Beads, Ironing and Illness.

Saturday and my poor sod of a husband (hereby known as PS) brings tea, Abbie brings toast, no butter, just toast, but she's 8 not quite 9 and toast with no butter is good for the diet. Its made quite, quite obvious that today I am going to have to do the bloody ironing. It's been coming for a while, little hints from the PS about no shirts and worse no pants. There are 3 ironing baskets in our bedroom and he make a point of tripping over them most days with large amounts of huffing and puffing and grunts to make the point.

So anyway, having got the kids up, showered and dressed because they have an all day rehearsal for Aladdin with their drama club, breakfasted and teeth cleaned, I ring to check on the rehearsal time and there is no rehearsal, it's next week, ok so I'm a useless social secretary but then again it is only 9.15am on a Saturday morning and both my kids are showered, dressed, fed and watered.

So this ironing, it sits at the bottom of the bed, slowly multiplying and looking at me, it gets riffled though everyday by the PS in the faint hope of finding something to wear. I fold and tidy it most days, and add to it at least 3-4 times a week but theres never a damn thing there worth wearing.

I spend 4 hours bloody ironing, all sodding morning, and it's done, I'd rather clean the oven or defrost the freezer than do the bloody ironing. It will sit now, around the arms and back of the sofa like a trophy, won at the ironing olympics for the next 3 days so that it can be noticed by all and sundry that I have done the bloody ironing and the baskets go back upstairs till next months bloody ironing session.

The PS is ill, he's got a sore throat, hacking cough, headache and general lethargy, I gave him paracetmol and cough mixure and lunch then he went back to bed, he's like a barking bear with a sore head so I went to the shed.

I'm on pink beads at the moment. It's hard getting a good vibrant pink but I've found it so I'm making pink beads in their hundreds, actually I'm exagerating I've made about 15 but it feels like hundreds. Since I forgot to dip my mandrels last time I worked I have to do it now. When you make a bead, you make it on a mandrel, a stainless steel rod which is dipped into a pot of bead release stuff which is a bit like grey sludge. I do them all at once now days. it needs a good shake before use and I used to give it a shake dip a mandrel, lid back on, dry mandrel in flame, make bead, shake, dip, dry make bead, etc. etc. until the occasion when I forgot to screw the lid back on and gave it a shake and my life stopped before me as the entire contents of this £11 pot of grey sludge emptied itself all over the shed, all over me and all over everything in the shed. If that isn't bad enough its the only pot of bead release I have and theres an inch left in the bottom, and it costs £11 a tub plus £2 postage so there I am scraping it off my jeans with the trusty pallette knife back into the pot. I'm down on the floor on my knees dipping my finger into the grey sludge scooping it back into the pot, wiping it off the storage boxes into the pot, if I'd had a straw I'd have been sucking it up back into the pot, you get the picture, no sludge, no beads. So nowdays I dip all my mandrels in one go and either leave them to dry or dry them in the flame before I start to melt.

6 nicely pink beads and 2 rather unusual creamy, greeny, browny ones and its dinner time. Toad in the hole and bread and butter pudding yum.