The Bluestocking women's Pub- spring is sprunging and MN's name generator can do one!

[lcakethereforeIam]

Welcome to the Bluestocking women's pub. Men are directed to the Staunch Ally just down the road. Otherwise all are welcome. Pull up a chair, give your order to the Wait Gerbil or the Gerbil behind the bar.

Don't forget to name change if you wish to.

I have sole access most of the time, but occasionally a nosy visitor (could it be my cousin, Macrame Sloth?) pokes about in the fridge or tries to pack the dishwasher.

Your kitchen is so tidy!

whimpers

I got one of those fancy assessments at the gym today. According to the NHS chart thingy, I'm 'only' obese. According to the fancy one which picks up visceral fat, I'm morbidly obese...

Not a huge shock, to be honest. I was 16st 4, but I'm still above 14stones. My arms are normal...

Apparently, my grip strength is damned good for a 65 year old...normal for a 40 yr old...and my muscle and bone density are at the top end of normal for my age. I'll be happier if I can get that up, though, since pension age 'normal' is probably quite poor.

Android, my brother was very funny about this, the sod.

He claimed it was"a cruel bias" against men, seeing as "we can only see in 2D - it's so unfair because you hide things under other things. Can't you see, MEN are the victims here." Then he started laughing because he knew he was talking bollocks.

So the fact there are tupperware containers of chilli and of black beans that DP claims aren't there but they are not on the top layer of the drawer means it's my fault Mr Pasta can't see them. Thanks, Bro.

It's the 17th version, so I'm going to claim my kitchen is ALWAYS tidy like this ... the other versions had furniture crammed in, dishwasher in front of the fridge, fridge right next to the cooker, weird wallpaper, brown vinyl cupboards, massive industrial 2-door fridge freezer, enough plates to serve 150 people and more than one interfering macrame sloth. Actually, my kitchen is tidy roughly once per fortnight, but I do like the look.

I've followed this conversation with interest as DH and I have come to a different arrangement over the years. Dishwasher stacking is my job unless I'm away or incapacitated. Dishwasher unloading and putting away is his. Most of our food comes delivered by Tesco, which he carries in and I put away. Sometimes he does some shopping when in town for something else, but again, he brings it in and I put it away. This way when I come to make a meal I know where everything is and on the odd occasion when he cooks he can usually find things without too much difficulty.

The chance of DH being trained to do a specific job well is low. We just muddle along, me frustrated because he's wildly bright with a great capacity for analysis...

Here's hoping the foxes dont keep @SionnachRuadh awake tonight.

The Walrus shops, puts away and cooks. I stack the dishwasher as we go and he empties it. We agreed last night that if we'd had kids together and they had ever complained about stacking or emptying the dishwasher, we would have made them wash up and dry. A single evening would probably have stopped them whingeing.

I used to have to wash up for six people so I am FOREVER grateful that I never ever ever have to wash up for six people EVER again.

That's what I hate. Grown men who hold down very important jobs and do complicated things that their bosses insist they do, but who say, just tell me what to do and I'll do it...

Well am off to the boat for three days tomorrow in sunny Burton looking forward to some riparian peace.

I am fascinated by the discourse on fridges. We have two fridges. There is the one that fits under the work surface and has a freezer section in the top. It contains gin and vodka in the freezer section and tonic, tomato juice, white wine and cheese in the main section. I know my way around this fridge. The other fridge is huge! There is loads of stuff in there that DH uses to produce meals. I would rather eat my own liver than investigate it's contents. Every once in a while I volunteer to cook breakfast. DH digs through the big fridge and removes the bacon, sausage, black pudding and eggs required and reminds me where to find the bread and beans.

I must have been off sick the day when school taught domestication.

My DH doesn’t stack the dishwasher, which is fine by me but I’m hoping at some point he’ll use a bit of his significant brain capacity to figure out it’d be better if he left dirty dishes on the counter on top of the machine or in the sink, not on the counter on the other side of the room (or the living room floor - he’s lapsed since we lost our dog who trained him out of that).

Phew i managed to avoid the norty step on the latest JKR thread. The knob head who was on repeat and rinse let me know they were reporting me so i reported myself as well so they let me of with a tut tut

Well done @Magpiecomplex! I also lost half a stone this month. Fingers crossed for ongoing progress.

Errol, it was Mr Pasta who insisted we get a dishwasher when I was pregnant with First Pasta.

To my amusement, our three children lecture him regularly about his terrible approach to loading the dishwasher because things are still dirty.

Myrtle, it was established very early in our relationship that the "one cooks, the other washes up" was a disaster because I use one or two pans and clear up as I go and he gets all Gordon Ramsay and uses every pot and utensil in the house.

We have that rule in our house @PastaAllaNorma, but luckily Mr Brit doesn’t cook (or complain if I use a larger than usual number of cooking utensils).

Never get up to go for an early morning pee at the same time as Gillian is rounding up gerbils for the 3 times round the goats paddock run.

DH can cook entirely without oversight. He just has lower domestic standards than I do, and never seems to notice that if these were applied across the board he'd be moaning about the mess.

He's quite good at hoovering, though, and I came home the other day and found he'd fixed the garden bench after only being asked once.

Just catching up on the thread and wondering if one of the capybaras in Magpie's 'fencing' picture could be Samba, who is wanted by Marwell Zoo. Could she be an accomplice of Gosie in her career as an art thief? They both disappeared at around the same time. Whatever is the Bluestocking coming to?

I hope your mouth feels more like your own today Pasta.

Also hope Cake is recovering well from her latest op.

First task today - sort out the fridge/freezer. It's usually pretty tidy, but at the moment it looks as though the gerbils have been throwing a party in there.

Myrtle, when everyone is home I'm cooking for five, but youngest is bringing friend home for Easter so this weekend it's seven.

Thank god Mr Pasta does the roast dinner stuff. I can't be arsed with it.

Morning all, hoping to catch up eventually🙄with all your posts having had connection probs yesterday which wiped out the nice long chatty response to various Bluey news before it got sent, and then I had a post 'hidden' by MNHQ for no apparent reason on another thread, so it was not a good day at MN for me so I just gave up trying😒
So here's a generic smile from the Smiley Gerbil to cover all eventualities until I read everything

Ohhhhh - the smily gerbil is very cute, @MarieDeGournay - thank you!

I am hiding in the office/library because the cleaners are here - they come once a fortnight and go through the house like a dose of salts - wonderful women. I use the time to catch up on MN, and to do the menu for next week and the Sainsbury's order, and my duolingo lesson. Then, once they've finished, I can adjourn to the front room for an afternoon of TV and knitting - I am finally making progress on the baby dress - I've almost finished the trees round the bottom, and the rest is just sky and occasional snowflakes, and I've decided it won't matter if the odd snowflake is in the wrong place - which will make my life easier. Working with two colours rather than three will be easier too.

We have two fridge freezers - we got a second one when we moved here, mainly because three teenage boys meant we needed huge amounts of food - but now there are only three of us living here, we are still using both of them. We periodically go through the freezers, and make a list of everything in them, so we can try to use stuff up, but even that never seems to make much of a difference. On the upside, it meant that, when I was snowed in on my own during the Beast from the East, I had enough food to last me for ages. 😂

We also have two fridge-freezers. When we expanded and redid our kitchen we kept the old one and moved it to the basement, where it has become the overflow fridge-freezer, particularly handy at Christmas or after a visit to Costco.

Mr Magpie and I keep having semi-serious conversations about getting a cheese fridge. He may be fundamentally incapable of stacking a dishwasher properly but his thoughts on cheese are very sound.

Hello again, still haven't caught up on yesterday and this morning😕
but I have had a nice update from the moderators:
I asked about why the hidden email? and also referred back to the deletion of a post in Feb.

I got a lovely response, apologetic [the hidden post was a mistake] and they took on board my concern that threatening 'first time offenders' with suspension/permanent ban was OTT and very distressing.
I'm hoping they rephrase that in the emails they send out to make it less scary!

So I'm glad I contacted them - they sometimes makes mistakes, and sometimes we're not going to agree at all with their 'tone-policing'😠, but I'm glad I gave them the chance to explain and I'm satisfied with how they've responded to me