Vegetable noodle stirfry with plum and hoisin sauce

It’s been a long day today.

One of the good things about the “what’s happening tomorrow” whiteboard is that it tells mum that something is happening tomorrow. The bad thing, of course, is that it tells mum that something is happening tomorrow, and that means that there’s something to worry about.

I was therefore up and dressed by 9am, as mum complained of a headache and bellyache which weren’t due to anxiety because, as mum snapped at me several times, she wasn’t anxious. Just because she was asking for reassurance that it would be OK every few minutes didn’t mean she was worried at all. Got it?!

The cause of all this not-anxiety was the arrival, late in the morning, of two very nice men (possibly father and son, but I’m not assuming) to cut back the leylandii hedge that is intent on securing our privacy by blocking all the exits.

Hedge sorted, it was on to (for me) sorting out the renewal of my website domain registration. Unfortunately, every attempt to pay with my card resulted in an error message that mobile banking was unavailable, and my bank’s chatbbot is frustratingly useless (“here’s a link to the app you’re already using, goodbye”).

In a moment of irritation, I made the mistake of telling mum I was having problems with it, which resulted in mum coming in to check on my progress every couple of minutes. After the sixth or seventh time, mum asked if she had done something to upset me, and my “no, but I’m trying to concentrate!” came out far sharper than I intended.

Mum departed in a (not entirely unjustified) huff, which at least gave me a bit of peace to get the problem sorted and ensure that Pineapple Sponge will keep running for another year. By that time, mum had forgotten our brief moment of disharmony, thank goodness.

Tomorrow I’m heading into town, which has kicked off a new round of maternal anxiety: she doesn’t really want to come with me, but nor does she want to stay at home while I go out. Her preferred arrangement would, as always, be that I stay home with her and never leave, and the fact that I don’t want the same thing causes her some upset.

I’ll let you know tomorrow if I get to go out, and how early I’m woken up as a result of my plan to do so. 🥱

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Oops, nearly pushed publish before adding anything about dinner.

Not that it was terribly exciting: supermarket stirfry mix with boiled noodles and a sachet of plum and hoisin sauce that wasn’t quite as sweet as I feared. Mum enjoyed it enough that she had seconds, which almost never happens, so clearly something about it was good.