Lovely weather this morning, so I got into the garden and did a couple of hours of leaf sweeping, weeding and pruning. I shall admit I have fallen a little out of love with gardening of late, mostly I think because I am madly in love with writing and also because of the recent rain which has turned areas of the garden into a spongy, claggy mudfest. However, attention is required so I told myself sternly to ‘get out there NOW and do stuff’ and a jolly two hours were spent in the sun!
Starting with the Sisyphean task of Leaf Sweeping 2019, I soon got into a goodly swing with the leaf rake. We have 31 trees in the garden and they are all beginning to shed leaves like there is some kind of leaf shedding championship going on. It’ll get worse before it gets better as the leaf shedding season is but still young, but I am determined to keep ahead of the job this year because last year (when I was still teaching full time) I drowned under piles of leaves during the rare dry weekend moments I had available to me for the job. I pruned back some bits of privet and holly hedge, attacked a few low flying tree branches so they don’t keep attacking me, spread some bark chippings in the chicken run, cut back the undergrowth around the oil tank so I can get close enough to measure the contents with my sophisticated measuring device a.k.a a garden cane, and weeded a bit of the courtyard. There was a bit of rose pruning, too, and a nettle massacre. I came in to start cooking Sunday dinner with the full intention of spending at least an hour in the garden EVERY day from here on in. We shall see.
I called my Mum on the FaceTime to see how she is settling in now she is back home. She informed me she has been scooting up and down the stairs to use the upstairs loo instead of the downstairs one because ‘it is good exercise.’ She has done some knitting (a llama toy) whilst doing her ankle exercises in order to stave off the possibility of deep vein thrombosis. The iPad screen bounced up and down at this point as she demonstrated her ankle exercises to me. She was cooking herself a bit of chicken and some vegetables for lunch. She did not look or sound like someone who had major surgery just 4 days ago. She said, ‘I managed to get into bed okay last night. I got a bit stuck at first, so I came downstairs to read my exercise booklet about how to get in and out of bed, and then I went back upstairs and tried what it said and it worked very well.’ I tried not to roll my eyes too much about the amount of stair climbing she is doing. But if she feels happy, then that is fine. She informed me she had adopted a ‘positive mental attitude’ towards all this and is determined to get back into her normal routine as soon as possible. Good old Mum! (‘Less of the old,’ she would say.)
Heather sent me some photos. Today is her alpaca trekking day. For her birthday I adopted her an alpaca by the name of Andy Pandy. Part of the adoption package is going to meet and feed your adopted alpaca, and then you get to take them for a walk, or ‘trek’ as it is known in alpaca communities. Anyway, it turns out that Andy Pandy is very friendly. A little too friendly to be taken for a trek. Apparently, he suffers from Male Berserk Syndrome. Yes, who knew such a thing existed?! It is where he imprinted onto a human when he was too young and now he is overly-friendly and doesn’t ‘alpaca’ very well. Boisterous. A bit like Bambino Bobble Wilson, methinks. Other than that, Andy Pandy is a very nice alpaca!
Off to do some sewing now. I am two thirds of the way to completing my quilt. I’m approaching the unwieldy bit. I might need some of my Mum’s positive mental attitude in order to finish it!
Starting with the Sisyphean task of Leaf Sweeping 2019, I soon got into a goodly swing with the leaf rake. We have 31 trees in the garden and they are all beginning to shed leaves like there is some kind of leaf shedding championship going on. It’ll get worse before it gets better as the leaf shedding season is but still young, but I am determined to keep ahead of the job this year because last year (when I was still teaching full time) I drowned under piles of leaves during the rare dry weekend moments I had available to me for the job. I pruned back some bits of privet and holly hedge, attacked a few low flying tree branches so they don’t keep attacking me, spread some bark chippings in the chicken run, cut back the undergrowth around the oil tank so I can get close enough to measure the contents with my sophisticated measuring device a.k.a a garden cane, and weeded a bit of the courtyard. There was a bit of rose pruning, too, and a nettle massacre. I came in to start cooking Sunday dinner with the full intention of spending at least an hour in the garden EVERY day from here on in. We shall see.
I called my Mum on the FaceTime to see how she is settling in now she is back home. She informed me she has been scooting up and down the stairs to use the upstairs loo instead of the downstairs one because ‘it is good exercise.’ She has done some knitting (a llama toy) whilst doing her ankle exercises in order to stave off the possibility of deep vein thrombosis. The iPad screen bounced up and down at this point as she demonstrated her ankle exercises to me. She was cooking herself a bit of chicken and some vegetables for lunch. She did not look or sound like someone who had major surgery just 4 days ago. She said, ‘I managed to get into bed okay last night. I got a bit stuck at first, so I came downstairs to read my exercise booklet about how to get in and out of bed, and then I went back upstairs and tried what it said and it worked very well.’ I tried not to roll my eyes too much about the amount of stair climbing she is doing. But if she feels happy, then that is fine. She informed me she had adopted a ‘positive mental attitude’ towards all this and is determined to get back into her normal routine as soon as possible. Good old Mum! (‘Less of the old,’ she would say.)
Heather sent me some photos. Today is her alpaca trekking day. For her birthday I adopted her an alpaca by the name of Andy Pandy. Part of the adoption package is going to meet and feed your adopted alpaca, and then you get to take them for a walk, or ‘trek’ as it is known in alpaca communities. Anyway, it turns out that Andy Pandy is very friendly. A little too friendly to be taken for a trek. Apparently, he suffers from Male Berserk Syndrome. Yes, who knew such a thing existed?! It is where he imprinted onto a human when he was too young and now he is overly-friendly and doesn’t ‘alpaca’ very well. Boisterous. A bit like Bambino Bobble Wilson, methinks. Other than that, Andy Pandy is a very nice alpaca!
Off to do some sewing now. I am two thirds of the way to completing my quilt. I’m approaching the unwieldy bit. I might need some of my Mum’s positive mental attitude in order to finish it!
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