Wednesday 5th July 2023

Since the London Olympics in 2012, I have blogged at least once a day, pretty much every day since.

I have blogged about my life.

Our life.

Lives of friends and family.

Mum has gone, Jools's Dad has gone.

Jen's Mum has gone.

Meg has gone.

A few years ago, I was on operations and travelling hither than thither, even work sounded exciting: airports, hotels, restaurants, deadlines.

And then I became an auditor, travel was less.

Stress was much less.

Thankfully.

But since September 2019, life has been pretty stable.

I travelled to Ireland for work in May, I am due to travel to Denmark at the beginning of September and Porto at the end of that month, and maybe the South of France too. But between, I work from home, I look after the cats, prepare dinner, and at weekends either churchcrawl of go chasing orchids.

Rinse and repeat.

Is there any point in blogging every day now I am home for the next nine weeks, working?

I don't even chase every orchid species in the county now, just most of them.

Do you, dear reader, get bored?

I do sometimes, writing the same things day after day after day. Maybe I should just write when stuff happens, or something inspires me to write?

As for Wednesday.

Well.

The highlight yesterday was making ciabatta loaves for dinner.

Jools had bought a mix a week or so back, that all you had to do was add water, mix and let rise. How hard could it be to make my own from scratch?

Not that hard, but time consuming. I didn't have over 12 hours to allow the starter to, start, so I made it and put it in the kitchen window where the sun fell on it, speeding things up I thought.

Then after four hours, added to the rest of the ingredients, mixed and left.

Mixed and left.

Mixed and made into loaves.

The recipe said the dough would be "wet".

No kidding!

I used an oiled pallet knife to mix, shaped into two loaves, placed on floured baking parchment and instead of letting it rest further, just put in the oven.

And what I got was two, irregular loaves, not good looking loaves, but with the Caprese for dinner, they were perfect.

Or one was.

The second we would have Thursday.

I sliced the tomatoes, the cheese. Seasoned, put on balsamic and oil.

Poured wine.

Yummy.

Work is best left unspoken about, instead, the crack of thunder at five, the only one within a hundred miles, and right above our house. The storm radar agreed. Then the rain fell. And fell.

In the garden, the ox-eye daisies are going to seed, and I think about my next move.....