Level 2 Chi Kung.
Katie home from school again and the second day of work for the new cleaner. It is always stressful having someone new in the house but with this girl it is worse than usual. She is very sweet, so I very much want it to work out, but she is excruciatingly slow. Last week I put it down to her finding her way around, but this week she wasn’t much faster – taking 5 hours to do around 50% of the work that Geni did in 4 and half hours. Worst of all, noticing a terrible smell, I went downstairs and discovered that she was vacuuming with the Dyson so full that it obviously couldn’t fit another speck of dust and was just re-distributing hot dust around the house. One of the things I like about Dysons – as opposed to normal vacuum cleaners – is that they don’t smell, but clearly even Dysons have their limit.
During the morning, Katie had her first experience of the inexplicably impossible quest. She was keen to re-watch a particular episode of Katie Morag but, having watched all available episodes on fast forward, she couldn’t find the right one. She described the episode to me and, with the help of google, I discovered that the one she wanted was episode 12 of series one. I went confidently to iPlayer and found episodes 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. Heaven knows what has happened to episodes 8 and 12! Poor wee Katie.
After the cleaner left, Katie and I made rocky road. Katie has been wanting to make this ever since I told her about making it when I was a teenager. I wasn’t optimistic about the outcome – we only had leaf gelatine and the recipe specified gelatine powder, when I found instructions for substituting leaf for powder we turned out to be three leaves short of what the recipe required, AND it was three years past its ‘best before’ date – but it turned out fine.