How to propose

Content warning:  The following post contains sickening romanticalness, read at your peril.

It's a tricky thing, a proposal.  There are expectations.  And if you are a same-sex couple you have to figure out whether, or how, to address those.  Obviously, this isn't a blueprint for how *you* should propose, but more of a memory about how I did so.  Not necessarily in this order, but if I put it all in order we'd probably be at 'Proposing in Eleventy-One simple steps'.

So, yeah, did some proposin' this weekend.

1. Find out who's going to do the proposing

Now if you're traditionally minded and of different genders, this might be obvious.  But it might not.  In our case, my Beloved spent a year or so asking me to marry her every day so that I would know she still loved me and was invested in our relationship.  As such, we determined that if there was ever to be an actual down-on-one-knee-ring-in-hand proposal I would have to do it.

2. Find out what the proposee would like

Over the course of time I picked up a few hints (these were all actual statements made by my beloved in pretty much as many words) that I wanted to work into the proposal itself:

• Notice in writing, in triplicate, delivered at least 6 weeks before the proposal itself.
• Cake (I cannot for the life of me remember when/why this was mentioned, but it was at some point so it went on my mental list).
• Signage - Beloved specified that there had to be a sign so that she would know I was proposing.  Possibly in order to effect her escape.
• Running shoes - she threatened to attempt to run away should she spot the sign, so stipulated that I should have my running shoes on in case I needed to catch her.

And for a bonus point I wanted pink champagne, because someone brought a bottle of the same champagne that I had for my 18th birthday to Beloved's 21st.

3. Deliver Notice of Intention to Propose Marriage

Beloved received this beauty one weekend morning last year:

4. Sort out the bling

I went and got my great aunt's emerald ring restored and sent a very scary email to my now future in-laws asking if there was any suitable family ring for my Beloved.  I got a response saying they couldn't think of anything so started contemplating having something to match my ring commissioned.

Later a family ring did turn up on her side, so we had a few conversations about whether this was the ring she wanted and went about getting it in turn restored.  This took Sandy Menzies a fair while - apparently the setting was porous and thus pesky.

5. Pick a date

I picked a Friday afternoon just before a week when we would see both sets of parents and would be able to tell them in person.

6. Come up with a plan

Plan A was to use my weekly afternoon off to turn our living room into a tent (reflecting our mutual love of camping) using swathes of fabric, a sari and various scarves.  Lay out cushions, blankets and squishy things along with a small table set with cake and fizz.  Then go meet Beloved from work and head for the gym as usual and return home to my beautiful proposal.

7. Have your date scuppered

A few short weeks before my intended date, a couple of our friends got engaged.  I shouldn't have been surprised, being as how there is an established engagement season in the northern hemisphere but I worried about treading on their toes.  I was wavering over whether my planned proposal was too soon.

And then Rowan Tree Tents sent me to set up a tent on the afternoon in question and that was the end of that.

8. Pick a new date

I realised that the 7th anniversary of our first kiss was going to be at a weekend (I warned you about the soppiness, you read on so on your own head be it) and that we could once again stay up all night to watch the sun rise over the North Sea.

9. Allow the proposee to think that your romanical notion is their idea

Imagine my relief when Beloved suggested the very romantical sunrise watching (obviously she didn't include 'and then you can get your sign out and propose') I had been trying to figure out how to suggest.  Beloved had been getting suspicious of any ideas that I had which included walking up hills or going somewhere just the two of us.  Now she was going to be the agent of her own undoing *mwah hah hah haa*.

10. Gather supplies using subterfuge

It's awkward buying champagne when the person you want to suprise with it is in the shop with you.  Fortunately I had an additional ulterior motive (of which, more next week) for sneaking inexplicably round Tesco so she ascribed my weird behaviour to that.  I was, however slightly scuppered yet again by the supermarket I had to visit for other reasons not having the champagne I was planning on, so I had a speedy dither and settled on the pink one wearing a Wimbledon jacket. 

I also had to make a sign.  I made a very dinky little sign.  Fortunately I had another excuse for getting out my wood-burning tool, Beloved never suspected a thing.

The dinkiest proposing sign in all the land.

And I made cake.  It's usually easy to think up an excuse for baking.  So I did.

11. Be thwarted by sleepies

At 2am on the overnight in question, Beloved announced that since it was forecast to rain she was going to sleep rather than go for that romantical walk.  I offered to let her have an hour or so's sleep then take her out to the beach in the car.  She said she would be grumpy if I did.  So I let it go and set a normal-ish alarm.

12. A plateful of breakfast helps the proposing go down

Yes folks, a plateful of croissants is to proposing marriage as a spoonful of sugar is to medicine.  I got up, made the breakfast*, put on my running shoes and knelt at my Beloved's bedside.

11. Say it with cake

I said it with this cake:

'Marry me?' takes up a surprising amount of space on a cake.  I didn't think a practice run was appropriate, somehow. 

Because, really, who can say no to cake?

12. Forget to eat all of your breakfast because of the excitement

The coffee will go cold, the croissants will go chewy, but how often is it appropriate to eat cake and drink champagne before 9am?

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*Of course I wasn't nervous, I knew she would say yes and the plan would be well-received.  So that can't be why I poured the first half-cup of coffee into one of the champagne glasses, can't be that at all.

When is clutter not clutter?...

When it's display...

So, recently I got around to two tasks that had been on my 'to do' list for a while.  That mirror at the top of the photograph?  Yup, that's been leaning against my bedroom wall for about two years.  I have now hung it on said wall (no scrutinising the angle at which it hangs, or its dusty state, please) and no longer have to stoop to see myself in it.

I also managed to nail up two strips of moulding and thereby got six pairs of shoes off the shoe rack in the hallway that was filled to overflowing.  It was a very simple job, and here's how I did it:

1. Buy 2.5m length of pine moulding
2. Leave length of moulding leaning in the corner for a while to acclimatise
3. Keep meaning to get around to putting up that moulding
4. Finally determine that today's the day
5. Measure the width of a pair of your shoes - remember to this across the widest part and with the heels a little way apart, I didn't and it's only by sheer luck that each end shoe squeezes on
6. Assess how many pairs of shoes you will be able to fit in the available space
7. Take your moulding and saw lengths of (width of shoes) x (number of pairs)
8. Do a lot of strange holding up shoes and lengths of moulding to figure out how high to put them.
9. Figure out which nails will be short enough to go all the way into the wall without bending
10. Position the moulding as levelly as you can (lesser mortals use spirit levels for this sort of thing) and tap in a nail about a quarter of the way in from each end
11. Hang shoes!

How to make soup when you're sick

I am a snotfest.  This is not enjoyable.  Yesterday I slept all morning and surfaced requiring sustenance.  We have been struggling yet again with using all of our vegetables, so I decided that some Nourishing Soup was in order.  And at least some chilli was required for its decongestant properties.

Here are the things I put in it, in roughly the order and quantities I used:
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 small onions, chopped into strips
8 inches of celery, chopped into strips
2 roasted red peppers from a jar, chopped into strips
half a head of cabbage, chopped into ribbons
4 heaping teaspoons of thai green curry paste
1 chicken stock cube, made up in 1.5 litres of boiling water
a third of a tin of coconut milk

And here's how I did it:
Sickness-specific preparations 1:  Haul a chair into the kitchen
Sickness-specific preparations 2:  Stuff nose with tissue
Step 1:  Chop  onions and celery, cook on a low heat with the oil

Feebleness-specific interlude 1:  Fail to open large jar of red peppers
Feebleness-specific interlude 2:  Boil kettle
Feebleness-specific interlude 3:  Pour boiling water over lid of jar
Feebleness-specific interlude 4:  Wrestle with jar and teatowel until openness is achieved
Step 2:  Fish two peppers out of jar and chop

Optional prequel to step 2:  Rinse some of the vinegar off the peppers.  I didn't bother as the mild tang works nicely enough in this soup
Step 3:  Add the peppers to the pan

Step 4: Chop the cabbage

Step 5:  Add cabbage to pan and let everything cook until fairly tender
Interlude of forgetfulness:  Realise that cabbage goes better in soup if it's not in really long ribbons and attempt to bash it with your spatula so that some of the long ones break up.  Fail

Step 6:  Use the remaining hot water from the Feebleness episode to make up a chicken stock cube.  Add stock to pan, pop the lid on and leave for 10 minutes to really soften the cabbage
Step 7:  Stir through coconut milk, faff about fetching a bowl and serve

Step 8:  Feel accomplished and like your efforts are doing you good.  Have another little sleep.

How to: Christmas house decorations

This year I plan to make a few of these little dudes (can a house be a dude? I don't know.  Perhaps I should schedule a post on the personhood of inanimate objects someday) for various folks - as 'first christmas in your new home' type gifts, 'thank you for having me' gifts and 'here, have a tiny village' gifts.

Step 1:  Select a short length of wood left over from making a play tent, I cut mine down to about three times its width:

Wood all marked up, lookin' shiny in the dim hallway lights.

Step 2:  Mark a cross through roughly the middle of the wood if you want two houses of equal height, or at some other point if you don't.  Mine was slightly off-centre, for artisticals.

Step 3:  Rig up a slightly dodgy-looking clamp assembly in your hallway, because it's too cold and dark for outside nonsense:

This is the first outing for my 'table vice'.  You can find marvelous things at Lidl.

Step 4:  Being moderately lazy, put together your electric saw:

There's a pre-step about charging your batteries, but your saw is probably more charge-holding than mine.  Or not electric, in which case, fuel it with a banana, or some festive lebkuchen.

Step 5:  Cut along one of your diagonal lines to separate your houses from each other.

Step 6:  Cut along each of the remaining diagonal half-lines to leave your house-shapes:

Little housies.

Step 7:  Change the saw-attachment for the sanding attachment, for you are nothing if not lazy.

Step 8:  Sand the roofs and edges of your little housies to make up for your shoddy sawing.

Step 9:  Tidy up after yourself, you dreadful slattern:

We have the niftiest little multi-vac thing in our house - great for jobs like these, plus it's cordless, so you can only hoover for a maximum of 20 minutes.

Step 10:  Mark out the features of your little housies with pencil:

Confession time:  I only did this for the first one, I freehanded the second.

Step 11:  Select a tip for your burning iron, fit it and turn the thing on.  This is yet another fabulous Lidl purchase, it's lots of fun, but you do have to be careful because it gets VERY HOT and the cord is quite short.

Step 12:  Carefully burn over the pencil lines, or freehand your way through it.  Add a roofline because your girlfriend says it needs something at the top.  Try to to hunch over your work too much or you will get hot smoke in your eyes and won't be able to see the table properly.

Step 13:  Burn snowflakes onto a bunch of little wooden discs you have lying around that were sliced of the excess from your morris-dancing sticks, just so you don't waste the heat in your iron.

Step 14:  Admire your handiwork and stretch your spine back into a more normal configuration.  Ignore any alarming cracking noises.  Sigh with relief.

Finished products.  I'm trying to decide whether I prefer the leaded lights of windowpanes.  There might be a prize if anyone spots the difference.

I think I could get quite the little production line going for these.  I'll drill little holes in the snowflake discs and use them as gift tag/tree decoration combos.  I may also wash the housies (or maybe just the doors) with a little paint or stain for colour.

How to pitch a Bell Tent in eleven easy steps

I am the deliciously pretentious owner of half a genuine Bell Tent.  Fortunately the Other Half owns the other half* so there has never yet been a scheduling conflict.

One of the most wonderful features of a Bell Tent, after the distinctive aesthetic, is the ease of pitching.  One person can erect one of these beauties alone fairly swiftly.  It's downright speedy when there's more than one of you.  And here's how we go about it, with excessive picture references:

First, pick a spot and lay out your under-tent tarp

Pick a nice level spot with suitable windbreaks and, if possible, a beautiful view.  If camping in a group it's nice to all face the entries to your tents into a central space.  The tarp prevents the bottom of your groundsheet from getting covered in grass and mud or soaking the canvas when you put it away.  And another layer between you and the cold, hard ground is always a bonus.

Second, peg out your tent

On this particular occasion, this broke the mallet.  Now we have a nice new wooden mallet that will hopefully last longer than the season-and-a-half its predecessor managed.  Now is also the time to tuck the corners of the under-tent tarp under the tent.  For pretties.

Third, find the door

A small but vital step, should be fairly easy to find if you remember where you decided to put it during step 2.

Fourth, leave your shoes outside and enter the tent

This prevents your mucky shoes from leaving detritus all over the inside of the groundsheet and reduces the number of passes required with the tent hoover** later.

Fifth, unpack your chandelier

This step can be skipped if you have no chandelier.  But you should have a chandelier.  Canvas and candelight, what could possibly go wrong?  We keep ours in its original box for now but sometimes the bubble wrap causes difficulties.

Sixth, check where the centre of your tent is

This may not be a strictly necessary step, but I like the way it all looks rather like the Sorting Hat in this picture.

Seventh, insert centre pole

This step is easiest if you have a willing volunteer/conscript/minnion/friend construct said pole and pass it in to you, so you can stay in the centre of the tent, but it can be managed singlehandedly without incident.

Eighth, erect the pole remembering to include chandelier

Up you go!  If you were clever and marked a little cross on the floor of the tent to let you know where the centre is you can make use of that now.  Sliding the chandelier under the foot of the pole at this point is easiest.  You can lift the foot of the pole once everything's pegged out, but it's far easier to do now.

Ninth, add the door pole

There's a secret to this: pass the door pole into the tent feet first with one of the joints nearest the bend still unjoined.  Pop the doorframe out into the correct 'V' shape once in the tent.  Poke the pokey bit through the designated hole and tie down the feet with the ties provided either side of the doorway.

Tenth, peg out the guyropes

Discover one missing and remember that at the end of your last trip as you struck the tent in the rain it came undone so you put it somewhere safe to re-attach later and it has never been seen again.  Improvise with string, while also improvising a mallet with a rock.

Eleventh, add bunting, get the kettle on and start enjoying your camping experience

I manufactured the bunting myself, in rather a hurry, out of a worn-out duvet cover.  I am rather pleased with it.  And a cuppa is exactly what a thirsty work crew needs before they furnish the newly-erected abode.

* I can't claim the credit for this joke, she made it first.
** More on this in a subsequent post.  It is a truly marvelous contraption.