Come and tell us your dull and unexciting news 32: Calmly through the day

[MissConductUS]

I've started a new one. Please join us and share the boring and mundane things happening in your world. It will be calming for all.

Here is a link to the prior thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5148913-come-and-tell-me-your-dull-and-unexciting-news-31-calmly-through-the-day

Welcome to all regulars, lurkers, and new contributors! Everyone is welcome to join.

Note there is one minor change to the thread title. "tell me your dull news" has been changed to "tell us...". I thought it was more in keeping with the spirit of the thread.

Made it to the seals on Horsey beach, baby seal season. Weather was a bit overcast but still lovely to walk along and see the baby seals and seals going in and out of water on their flippers. Had starbucks coffee on way back and just had a turkey and veg curry.

Penguinsn, what a great afternoon! How nice to be able to see the seal pups. I've seen lots of seals here, but never pups, nor seals coming out of the water.
Miss, we must've been typing at the same time. Your meal sounds awesome.

Lazy afternoon here with all of us napping. 👍👍👍
Baby just woke and instead of crying to be picked up, "told me" by baby talk (babbling).

Merry Christmas all! Had a lovely Christmas Day at home, just the 6 of us, then went to my folks yesterday for round 2 - 23 people at the table!
Going to do some clearing up now, and then going to a National Trust property for a walk and their light trail.

Deathray, I am officially a fan of the Victoria sponge cake now. I wish they were easier to find where I am. My regular bakery doesn't make them.

Havoc, it is so interesting when they start trying to talk. I took a course in developmental psycholinguistics at uni and it was one of my favorite subjects.

Those are beautiful beach pictures, Penguinsn. DH and I were just talking about going on a beach holiday next summer, probably back to the place we had our honeymoon and took the kids when they were younger, Block Island. They have seals there too, and the seafood is fabulous.

DH has ordered an Apple TV streaming device for our home theater system. Upgrading everything seems to have become a project for him. He also wants to get a new sofa and loveseat for that room, so we'll probably go shopping for those later today or sometime this weekend. The sofa and loveseat we have in there now are about 20 years old and not as comfortable as they used to be.

And speaking of wildlife, I was in the kitchen yesterday and noticed a flock of wild turkeys running around in the woods on the other side of the stone wall, so I went out in the front yard and took pictures. There were about 20 of them. It's good to see that they're surviving the winter so well.

MissConductUS; They're dead easy to make. It's just equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour.

I was just going to say that but @sueelleker beat me to it! 🍰

Sounds like everybody had lovely Christmases, ours was lovely and very quiet. DH made dinner for us (he inherited excellent cooking skills from his DM, I inherited very poor ones from mine) which was really good. DD, in typical teenage fashion (in spite of special needs), did not dress all day. DB and SIL are on their way to visit shortly. They live abroad and haven’t seen DB since September and SIL since last Christmas. Looking forward to seeing them.

@MissConductUS yes I am Welsh, educated through medium of Welsh til I was 16 but don’t get much chance to speak it any more. Still reasonably fluent when I do get a chance to use it though. It’s amazing what the brain can drag from forgotten depths when it needs to!

@sueelleker @HelenaJustina @MissConductUS

That's pound cake, then. That's the old-fashioned recipe:
pound of sugar, pound of butter, pound of flour, pound of eggs.
If anyone makes one could they post their tried and true recipe? I've googled some in the past, but I don't recall that comparison. I'm quite curious to try baking one.

This is a Victoria sponge cake recipe though here its often with strawberry jam and fresh cream in the middle, sometimes with fresh strawberries or similar, sometimes not.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/victoriasponge13555

Good to hear people had nice Christmases.

DH has gone to France now for a few days to see his Mum and his aunt and his brother and family and some friends and the rest of us are here to be with DS. Floof was a little put out but he's now had 2 tunas and a plate of turkey as well as his cat biscuits, cuddles from DD and I, the heater, his chair, games and new boxes and he's a happy boy.

I got a Sainsburys order, put things in the kitchen then within 0.1 seconds DS was there. DD checked with me what I had ordered for DS and seemed happy with it. Been working today from home. Finished the turkey today.

Thanks MissC Love the wildlife photos.

Good to hear you had a good Christmas Helena and Shoes

Thanks, Penguinsn. I've seen that one, but hadn't tried it. ☺️

This is a kids version in mini fairy cakes with icing and sprinkles. DS loves these.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/fairycakes_93711

Penguinsn, oh, cute! Thanks for posting.

Hope everyone had a peaceful Christmas - it all sounds lovely!
@HelenaJustina I love a NT property at Christmas - went to Tredegar House before Christmas.
We had family for Christmas and I was working today so just catching up on the Christmas tv after work.

It is easily confused, but pound cake (known as madeira cake in the UK) is much heavier. A sponge is the weight of two eggs in flour, butter and sugar, so it's much lighter.

The cake is separated into two sandwich tins and baked for 25 minutes. Buttercream or jam for filling.

Myrtle, thanks for that info. I will try my hand at making one in the new year.

All over the city today for multiple errands. Will be busy tonight as need to do a Costco run for a few things and decorate for baby's birthday.

Thanks, everyone for the Victoria sponge cake recipes and tips. I don't think I'm going to do anymore baking until after the kitchen remodel, which starts a little over a week from now. DH and I are going through the cabinets today, sorting what can be binned and putting the rest in boxes, which will have to go into the living room.

DS is spending the weekend in NYC with a friend of his from uni who has never been there before, so we're on our own until tomorrow. One of the cats is distressed that he can't find DS and keeps looking in his room for him.

As part of his home theater upgrade, DH convinced me that we needed to replace the couch and loveseat in our family room, so we looked online and then went to our favorite discount furniture store and picked one out. It's on us to get rid of the old sofa and loveseat, so DH has emailed the builder to see if she can take them in the construction dumpster she'll have at our house. This is the set we selected. It's very comfortable and I love the color.

https://www.mybobs.com/furniture/living-room/living-room-sets/p/20083979

DH made a mini-pizza for us to share for dinner last night. It's raining here, thank goodness it's not more snow.

Lovely pics of turkeys in the snowy woods, MissC.
Your new furniture looks very nice, as does that pizza.

The funny angle of the December afternoon sun means it shines straight into my eyes when I sit on my couch between 2:30 and 3:30ish. I'm spending a very lazy day here, hence noticing the sun problem. It won't be an issue tomorrow as the clouds are to return.

We're still eating Christmas leftovers here. I won't have to cook again til New Years Eve at the rate we're plodding through it all.

Lovely to have new furniture MissC looks great.

DH is away for 5 days now and Floof has been really ill, suspect Christmas overeating. He's getting better and DH has been asking for regular updates on the cat he didn't want but is besotted with and DD went to check 6 times in the night on him. He's with me and been rolling over, purring and gaming again but only a little food and drinking ok today so getting there. Previous day he was sick about 10 times. Wasn't sure if we would need vets but he started to revive overnight. Suspect it was the turkey on top of his tuna and cat biscuits and he had more tuna than normal too. They are quite fragile compared to size for diet.

@Penguinsn

Aww so glad the Floof is better!

Our cats (RIP) used to go mental for turkey for bout 3 days and then wanted absolutely no turkey and would look at us as if we were mental!

Like the rest of us I guess they wanted to return to normal.

Love that furniture MissC it looks similar to the ones we picked in the summer. Our feline overlords had well and truly scratched the heck out of one arm in particular of our old ones. We bought lots of things for them to scratch on and the cardboard ones are preferred.
I am quite glad we ate up our left over beef in a couple of days. We do have lots of different cheeses but they will soon go and we can get back to our regular meals.
Hope Floof continues to recover, I think it can be tempting to give cats too much rich food when we are having it but I know my vet tells me off for this. One of mine is off his normal food and I wonder if we have done the same. Keeping a close eye on him as he seems otherwise well.

Penguinsn, I'm so sorry to hear that Floof has been under the weather, but I'm glad he's improving. Cats do tend to have temperamental stomachs. Ours regularly overeat too. By the way, your husband had no choice about becoming besotted. Floof cast the kitten love spell on him when they met.

Dandy, we have lots of cardboard scratchers for ours. They are going to be quite distressed when the old sofa and loveseat are removed on Monday and nothing to replace them until Tuesday, as they sleep on those pieces every night. Of course the whole kitchen remodel is going to be very traumatic for them.

Math, I checked the Bob's Furniture website and they have stores in Chicagoland. I love the everyday low prices (i.e., no phony sales) and no pressure salespeople. Their mattresses are really nice if you ever need new bedding.

We went for drinks with our neighbours yesterday afternoon and quite a few of the other neighbours came. We live in a group of houses that were built at the same time in the 90s. A lot of the original owners are still living here so it's nice that we have a ready made community. Everyone is having their windows redone and we compared quotes and companies.

DH was reminded by a casual line in a TV show yesterday that he had bought me flowers for Christmas Day and left them in the garden. They're not too badly wilted 🤣

He also wrote his Christmas cards and brought up the Quality Street. It was almost as if we had a mini Christmas Day all over again.

Today he has been making trifle from scratch, including an egg custard. He really is lovely but I think he makes things much too hard for himself.

Thanks for the kind messages re Floof Death, Dandy and MissC He's definitely perked up today again, at 6am he was on my headboard trying to roll over so I got up rather than getting a 8kg cat on my head. He walked over to his game so we played for 10 mins. Then he went over to wake DD up by bashing her with his big white paw and she emerged half asleep at 6.15am and sleep brought him tuna which he ate a little of. He's ate more since and been cuddly and wanting games. DH is back tomorrow. Floof is currently waiting where DH sleeps.

Hope your cats will be OK with the kitchen work MissC Floof and Silkiecat both liked kitchen works as Floof added a couple of staff members and also he liked to inspect at night. Silkiecat was too nervous to be there in the day but would spend an hour inspecting and purr.

Been working from home today and again tomorrow then NYD is a bank holiday. Has anyone got any NYE plans? DD has a party. DH will have driven back from France and also needs to pick DD up from that party so doubt we will do anything other than a meal here and prosecco.

Nice to have a neighbour's party. We have a few of those round here but tend to be in early January rather than in December for ones around now.

Glad Floof is on the mend Penguinsn
Myrtle that reminds me of when I was young and we’d go to neighbours at Christmas, we were in a set of 4 houses and kids of similar ages (and one elderly couple who were lovely), such a lovely memory so thank you!

We are still in a bit of a post-Christmas haze here. DH not back in work til Thursday and we are attempting to eat all the ‘bits’ before then. Had tea of cold turkey, salad stuff and chips. Was very tasty. DH has also declared he’s not eating any more chocolate so I will bravely soldier on alone, trooper that I am 😁.

DH has also declared he’s not eating any more chocolate so I will bravely soldier on alone, trooper that I am 😁

It's a tough job but someone's got to do it.