Thread 13 - TalkLair: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.”

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 12).

Looks like spring has sprung! Tulips, apple blossom and early hay fever are upon us. In the TalkLair, we remain hunkered down keeping cosy and warm, because "something something 'til May is out". The hearth is glowing, the walls covered in dubious artwork, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them).

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Blimey, @Kucinghitam that sounds like an absolute nightmare. The siblings need their heads knocking together. It must be really tough watching all this play out here all the while knowing that your own parents are having similar issues in a far away country.

@Gonners, snap, my mother was carted off too, though at a much earlier age, when I was 16. I stopped communicating with her during the last 25 years of her life and was relieved when she died as it meant I no longer had to dread that she might try and get in touch.

I feel for you, Kuc, but it strikes a chord for me in the opposite direction. I feel like I'll be like your FiL in a few years time, and my DS will be coming up from London and going through boxes of files in the attic...

Ah, but will you be still buying more and more shit, even whilst your DS is trying to get rid of the existing shit?

I doubt it; I don't buy much. I did buy a cheap cordless vac a while back to run over the bedroom carpet.

Blimey, you've really been through it, Kuc and I don't envy you one bit. My dad's nearly 80, but apparently fully compos. My stepmam broke her good hip last year and they cashed in part of their pensions to have the bad one done.

On Monday, she fell in hospital and broke her good femur. My sister (nurse) thinks that she may not walk again, which is the exact opposite of why she had the cursed op in the first place.

if that's the case, he's not going to be able to look after her.

Sympathies to all those with problematic Aged Parents. I was fortunate in the sense that all my parents and in-laws dropped off the twig before we got to that stage and that both my husbands were only children. I worry about myself a bit. I'm 74 now, and seem to be in good health mentally and physically, and DH is almost 82 but is doing well. None of my kids live near me - the nearest is 400 miles away and the other two are across the Atlantic. DH only has his DD who hates me and we almost never see, and his DGD lives about a thousand miles away. Essentially we're on our own.

Slightly younger than you, but feel much the same, Brit. And it's not helped by the fact that every Netflix or C4 series you watch, the detective has an ageing parent whose eccentricities cause all kinds of problems! 😃

So sorry to hear about your poor stepmum @SinnerBoy That just sounds so awful, both for her and your dad. I hope they come up with a good solution.

So many elderly parent challenges! Mine is 98 and has had enough although she does want to live until the election (her plans to game the system with a postal vote were abandoned when she decided that she likes going to vote). This house is full of stuff but I’m more to blame for that I think and I’m certainly to blame for buying more stuff and not sorting anything out. I really need to get my act together.

This getting old malarkey is rubbish. I see headlines saying things like 'Make these life changes right now if you want to live to be 100!' and I look around me at what elderly family and neighbours are going through and think 'JFC, no way, why would I want to do that?'.

It is remarkably difficult to get rid of Stuff. I look around this house and wonder what I'd like to get rid of, but most of it is books and I find it very hard to part with books. To be honest, if DH died and I was on my own I would probably junk the lot and move to a small apartment in NJ not too far from my son (deffo not with him - we'd drive each other nuts in short order). I would miss Maine and miss my friends here, but I doubt I'd move back to the UK. The government would take a very large chunk of money from my estate in inheritance tax, and I'd rather my kids had it - in fact my autistic eldest, whose share is left in trust with his siblings as trustees, is going to need every penny of his share.

Thanks, Kuc - she's had it pinned now and is recovering. Really, she didn't need a general, she had both hips down with an epidural. I'm not sure what's going on in terms of physio, but she was supposed to be up and about on her new hip.

I've got a couple of mates who have had pinned femurs and even for fit young men, it's hard.

I'm so sorry for the problems with beloved aged Ps. I'm one of the lucky/unlucky ones whose parents shuffled off far too young (43 and 56) for that to be an issue. I wish they had hung around far longer but I see that living to a good old age can often be living to a bad old age in terms of so much.

@Britinme I hope I haven't shared this with you before, but I saw it at the weekend and thought of you, then thought "have I seen this before? have I shared this before?" I don't think I have, but if I have, huge apologies but my brain is very foggy of late! SO! I like to imagine you living somewhere like this and I will, forever after, imagine you and your DH in that glorious screened porch (picture 6).

That’s a fantastic space!

Weirdly our previous home had a space like that but this one doesn’t. However the old one was where you had to get in the car to go anywhere outside the garden, and an acre and a half of garden was just too big to manage in the end. Sad but true.

An acre and a half is big. I've only properly learned about acerage (sp?) from watching Escape to the Country where people are often after big gardens or some land and when they see what an acre or more is nine times out of ten they are taken aback. I, of course, due to watching far too much property porn, am no longer surprised.

It's "acreage" ... which looks insane but is no dafter than acre. The temptation to pronounce it "ak-ree-aaahge" is immense, though!

Improbably for suburban London, when I was little we lived in a house with a third of an acre garden (I think, it’s possible it was a quarter). Next door one side had a bigger but not that much bigger garden (without a fence between them and us) and next door the other side had a much bigger garden (two thirds of an acre which included an orchard). We had the run of the orchard (there was a gap in the hedge) so I have better idea of what an acre and a half is than many of the more confused Escape to the Country househunters. A third of an acre is more than enough for a bit of a wild space, a nice pretty garden area and a decent size vegetable garden. And it’s lots of work.

Yes, we had half an acre with the giant Victorian villa my parents bought in the 70s, and they spent most of their time rotavating, leaving my brother and me to run completely feral.

Minimum lot size in the small town where we lived was an acre and a half once you were out of the town centre, because town water and sewerage didn't go as far as our house so you had to have a well and a septic field, and of course they had to be separated by a certain amount. The well was at the bottom of the driveway and the septic field was behind the house. We had a generator because when the power went out, as it occasionally did in the winter, we had to be able to run the well pump as well as the heating. We backed on to seven acres of common land, which was woodland. It all sounds beautiful, and it was indeed a nice place to live, and when I was younger and had more energy I enjoyed growing veggies and keeping up the garden, but eventually I could see that we needed to be in town and with a much smaller plot, so we moved about twelve miles into Portland. Now we're half a mile from the supermarket and a bookshop and a few other shops, and one short block from a bus stop into the city centre, and three miles from the doctor. Much better.

That does look lovely. As long as someone else is looking after it all, though.

We are very luckily situated at the moment, with plenty of outdoor space, yet within walking distance of everything we need. I love living in an old market town and feel like it's where I belong.

My outdoor space is a balcony/terrace space which is far bigger than a bog standard balcony hence why we call it a terrace despite it being on the first floor. It is basically built on the roof of the extention below. I feel very lucky to have such a large outside space. Francis loves it out there and he loves showing off when I go out into "his space", so that makes both of us happy. He's being an absolute dote at the moment and I love him more than ever.

Oh and thank you @Gonners . I realised afterwards that of course I'd got it wrong because acre should be acr etc not ace etc. By then I was too lazy to figure it out so just left my ignorance for all to wonder at!

Remember those five-minutes baguettes? I've been having another go. I tweaked the amount of water (really the only variable), and for one baguette, 150 g of flour seems right. So, by weighing the water in, I started with 112 g, then 105 g, and today 106 g, and that seemed the give a texture similar to that in the video. And I've reduced the cooking time down to 18 minutes from 25, which is quite a lot. But his baguettes were overdone in the first place, IMO.

Sounds good. Did you take a picture?