My head is all a whirl today. I tried to make mayonnaise, twice. First time I used the wrong oil and it tasted yucky. Second time I couldn't get the thing to emulsify. Oh, I don't like it when I waste eggs. We eat so many of them, they are precious things. Mrs Dietz, my highschool food tech teacher would be proud that I know the word emulsify, but most dissatisfied that I'd wasted two whole eggs. We were so heavily rationed in those classes. Two beans each and half a sausage when we were learning the meat and three veg routine. Her budget must have been teensy tiny. The dog ate the first batch and is sleeping peacefully over the heat vent now. We ate the thin one, drizzled over a tuna salad. It tasted fine, just wasn't thick and creamy how I like it. Anyway, the whirly head is due to househunting. We drove out to Stanley to look at a house on the weekend in the most atrocious weather, you know driving rain, snow predicted down to eight hundred metres ( oh please, yes), bitterly cold. It felt good, the house I mean. She had good bones, needed work, but good bones. Two of our dearest friends are living in it at the moment & would end up being our neighbour. But oh, what to do. I'm totally grasping in the dark when it comes to real estate & renovating, how much these things cost. My only experience being Grand Design re-runs & they always go over budget by hundreds of thousands of pounds. It's a whole new world for me, us. I feel completely blind, terrified & excited too. On the way out there, amid the stormy weather, a rainbow followed us down the valley. Is it a sign?
We made it down to the river on the weekend. It was all sunshine and blustery. Zahra made a fairy house in the river bank and Kaya splashed at the water's edge. She doesn't get out much these days, spends most of her retirement sleeping. But she still adores the river. She's a river dog through & through. I remember when you could throw a stick for her, right into the current and she'd be after it in a flash, drifting downstream, out of sight. Then a little while later she'd come back with the stick, all fluffy from shaking out her coat, & do it all over again. She won't go out into the current anymore, even if you do throw a ball or stick. She just stands on the shore, watching it float away. Sweet, old girl.
