I spoke too soon. Email collection is fine, email sending is not. Waaah. Will have to go and see the IT geeks tomorrow to get it fixed.

I finally got round to sorting out my email account (only coz Amy told me I was missing out on much gossip!). Having downloaded loads of emails that were out of date and - quite frankly - irrelevant, I've just deleted the lot of them! Welcome to the world of Extreme Decluttering: if only I could apply the same principles to my home!

After a weekend in which we made doughtnuts AND sausages from scratch, I'm feeling a tad on the bloated side. Why is healthy living never as tasty as 'bad' stuff?

Our boiler stopped working this weekend. Rob noticed this when I was at Guides on Friday, and we've been freezing ever since. The electrical display control thingy has given up the ghost, which may just been a blown fuse but might be signalling the need for a new heating system. Whichever it is, let's hope that it's fixed quickly - we're off to the pub this evening in an attempt to find somewhere to sit without wearing four layers of clothing.

Yesterday was one of the biggest food challenges of recent months. My parents held a family lunch - three courses of big-portion-no-messing food - to mark their joint retirement. No sooner had the second pudding gone down (it would have been rude to refuse it) then we were back in the car to get back home, so I could go to a black tie dinner in the evening. Pate, lamb, chocolate mousse, cheese and port later and I was at least 10 inches bigger round the waist than I'd been at breakfast. Unsurprisingly, I've not been very hungry today.

Well that's it - my husband has just pushed firmly at the culinary boundaries. We've just had Roadkill Casserole for dinner, and yummy it was too.*

Other food things of note in the last couple of weeks include:
* home-made salty snacks - healthy pumpkin seeds, albeit drizzled in olive oil
* steak and kidney pudding, in suet pastry
* home-made pork pies - with proper jelly this time
* scones - two batches made on the same day, following different recipes, just to see which were best
* merengue - melty chewy crispy bliss. Eaten with fresh raspberries from the garden. Yup, we're still getting fruit off those suckers!

* To be fair, it was a pheasant that was hit by a car and was still warm when we got to it. Still technically roadkill, though!

It's gone all autumnal here and our new flat has single-glazed big windows throughout... the global condensation convention is happening right here in our front room. The boiler seems to be a tad binary: off or on at the switch, and no thermostat or timer device. All in all it's making things a tad chilly round the extremities. At least it's not as bad as last Saturday, when Rob realised that he could see his breath when sitting in the living room. Waaah!

In other news, we've harvested the mammoth pumpkin (which is very aptly named if mammoths are mishapen, pale orange squished ovals) so I suspect that there's a lot of pumpkin products just waiting to be made. Hurrah!