Nacho bean burger, cheese and onion crispbake, salad

A few weeks ago I felt I was spending too much time on various small screens, and bought myself an adult colouring book and some double-ended (fine liner at one end, brush tip at the other) coloured pens. And then I put them to one side and didn’t touch them until today when both my phone and my kindle were out of charge and I found myself needing something to do.

An hour or so later, I had a two-thirds coloured stylised jaguar, and multi-coloured hands where my fumbling figures had repeatedly missed while attempting to re-cap the pens. Nvm, it’s washable ink, right?

Err… wrong. Oh well, l don’t mind being multicoloured for a while. Not that it would matter if I did mind, as no amount of scrubbing would shift it.

After that, it was time for mum’s urology appointment, during which mum kept muttering sentiments along the lines of “please don’t let them take me away” so that I had to keep asking the doctor to repeat himself. Eventually I had to ask mum to stop: she stomped off with a “well, excuse me”, then almost immediately came back.

The outcome of the appointment was that mum will probably need to have an ultrasound scan and, assuming that doesn’t show anything alarming, she’ll be prescribed tablets to calm an overactive bladder. (If it does show show something, there’s a long list of other tests and interventions that might be necessary, but I didn’t tell mum about that bit as it would only send her anxiety into overdrive.)

Then I had a very brief (96 seconds) call with a pharmacist about one of my new meds. (“Are you taking them?” Yes. “Are you getting any side effects?” No. “That’s OK then, bye.”) (OK, that’s exaggerated for comic effect, but not by much.)

Then I paid a bill online (eventually, once I got the site to stop declining my card for no real reason), watched a bit of tennis, made a meal plan and ordered some groceries (including coffee ice cream this time, to mum’s great relief), and finally cooked dinner (or at least put things on a baking tray and into the oven). The bean burgers, which mum quite enjoyed the first time we had them, have since had their chilli heat increased to a level where I can discern that they have chilli in them but mum gets halfway through and can’t cope. I got an extra half burger out of it, so I can’t really complain!

Finally, by way of non-sequitur conclusion, I remembered a little too late to include in yesterday’s post another highlight of yesterday’s Age UK visit: the rep asking me if I’m mum’s daughter, or perhaps her granddaughter? (We’ll ignore the misgendering here, as I hadn’t yet told her I’m not female.)

I know I look younger than I am – I was still occasionally getting asked for ID when buying alcohol around 18 months ago, despite being 20 years past the “if in doubt, check” age for retailers – but granddaughter?!

Finally, finally: I just saw a cat in our garden and, despite soft talking and pspspsing, I couldn’t persuade them to come and say hello, so now I’m sad. 😿

Tomorrow I’ll go back to my colourful big cat, which will have to be feline enough for me for now.