Autumn Zebra

In the late afternoon of mince pie day, my sister came over to cook various stuff. I think she made a crazy Polish cake, most of the trifle, and here she is doing her famous salad from the vegetarian cookbook with lots of Polish recipes in it because the author is Polish. Mum is becoming a hippie again, so she is not wearing shoes. I don't wear shoes much myself, but Mum has generally been a shoe-wearer. From the other photos I have, I see we were drinking beer and wine this afternoon. At some point, my sister and I went down to the supermarket to get crazy Polish cake ingredients, mostly. It was great fun, as for some reason when go places together, we often act quite weird. I guess it is a sister thing :) It's always stuff that is really funny at the time, that no one else finds funny, and isn't actually funny at all.

Every Christmas we make a zillion (fruit) mince pies that aren't anything like the shop ones. This year my brother got to help - as in, he was here and available. I also managed to take a photo of him without his hands over his face for a change. He enjoyed helping, which was pretty cool. Mum had to leave for an appointment part way through, and my brother had to leave to go to a nearby town to do a fire performance there with his group, so I had to finish them by myself. These are the mince pies we made. I made the giant ugly monster one last out of the left-overs. Since the buses don't come very often, my brother and I walked to Mum's from town, which took about 45 minutes maybe. The previous bus had come about 10 minutes ago, and they come every 40 minutes, so the 30 minutes wait plus actually taking the bus plus the 10 minute walk at the end made walking seem more sensible. As it does every time to anyone capable of walking the distance when they consider taking a bus...

So I think everyone who reads this blog that I know, knows that Dad died on April 1st, but I thought I should post it here because of the last posts, before launching into posts about making hats or something. I posted on my LJ, if you want to read what I had to say at the time - link . Other than being April Fool's day, April 1 is also my husband's mother's birthday. So that's an odd collection of events, but it doesn't seem meaningful.

I might start writing various diary-like entries about depressing stuff, and other stuff, for a while... So I decided two weeks ago to make Dad a nightcap for "receiving visitors in the evening" (lol) and for when he is in hospital [ :-( ]. On the day when we didn't know what was wrong yet and he'd gone to the hospital to find out, I picked some seeds off a tree, the type that turn into "helicopters" to show him, because this is the sort of thing I do. Before they go brown and fall off the tree as helicopters, they are green and joined together - two wings or blades instead of a single one. I'd post pictures but I want to see if I've got any of mine at home (but I lost my camera/it was stolen and I think I hadn't got the photos off yet). Anyway, I got them to show him and gave him the best one. The point of this is that I decided to embroider these and the leaves of the same tree on the night cap. I used the shape of the one on this page on the ...

Very depressing; don't read if you're not in a suitable mental state. Four weeks ago we found out that Dad had cancer in his thyroid (which is in one's throat) and they were going to operate on it. Three days later we found out they couldn't operate on it and he would have radiotherapy that would make it shrink, but after that it would come back so he probably had months to live. One week ago he went into hospital with an infection. He stayed in hospital for nearly a week, during which time swelling and the cancer meant that he couldn't swallow. So now he can't eat, and he probably has a couple of weeks. If you want to say something and don't know what to say, say that you want to say something but don't know what to say. Not commenting will not be held against you. I'll assume all comments are meant in the best possible way, obviously. If you know me in real life, don't ring me unless you warn me first because I hate phone calls.