where I came from

Driving – not a strong point

kizzieh — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:32:02 +0000

I can’t drive – I’ve tried, I really have but I kept failing and then the money ran out. This is a point of extreme frustration for me – there is a load of things not accessible to me because of it.

But I know why…and I don’t mean to blame EVERYTHING on my parents but this is one I will.

Both of them are rubbish drivers.

I feel slightly more comfortable with father accept when he doesn’t look in his mirrors and nearly causes a crash. He is so lost in his own little world he doesn’t seem to notice traffic lights sometimes – or road signs for that matter. I am very shocked that he has only been caught speeding once. I was out with him once – he was teaching me to drive (SUCH a distressing event). He drove through a traffic light at a very busy roundabout missing another car by inches. Then we ended up on the M5..

But mother – oh god mother is in a different league altogether and she totally doesn’t get it. She drives very very slowly(she was once stopped by police for driving to0 slowly). She ponders which lane she should be and then starts panicking loudly – amid lots of beeps from cars because they can’t get into either lanes as my mother is between them. Then the car wavers as she works out what to do. She make noises of sheer panic going at busy roundabouts (ahhhhh! I can’t do it). She randomly stops on busy roads at rush hour. She makes me very very nervous. It is sometimes like a horror film. She is a very very nervous driver and it rubs off on her passengers and they shit themselves….

Sometimes I crack ( you are such a crap driver!) She gets all upset insisting she is great. Why then do I feel I need beta blockers on long journeys then?

So absolutely no demonstration growing up of decent driving. That is why I blame them.

Quote of the week

kizzieh — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:20:14 +0000

context: Bathroom is being decorated.

Mother: “oooh how exciting! Going to the bathroom with no raditor in it!!”

Bins and dishwashers – another domestic mindfield

kizzieh — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:55:34 +0000

Mother has bought a bin! Those who’ve read my earlier post ‘the absence of a bin’ will know how happy this makes me – doesn’t take much but bins in the kitchen are quite essential items and now I live in a house that has one. This is cause for a new blog post at long bloody last.

The bin is acceptable because it is from habitat. It looks stupid in the kitchen – its like those mock dustbin thingys where you have to pick the lid up. I’m not complaining though – well audibly anyway.

What i’m not happy about is the new dishwasher. In 25 years my parents have gone though about 5 or 6 dishwashers…i don’t think this is normal. Is this normal? Father refuses to follow the instructions on dishwashers and makes up his own mind how they should be used. He stacks them the way he wants to stack them. He also doesn’t believe in the rinsing thing – you know when you have to sort of rinse the plate to get all the foody bits off before putting it in? Well he doesn’t believe in this idea, thinks its stupid and puts it straight in. I can see his point – but I can also see that it is a machine and doesn’t function according to reason. So the dishwasher finishes its cycle and the plates are covered in dry foodie bits which father chooses to ignore as he stacks them away in the cupboard. I come along and wash up the plates in the sink. That is how the cycle works in this house.

I really would prefer to wash everything in the sink – at least you know that something is clean – I worked so hard getting them to buy a plate stacker for the draining board ( they didn’t have one of those either) and now a dishwasher which father will now turn into a useless piece of equipment has just been fitted.

Shouting vs talking

kizzieh — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:53:16 +0000

Nobody seems to talk to each other in this house – they shout at each other instead through different rooms. My mother actually screeches. She has the most amazing lungs. She will never walk upstairs or in to another room, she screeches instead. What makes things worse is she is actually quite deaf so if you answer(this involves shouting at the top of your voice) you have to answer several times and eventually go and talk to her. it annoys me very much.

This is a four bedroom Victorian terraced house. I am living in the loft conversion. I am amazed that i haven’t lost my voice yet…

Foodstuffs

kizzieh — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:50:12 +0000

Hello back again – I must apologise for the utterly long gap between my last post and this one. I went on holiday to India and came back with absolutely no motivation to do anything whatsoever. The motivation is coming back now in dribs and drabs…thank god.

On returning home I found that mother had gone diet cholesterol obsessed-mad. The fridge now consists of skimmed milk, extra extra light Flora, lentils, vegetables and..well that’s about it.

So off I go to the supermarket to buy some normal food – I hate all this extra extra light stuff – it tastes disgusting and I’m sure there’s something horrible in there replacing the fat that’s supposed to be there. Get home put it in the fridge. The next day I go to the fridge, to get some cheese and find that it’s ALL GONE. What I hadn’t realised that whereas mother’s cholesterol is high, father on the other hand is celebrating the fact that his cholesterol rating was a lot lower ( a 5. something? I have no idea about these ratings but apparently that’s good) so has decided to celebrate this by indulging in lard.

So he eats all mine.

Now this is one of the problems with living with your parents rent free. If this had happened in a shared house I would have got quite cross. I’m not precious about much stuff but if someone eats all my cheese then this is worthy of a big row. But when you’re not paying rent or bills and living in somebody else’s house as an adult it seems abit pathetic to throw a fit complaining that owner of said house has eaten some of your cheese…

The absence of a bin

kizzieh — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:10:31 +0000

I haven’t blogged for a while because other than being slack and lazy I’ve been flat sitting for some friends. They live in a beautiful one bedroom flat and I’ve been having and amazing time having space to MYSELF. When you have to move back in with your parents, getting your own space for a while is absolute bliss. It’s turned me into a hermit actually – I don’t want to go out – want to stay in the lovely flat. I go on holiday in a couple of days for a fortnight and then I’m back with the parents again. That’s gonna be a bit gross.

So anyway, I went up to dinner with the parents today…which gave me some inspiration for this blog. Washing up afterwards I realised I’d forgotten to tell you about my mother’s thing with the bin.

The thing is, my parents don’t have a bin in the kitchen because my mother does not want one. She does not want one because she believes bins in kitchens are unhygienic. I do not know where on earth she’s got this warped logic from – I mean surely, a having a bin to put rubbish in is more hygienic than not having one – so the rubbish just sits on the side? what? what? what?

There is a makeshift bin which is actually any plastic bag you can find which hangs on a cupboard door. This gets knocked whenever you open a one of the draws next to the cupboard door. This is extremely irritating because it does not work. What is even more ridiculous is that being environmentally aware my parents take reusable bags to the supermarket. This is great in terms of saving plastic bags but not when it comes to saving their kitchen. If there are not plastic bags around what are we going to do with all this rubbish?
I think the best course of action is to get back from holiday and buy a bloody bin. Just stick it in the kitchen -’not liking bins’ is not going to be acceptable anymore.

Getting round to things…

kizzieh — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:29:04 +0000

One problem with this house seems to be the in ability to get round to the simplest of tasks. I’m quite amazed at how the kitchen has managed to function so long without adequate lighting, a proper grill or a secure back door.

About three years ago the grill pan of my parent’s new cooker disappeared – apparently ‘something happened to it’ (couldn’t get anything more specific than that I’m afraid) so it was replaced by the old grill pan. The problem with it is though that is doesn’t actually fit properly. When making toast you have to force the pan into the grill and it often slants upwards which results in half burnt toast.

Then there are the lights that stand in the centre that are all quite dull and seem to have been designed to focus on one place – which is the floor. You can’t really see what you’re doing after dark when washing up in the sink.

The back door however is the most worrying. There are three key holes. Two of the keys have been lost so only the top one is used and a shelf bracket is wedged under the bottom of the door for an extra security measure. . I have tried pointing all these things out – that it might be useful to buy a NEW grill pan so we can stop burning things; how it maybe a good idea to get a locksmith so we can use all the locks to make the actual house secure and the lighting…well actually they don’t agree about the lighting but the truth is they already know. There domestic capabilities are somewhere on the floor.

The thing that worries me is how much influence this is having on me. This is my first post in two and a half weeks…

The Roux Sauce debacle

kizzieh — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:20:01 +0000

Father is making Lasagne. He is quite good at Lasagne actually but he does have issues with Roux sauce (or is it Béchamel? anyway). He doesn’t like making the cheesy sauce because it gets lumps in it and he panics. Make it slowly I say, add the liquid in gradually. So the butter goes in, then the flour, then all the milk and… oh look! Lots of lumps! So father stirs and stirs ..’Kizzie! the lumps! They won’t go away!’ The lumps refuse to go – they are not blending in with the sauce so matter what. I suggest he gets a sieve and pour out the lumps…’oh good idea, thanks’. Off the goes to the sink, pours the sauce into the sieve, the sauce goes into the sink, down the plughole and there are the lumps in the sieve starring at him. Oh Shit. I put my apron on.

kizzieh — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:24:23 +0000

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The power of the ground coffee bean

kizzieh — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:56:57 +0000

I think father has a very unique OCD –as he seems to actually want to spread mess rather than clear it up. The coffee situation in this house is a classic example. The parents are big fans of freshly ground coffee but I’m sorry to say, it is actually the bane of my life. I have lost count of the amount of times I’ve tried to instruct father on how to open a bag of coffee – at the top, not in the middle with a knife. If you open a packet of fresh coffee in the middle with a knife it will spill everywhere – if you so much as walk past it. This doesn’t seem to go in. Ever. Father just does not understand the power ground coffee. After father has made a caffetier of coffee the kitchen will be covered in the stuff and it will stay there. It will be in the sink, all over the floor and surfaces. The cloths are all unusable as they are covered in them. There are little coffee bits that are years old integrated between the floor tiles because the clever thing about coffee granules is that they never ever go away. Not in this kitchen. There seems to be a layer of fresh coffee over everything. You have to be quite careful in pouring them down the sink I find – I’ve lived in houses with coffee drinkers and it doesn’t happen with them so why here?

It would be nice for just once to open the fridge and not see any loose coffee in there..to be able to wash up without having to wash the sink first. Or father to open the coffee bag at the top like every other functioning human being .This will never happen though..I think that if you reach the age of 65 and you still can’t work out how to open a bag of coffee it’s never really going to happen is it? He does make nice coffee though.