Last minute

It is rapidly becoming the last minute. I am down to last minute meetings, last minute socialising, last minute packing, last minute shopping, last minute panicking, etc etc.

Today has mostly been about last minute hair dye, as I realised it must be almost a year since my mother slapped henna (I use Caca Rouge from Lush, and have done so for over ten years) all over my head and I propped myself up for several hours while the mud did its miracle thing on my hair.

With what feels like several tonnes of goop and clingfilm on my head at the moment, my neck is rather sore. That may have something to do with the killer upper body workout that Mark the Magician made me do this morning. His trainers matched the walls of the gym today. I was rather impressed, but I don't think it was intentional.

"Rather than mess about with more reps," he said, as I sipped water in a recovery break between push presses, "how about we just build up this weight to about that of a saddle?" This man has paid close attention to my goals, and I love him for it.

If I can now push 60lbs over my head three times, without dying immediately, hopefully I can avoid the shame of flinging Cowboy's saddle, forcefully and enthusiastically, into the side of my horse instead of over her back.

I've also ended up doing some last minute bonding with this little monster, who has spent the last nine months completely ignoring me.

She has finally realised that I will scratch her ears, rub her belly and bump heads with her at her every whim.

I'll even feed her. I'm that kind of cat person.

I think she might be a little sad when I leave, if she even notices, of course.

I'm not really going to miss her needle sharp claws being dug (with love) into my legs, arms, neck, feet, fingers, etc.

She can be a little over zealous with her affection.

She also likes to dribble on me when she's really enjoying the bonding session. Then she likes to shake her head and spray the dribble all over me, and whatever it is I've been doing whilst petting her. Thanks, Marmite...

You love her or you hate her. Her name really is appropriate.

Last minute home made gift wrapping card making cake baking efforts

I'm a bit of a last-minute person. I like to feel the pressure and the threat of the deadline, it gives me the adrenaline rush that I need to accomplish... anything. If I need to be productive and efficient, I need to be threatened by several deadlines to get it done.

At the weekend, I had nothing to do for the whole of Saturday. I could have done all of the things I needed to do with plenty of time to spare. Instead, I sat in my pyjamas and watched Heartland on Netflix while I knitted (and unravelled and knitted again). Heartland is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I'll happily stand up and say "Hi, I'm Bee and I am addicted to trashy Canadian TV shows about horses and life in the country for a not-so-teenage-any-longer girl. I am a Heartland-aholic."

Anyway. Sunday morning rolled around and I had an extra hour of sleep with the clocks going back, which has done me the power of good, because I don't sleep well at the moment and I was getting a bit behind. Then I had to jump out of bed and achieve things. I needed to be out of the door and on my way to my niece's first birthday party by 11.30am. I woke up at 8.30am. Lounged until about 9am. Ran to the shower to claim it before anybody else could (my days of sharing a house are numbered), and after a swift blowdry of my hair and some clothes thrown on, I sped to the kitchen.

I had to make a cake. It was for my brother, who can't really eat grains, or sugar, so cake made with normal flour is right out. This makes me sad, because he and I share a voracious love of cake. I had searched Wholefoods in Kensington for the wherewithal to make him a friendly chocolate cake, and finally had coconut flour and coconut oil and enough eggs to produce something for him.

As soon as I had got that in the oven, I made myself some apple and sultana porridge (that's oatmeal, Americans) and set about browsing Pinterest for some wrapping paper.

Being a bad aunty, I had not managed to get my niece a birthday card, nor wrapping paper for her presents. I was frankly a bit surprised I had managed to get her a present, but I'd had a burst of activity on Friday and picked up two lovely books - good thing I didn't get the xylophone I saw first, because my mother gave her a xylophone and it would have been awkward. I needed paper to wrap the books in, and I needed it fast. I usually wrap gifts in pages from old magazines, but decided my one year old niece might not appreciate pages from either the Physiotherapy journal Frontline, nor Western Horseman.

I soon found some suitably cheerful and colourful patterns, and put my shiny new laser printer to work producing several pages of a triangles pattern. A Google search gave me a customised "Keep Calm..." image for the front of her card. The only actual card I had in my supplies was a packet of file dividers in lovely colours, so I chopped the holes and the tabs off a couple of those, and stuck it all together. Not bad.

Couldn't find any sellotape, so resorted to the roll of glue dots that I had used for a scrapbook project for Cowboy over the summer, and glued my home made wrapping paper around the books. Lacking an envelope for the card, I found a roll of cooks' string in the kitchen and looped that around the present, and could wedge the card underneath that.

It sounds awful, I know, to have scraped together this thing for my brother's first born child, but I am a student with long distance flights to pay for, and wrapping gifts and buying cards is an expensive pastime these days.

Here's the end result:



I thought it was a fairly respectable effort, given my distinct shortage of resources, and it blended in well with the other presents at the party.

I managed to get the cake out of the oven and cover it in melted chocolate, slap some make up on, brush my hair and get out of the door bang on the dot of 11.30am, which is fairly miraculous. It was a lovely party.

Other things I've done recently include: eating too much cake, cooking a big batch of risotto, and staying in bed because it's cold outside.