There are so many trite sayings about how wonderful it is to spend time with your grown up children but they are all true. Even doing nothing is fine if I am doing nothing with my kids. When I see them happy and doing well at life it especially makes me feel pleased. My daughter Caitlin and her husband are so well suited. They just fit together perfectly in unexpected ways. The most important thing is that they are both kind and supportive of each other and have such a healthy relationship.
I mentioned that it was Norman’s birthday last week, so Caitlin and Wes took us out to lunch to say Happy Birthday to Norm and she brought a lovely bottle of wine from Lily and Trevor.
I posted the menu last week, but here it is again as I am not a great describer of things.
We were running a bit late and Caitlin and Wes were already there when we arrived. They are such beautiful looking humans I cannot wait to see what their baby girl looks like. Caitlin had her scan last week and all is on track. She is 29 weeks along so it is hurtling past!
It was a bit dark and the narrow steps were not made for poorly sighted clumsy people but I managed to get to the table. We all said we were having the special and they quickly poured a huge glass of red wine for each of us and served the amuse-bouche.
The amuse bouche was a light and fluffy arancini ball with a rich cheesy sauce. It was delicious.
They then brought out the antipasti course. Everyone had their own wee bowl of Smoked Minestrone. I was not a fan as it had too many strong flavours for me, it had rosemary and something that had little sticks in it. Texture fail.
Then they brought a plate of focaccia and bread sticks to share. The focaccia was a slice of warm, oily heaven with the richness of the olives biting through the dense bread. Divine!!! The breadsticks were just crispy sticks with no flavour, I deemed them not worth the carbs.
The plate of melanzane to share came out next. The eggplant was perfectly cooked, tender and juicy. The tomato sauce was quite sharp and I would have liked more cheese to balance it out, but overall it was tasty. To me it was if the eggplant was cooked separately, the sauce was cooked separately and they just layered it all then sprinkled on Parmesan and put it under the broiler, so the taste of the sauce was not infused into the eggplant. But I may be wrong!
Next was the Main Pasta course.
First they brought out a lovely little dish of oven baked pacchero to share. It was like the dish I make of ricotta stuffed cannelloni but with the tubes cut in half. It was good, I thought the pasta was a wee bit underdone on the edges but the flavours were well balanced.
Next was the pappardelle with meat balls. The pasta was absolutely delicious. All of their pasta is home made, right there in the open kitchen in front of you so it makes sense that it is the star of the show. I liked the sauce as well but I had a bit of weirdness in my meatball so I let Norm have them all. I get put off so easily by weird textures. If I find gristle or a bone I am done and I found two bits in one bite.
The final dish of pasta is their specialty – a proper Carbonara with guanciale and pecorino cheese. It was a bit intense for me and the guanciale was too full of fat and other chewy bits for my weird texture thing. I had one piece, struggled to swallow it and then gave the rest of the guanciale to Norm and focused on the pasta and sauce.
The final course was a gorgeous tiny dessert to share which they called ‘millefoglie‘, which is better known by it’s French name, ‘millefeuille‘, which means ‘a thousand layers‘. The dense pasta sheets were piped with some little towers of dark chocolate across the bottom and the top of the second layer of pastry was vanilla custard. Candied almonds were scattered across the top. The pastry was very hard and difficult to cut without launching it across the table, but it might be fine for non clumsy people. However, it was not the usual light as a feather puff pastry I am used to, but the creams were divine.
As a “last bite while you pay the bill” they gave us these little coffee ice cream and chocolate dipped goodies.
All in all I would rate the meal 3.5 Kitten Stars ⭐⭐⭐✨ but the service was immaculate and the company perfect.
The sky stayed clear all afternoon and it felt like a reprieve from prison to get out of the house and sit in the sun and pontificate.
Finn likes to pontificate with me.
Sometimes I feel like anything is possible and every now and then I have a bit of an autistic sciencey doubty moment. I forget that it is never me that is ‘doing’ anything, it is the Creator working through me, therefore I am limitless.
Then I find myself spending days contemplating something, then I come to a conclusion, then I state my conclusion only for someone who is NOT neurodiverse to look at me like I am taking the pi$$ and say ‘of course it is’. My Mom used to say to me that for ‘such a clever person you can really be stupid’ when I would be unable to do something or I did not understand something really obvious, yet I can master pretty much anything that is documented which I can read and absorb in my own time. I now know that is just how my brain works. For example, I cannot for the life of me work a can opener. This is common among ND people. But give me a data model or diagram and I am your girl. It is interesting to try and understand my brain!
This week I sat outside watching the birds eating. I had only ever seen the southern double-collared sunbird feed on nectar from plants and had never seen them eat from a seed feeder. I also realised this week I have always called these guys malachite sunbirds incorrectly. Oops.
One day I thought I saw a sunbird hover at the suet balls and peck at one. When I mentioned to Norm that because of their beaks being a narrow curved shape I had assumed they only fed on nectar and was surprised to see them eat the same food as the other birds, Norm said in his droll Scottish accent ‘Lee they are birds, of course they eat the same thing as the other birds.’ So instead of feeling like a professor who had been doing life shattering research I felt like an eejit. But I quickly got over it because he would never intend to diminish me, he always builds me up and tells me how clever I am, even when I say such strange things that everyone else looks at me oddly, unsure whether I am serious or not. I am used to being misunderstood! Then it made me laugh, but that is because I know he means no malice. We laughed so much at that. Now I am pretty sure it was just another bird hovering and probably not a sunbird at all!
This week I noticed that the squirrels were not stealing the suet balls every day like they had been. I then realised that the clever little squirrels had been preparing for the storm! They obviously knew about the upcoming storm (because animals know things) and so they stole all of the suet so that they could snuggle up in their little nest and do the squirrel equivalent of Netflix and chill.
I love watching the birds playing on the many hanging things I have in my trees, it is almost as if they treat some of them like amusement rides. I watched several of them sitting on the floating butterfly chime between his wings and rocking back and forth. They also swing on the wind chime, making it tinkle.
They swing back and forth on the feeders and swoop and fly towards each other, either playfully or in an antagonising way, it is hard to tell with teeny little birds.
Yes this is the sort of thing I spend ages doing and thinking about. I also chat to the birds all of the time. I could have redone this video but I thought it demonstrates what speaking to an ADHD person is like, I even interrupt myself. It is not deliberate, there are just so many chains of information firing off in my brain at all times, it can be hard to keep them all in control. I need a thought-dog to herd them all in an organised manner.
If you listen to my haphazard voiceover, what happened was that I had been talking to the birds and one of them kept landing on my little bits of garden ‘art’ and I said to him, ‘are you performing for me? if so then pop up and land on the birdcage’ and he did just that. I am confident we were communicating.
Tuesday night was the weekly Social Connection group at my friend Tamlyn’s house. There were fewer people there this week and I think it actually worked well as we were all in a seated circle and could have one conversation so it was much more inclusive.
When getting ready I had my second intuitive experience for the day. I wanted to be comfy so I put on grey yoga pants and I happened to think ‘I want to wear that long grey shirt with bright designs on it’. I have not worn this shirt in many years and I had thought I may have given it away but I opened the closet and put my hand in to the dark and a shirt fell into my hand. I pulled my hand out and it was THE shirt I was looking for!!! My closet is so tight that things cannot just fall out.
I am trying to be more conscious of these occurrences and acknowledge them. I think it is the universe’s way of saying to me, be more aware of the constant small intuitive moments and then the big ones will not seem so unbelievable? Everything you need is right at your finger tips!
On Wednesday my pedicurist came to do my tootsies after work. I feel so spoiled. I love having them done here at home and it is an advantage for her as she does not have to pay rent on a salon chair. #WinWin
I had popped a beef roast, carrots and potatoes into the slow cooker the night before so Norm and had dinner ready for us afterwards.
I had a delivery of some things I had ordered online and true to form had not measured. This time they were much bigger than expected. I had hoped the owl was larger than it is and that the houses were smaller as I wanted to take them to my mom, but they are proper concrete, Norm struggled to carry them. But they will look gorgeous in my fairy garden with plants in them. The other things will look adorable in my fairy garden too. I will do a video once the weather clears enough to potter about.
Thursday morning after Norm fed the animals, we traipsed over the mountain to the Fish Hoek traffic department to collect my driver’s license. I think that I look terrible. The lighting gives me a shadow that makes me look like the bearded lady.
I lost Norm as I was in and out in seconds. When I found him he asked was it that fast and I said ‘what did you expect, a DNA test? Blood test?’ and then we fell out. As always we quickly made up.
That night I took the roast, left over vegetables and stock, shredded the beef, removed the fat and made soup. I added more vegetables, peas and white beans. It was warm outside that afternoon but cold in the evening and it was perfect weather for it.
Finn is really having a hard few weeks. I mentioned last week about his nose. Then he went in to the vet earlier this week because he had licked his paw all night until it was raw the next morning and they sedated him to examine his foot, bandaged it and sent him home.
He then obsessively worked on the wrapping until he managed to get it off. His foot was bright red and raw. Norm took him back to the vet and they have taken the wrapping off and put a cone on him so he cannot get to it.
They are giving him sedatives to keep him calm. He is a very unhappy boy.
At least the terrible weather has kept him inside today.
Today I attended a “Mastering Emotions: Understanding and Managing Feelings” workshop facilitated by my friend Tamlyn. It was really fascinating and I had so many realisations about my own anger issues and what they are related to.
Here are just a few of the things which I found interesting…… The brain can only make sense out of things that have happened in the past or are happening right now. The brain can only understand things which are familiar. Social anxiety can be your body’s way of telling you that your brain is feeling uncomfortable because this is a new situation and therefore you need to be cautious.
Your brain will respond in the same way that it responded to the original incident. The reason that I was so triggered by the short man in the airport is because I felt like Caitlin was in danger and I understood why I felt vulnerable in that situation. We repress our emotions until we feel safe or capable of processing those emotions. Our subconscious tucks away things it feels it needs to protect our conscious mind from.
Hyper-independence is a trauma response. We become unwilling to rely on others if we feel like we have been let down by those we should have been able to depend on previously.
When we experience an ’emotion’ it is a result of someone touching one of our ‘wounds’. The way to resolve this is to process and feel those emotions that we have been stuffing down. To observe the things which are causing these feelings to come up, then to lie still, get into your body / earthed, then feel the emotion coming up and let it burn itself out. Ask that fragment to come forward and slowly unravel the emotion down to the root cause of that trigger. This is obviously a very shortened process described here, if you want to explore further book a session with Tamlyn here.
For me the key is to feel. I am the human whack-a-mole game of emotion. I have always been ‘too much’, so I have tried to fit myself into the little box society wants me to fit into. I have stuffed my feelings all of my life. I am not very good at identification of the feeling or the source so I know I have a lot of work to do in this area. The anger is coming up a lot now and is causing me some issues, so it is time to work on it.
I told Tam that I thought the key was self-confidence but she said that it is self-connection. If we are not connected to our selves then how can we connect to others?
I have a lot to think about and process. The weather is miserable so Norm and I are going to build a big fire and watch a film. I hope you all have a good weekend and week ahead.
Until next time, Kisses from the Kitten xoxoxoxox
Kitten in the City 