Arti's accounts

Well folks – I hope you could fill in the missing words correctly. The answer is of course “Pro Plus” tablet. For those of you not in the UK, Pro Plus is the brand name of a caffeine tablet that “relieves temporary tiredness”!

I actually bought them to make sure I could cope with the long drive tomorrow but was feeling so tired this morning I thought I’d try one in advance. I think it’s made me slightly jittery but I’ve got so much done! I did my tutoring prep. Packing took me a mere 20 minutes (what have I forgotten?). I’ve emptied the car of all the gardening junk and topped up the windscreen washer bottle ( I did the oil, coolant and tyres yesterday). I’m currently hastily eating toast and strawberries (not together) before going of to tutor via my GP’s to pick up a repeat prescription.

I think that only leaves taking tutoring stuff out of car ( including small folding table – don’t ask!) cleaning my shoes, digging out my sleeping bag, loading the car with my going away stuff and washing my hair to do when I get back at 8.45pm tonight!

Chelley!

And very many congratulations to her.

Yes folks – I did indeed manage to whack myself on the jaw with a traffic cone! We have them around at church to cordon off areas when necessary, indicate that the car park is full etc. In case you want to replicate the incident, here’s how I did it!

For any of you who have actually studied a traffic cone, you will have noticed that they are made of very hard plastic (very very hard) with a very heavy rubber base to stop them falling over easily! I was trying to prise two of them apart that had been stacked one on top of the other. I was bending over them and had them tilted at an angle to do this. Realising that my grip on them was awkward and that they were too heavy to hold on the way I had intended I let them drop (all of 6 inches!). The heavy bases swung them from an angle to upright as they fell and the top of the upper cone swung in an arc that ended up clouting me on the jaw.

Most of the others are still quite plausible though.

I do scrounge toast off the toddlers group (hunger drives me enough to face the mayhem).

I do climb in wheelie bins and jump up and down in them to squash all the garden waste. It’s a bit like trampolining but more prickly (especially when there are cuttings from the holly bushes) and less bouncy!

I have walked around with a bucket on my head (not recently!) and also walked into a lamp post – though not at the same time! Apologies to all of you who would have liked it to be this option! Iwouldn’t really be that stupid – would I?

The likelihood of me falling in the wheelbarrow or hitting myself with the rake are reasonably high though – you are after all talking to the only person I know who managed to once hit themself on the head with a bat while playing Rounders.

I also once slipped on some ice in a work car park and knocked my wing mirror – just not with my jaw!

The only thing I’m not so sure how I would manage is hitting myself with frozen milk, (just added to the list so that there was something even more bizzare than the traffic cone!) though a doctor friend of mine once had a patient come into A&E on Christmas Eve with a broken toe – they’d dropped the (frozen) turkey on it!

Well – I think I might start wearing my gardening overalls more often. The other day I got wolf-whistled and a shout of “Blondie” from some lads who were driving a lorry on the main road that borders our church site. I wasn’t sure whether to be a bit pleased and flattered or offended at the denigration of women as sex symbols. My natural inclination was towards the former – does that make me very shallow?

The trouble was these lads were really quite young (looked about 17 to me) and I reckon that from the distance they were at they couldn’t have seen me clearly and as I had my hair tied up in bunches* I may have seemed a lot younger than I really was! I did think that perhaps I should embroider “I’m old enough to be your mother” in large letters on my overalls – but perhaps that would be a step too far.

*If I don’t tie my hair up when gardening it keeps falling in my face (I guess you spend a lot of time looking down when gardening). Then I end up pushing it out of my eyes with muddy hands and very rapidly end up looking like an ancient Briton on the war-path!

To further complicate matters, since this episode I decided to experiment with one of those semi-permanent hair dyes. Copper Gold it said on the packet! Well suffice it to say that every time I now see myself in the mirror, my hair does seem rather, well, more ginger than I anticipated. I actually don’t dislike it but somehow it really doesn’t seem like “me”. I didn’t realise how much I had invested in identifying myself as blonde! Strangely, though I have had it like this for over a week now, no one at all has commented on it. This either means that a) it’s really not as noticably different as I think it is, or b) people have noticed but think it looks terrible so are saying nothing rather than upsetting me! What do you reckon?

Strangely too, I actually quite fancied having red hair when I was young. That’s the trouble with reading too many Anne of Green Gables books I guess!

Anyhow it is supposed to wash out in 6 to 8 weeks. It’ll probably get to the colour I like in another 3 or 4 then!