.  I think we may need some new bookcases, too, but I'm not sure about that.  We have decided that the books of my dead father are going to the nearest book sale - I feel that I have been cursed ever since they entered my life and that it is no longer worth trying to value and sell them.  Some we are deliberately keeping, happily, but the bulk of them will not even be entering the new house.  We all need to move on.

It needs a lot more tidying and organising and finding places for things but it feels like home and we love it.  Yes, it was worth all the angst!

And work is even feeling a bit better.  I had a three-month review yesterday - I am on a 12 month contract (we all are, it gets renewed so long as both sides still want it at the end of every 12 months) but with a 3 month probationary period). I wanted to discuss some things I was not happy with, and obviously my boss needed the opportunity to say anything he needed to say.  Everyone who matters is happy with me, so I do still have a job!  And I was able to air a couple of grievances and establish myself on a bit more of a professional footing.  And I am possibly the only person in living memory to ask for more work to do!  What I actually said was that my allotted duties did not fill in the time I worked, and I was unhappy with the perception that I should spend the extra time doing the work of people below me in the organisational structure.  This was agreed upon, I have more interesting things to do now, and I am going to embark on a training course in designing and delivering information literacy programes, paid for by the college, which will help bump up my CV no end.  So I am still tired all the time, and I would still rather be at home crafting, but at least I feel a little more appreciated now.