Extreme Knitting Redhead: New Year, new focus

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

New Year, new focus

Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you enjoyed the festive season and haven't put on too much weight. I have to confess to feeling somewhat rounder after all the scrumptious Christmas food.

I can't believe it's over 2 weeks since I last updated my blog but we've just been really busy and the time has flown by. I've got my first marathon of 2015 this weekend and the weather forecast is not looking good at the moment. I'm hoping it all changes by the time we get to Sunday!

What's been happening? I'll start with a brief recap of Christmas (and I use the word "brief" loosely). There was a large jigsaw which we started after lunch on Boxing Day. It's massive and took over half of the dining table. It was a Charity Shop find which was brand new and only cost £2.

Tilly helped enormously!

Our pretty Amaryllis flowered well and is still flowering with another flower spike growing before our eyes which is an added bonus.

I should have written about my Panettone beforehand so that people could try it for themselves. For anyone who has never heard of it, Panettone is that wonderfully decadent Italian bread bejewelled with candied peel and dried fruits that you see packaged in boxes before Christmas. I've been making my own for many years now and always use a recipe by Linda Collister whose recipes are always reliably good.

Often a recipe will tell you that you need a special Panettone tin which has really high sides (and costs a lot of money) but this is what Linda Collister suggests and it works a treat. In Italy bakers take great pride in producing the tallest Panettone.

You grease the inside of a loose-based tin and then line the sides with a double layer of grease-proof paper which protrudes about 3-4" above the top of the tin.

Then you add a double layer of silver foil around the outside of the tin and attach it to the foil with a paperclip.

When your Panettone has been proved and been shaped and placed in the tin it will be quite low down in the tin but after its final rising it will have come a long way up.

This is what it looks like when it's just come out of the oven

It's quite fragile whilst still warm and so you lay it on its side to cool and firm up.

This is what it looks like just before we attacked it. Oh my, it was gorgeous! We had it for breakfast for 3 days and then the remainder was used up in a bread pudding which was equally scrumptious - I can't think why we put on weight over Christmas!!!

Mike's given me permission to share his Christmas project on here. He decided that he wanted to do a portrait of me based on this photo of me sitting in a green chair (you need to scroll down the page a bit). He's been experimenting with oil painting for a few years now and he has a natural talent for drawing and painting and he's just getting better and better.

Here I am in a few stages. Each day he brought it into the lounge and we looked at it to see if it needed tweaking. I found it odd staring at myself but we both agreed that it's his best yet and I feel honoured to have been captured like this.

Thanks Mike xxxxx

I think that's enough for this post so in my next one I'll write about what I've been up to and my plans for 2015.

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Mum's Story

In 1997 my mother, then aged 81, had a series of minor strokes. Shortly after that we started to notice behavioural changes notably memory loss and confusion over everyday items. We thought it was just old age finally catching up with her. Then she started wandering and had violent mood swings. Although she already lived with us it became obvious that she couldn't be left alone for long and so I left my job to care for her. The next few years saw a gradual decline into the blackness that is 'vascular dementia'. My normally placid mum became violent and aggressive. She had psychotic incidents where she would see imaginary people (children hiding in her wardrobe, Russians sitting on the stairs, women stealing her clothes) and she would shout at them and sometimes throw things too. She was so convincing that we used to go and check that there wasn't anyone there! When my sister died mum did not know who Judy was or that she was her daughter. There came a point when I suddenly realised she no longer knew that I was her daughter and this was a terrible time for me. In the last 2 years that she lived with us, life for us all became almost unbearable as she needed 24 hour care - she couldn't be left alone at all because she would either wander off or hurt herself, she never slept for more than 30 minutes at a time during the night, she became incontinent and incapable of doing anything for herself. Finally my husband and I realised that we could no longer provide her with the care that she needed and she went to live in a special care home where the team did a splendid job caring for her in the last few months of her life. There she lived a zombified existence unaware of who she was, what she was or where she was. It was heartbreaking. She died in March 2005, the day after her 89th birthday.

Thank you for taking the time to read mum's story and I hope you'll dig deep and sponsor me using the link below to help find a way of beating this destructive disease.