Roasted Mediterranean veg and potatoes with panfried king prawns
I’m afraid today is one of those days where I just don’t have the energy to compose a whole post, so instead you get some random notes.
Despite it being nearly November, mosquitos are still about. I know this because one bit me on the knee overnight, and the itching has been driving me crazy all day.
We don’t have any insect bite relief cream, but a source online (unfailingly reliable, as we all know) suggested that baking soda can help as it neutralises the acid in an insect bite. We don’t have baking soda but we do have indigestion relief tablets, which I tried mixing with water and smearing the result over the bite. Amazingly, it sort of works.
Did you know that Mum has problems with headaches? Because she told me so roughly once every two minutes for the first couple of hours of the day. She later apologised for being so annoying, so all is forgiven.
I finally managed to do a bit of studying on one of the many OpenLearn courses I have saved. When I got to the end of my first course, I found a list of exercises “to discuss in class” about “events at your school”, so apparently the course was intended for people rather younger than me.
Mum recently received a letter from the company which she and my dad used to work for, promoting their charitable fund which makes grants to former employees and their children for things that improve quality of life. I would really like a riser-recliner armchair to replace the extremely uncomfortable orthopedic one I have on loan from the local NHS trust, and a grant would make that affordable.
I mentioned it to mum, and in response got confusion and a refusal to even think about it, because it would be a change.
Later, we started talking about Christmas, and mum instantly started panicking that she would “just mess it all up”. Nothing I said could convince her it would be OK – I offered to arrange everything, I offered to do whatever she wanted, I offered to not do it at all if she preferred, but the panic persisted. I don’t think even mum was really sure what she was panicking about.
I think I might need to speak to the mental health practitioner again about increasing mum’s dosage of anti-anxiety meds, as she’s exhausting me and it must be even worse for her.
Dinner was meant to be prawn laksa, from a kit1, but mum didn’t fancy it so I changed it to something I knew she would like. I added a tiny bit of chilli to the prawns, which mum didn’t notice (or if she did, she didn’t mention it), which to me made them particularly nice.
And that’s that. Goodnight.
- Or ‘kitten’, as my phone autocorrected it. No, I’m not eating kittens, you weird device. ↩︎
Is it pineapple sponge today? 