Last year I made a load of game pie filling – it was staggeringly good. I froze it in individual foil dishes, my intention being to top each one, in due course, with a Stilton and suet crust. However, as some of you might recall, I wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders last year, and a lapse of attention caused me to fail to close the freezer properly – with predictable results. I got to eat just one portion (served in a ring of cheesy mash), the rest went in the bin along with everything else that had been thawed and refrozen several times before I realised my error.
Month: November 2014
FreeWheel adapter and Quickie Ti update…
Been playing with my new toy again, and still impressed with it. I’ve not used it outdoors yet, it’s too wet and I’m feeling too crappy, but as per my first impressions, even indoors and on carpet, it’s much easier to push, and faster.
My Quickie Ti and FreeWheel adapter…
Pretty much a basket case after fitting the FreeWheel gizmo yesterday. Not that it’s hard – it’s actually quite simple – but my leg took against it in a big way and, despite pushing my luck with Oramorph, and taking very great care not to bang it, it was agonisingly painful. Oddly, this morning, it’s less painful than normal and I’m trying very hard to keep it that way.
One major gripe. The US is one of only three countries still clinging to the outdated Imperial system of measurements. Considering that the FreeWheel needs several Imperial (in this case fractions of an inch), Allen keys, I wasn’t best pleased to see, in the installation instructions, the words “not included”. Why the bloody hell not? The thing cost me £350 – they can’t afford to include 3 Allen keys which, at trade prices, cost coppers each? Sod that!
Getting a quart into a pint pot…
As of next week I shall have 4 wheelchairs in use – and room for only 2. Plus a Class 3 scooter, currently unused.
I have a Quickie Ti (titanium-framed rigid chair), which I’m converting into a trike with a FreeWheel kit (coming tomorrow), a Quickie Life (custom-built folder), a Shoprider Lugano midwheel-drive powerchair – my main chair – and a Betterlife Aries, a very basic, rear-wheel drive, powerchair, which I’ve just put back into service after discovering the Lugano is incompatible with taxis – the midwheel configuration stops it going up the ramp as when the front casters are on the ramp, the drive wheels come off the ground. A longer, shallower, ramp is the answer, but that’s out of my control, or being allowed to take a run at the ramp, and let momentum carry me past the critical point, but the driver was convinced I’d overshoot and wreck his car!
Spicy Vegetable Soup Again…
I made a version of this some time back – it was horrible! I used an ingredient I’d not tried before – frozen soya beans. Big mistake. This time I’m sticking with well-tried ingredients and, with that end in view, I made this soup yesterday and wrote it up.
And then, this morning, I realised that with this post, I’d already addressed that error and completely forgotten about it. Ironic, really, as I wrote that as a test of my memory.
However, given what it cost me in pain to make this yesterday (my sodding GP won’t comply with my surgeon’s instruction to increase my morphine and get my pain under control), and given that it’s a pretty damned good vegetarian version, I’m letting this post stand as it’s simpler than the one linked to above. Substantially different too.
What the hell is Twitter doing now?
Seriously, Twitter, WTF are you up to? Do you even know?
Of late you’ve deleted all my DMs except for a few apparently random threads – lots of people complained about that, not just me so it must have been general.
One leg, three wheels…
As regular readers might know, my right leg, which has made my life a pure misery for the past few years (and especially this year and last), is scheduled for amputation next year (don’t have a date yet and I wish they’d hurry up!). For a while there, when the end was in sight, the pain was easier to bear. Now it’s not, it’s getting worse by the day – I just want it gone!
This will, naturally enough, present some problems as, since the crisis that put me in hospital in early 2013 (if you missed it I almost starved to death – anorexia, plus vomiting and diarrhoea, being symptoms of my then diagnosed, but kept secret by idiot doctor, Addison’s Disease), I’ve been very weak. I lost 35kg, much of it muscle mass, and never got it back (though, thanks to the steroid treatment for Addie’s, I have got fatter!).
It’s all gone bit pear-shaped…
In terms of travel, that is.
(NB: I wrote this over two days. If you come across a discontinuity anywhere, that’s why.)
On a more immediate note I started this yesterday (Monday), and it’s now Tuesday, late morning, and things are pretty scary. I just can’t function at all. I’m trying to finish this but it’s taken me hours to add a final couple of hundred words – I keep drifting off and my breathing is very poor. It’s not often my condition frightens me, but it does today. I might have said that – I know I typed it somewhere this morning – I’m just too exhausted to re-read this to try and find it. Apologies if it’s here twice.
The rip-off of the disabled community is a national scandal…
And no, I don’t mean by this egregious government – some people have been at this far longer than they have. Being disabled can be viciously expensive.
Contemplating my upcoming new career as a one-legged wheelie, I’m looking at equipment I’ll need like, for example, a transfer board for facilitating moving, as it might be, from bed to wheelchair.
Today, so help me god, there will be soup!
It should have happened yesterday, but I was a basket case (it would happen more often if my GP would stop dicking about!).
I’ve been up since 05.30. Breathing while in bed is, increasingly in the early mornings, a luxury that eludes me. I can’t breathe lying down so have to sleep sitting up. Now that fails me, so I have to get up. To say I’m pissed off is a massive understatement! OK, I can breathe better sitting bolt upright in front of my computer, but I should have been in bloody bed, and with the right drugs I could have been.
So, to while away the time until the Observer put its foodie mag online, I cobbled up the baseline recipe for my soup (details will follow):-
Ron's Rants... 