Catch up

The plum and pear blossom has finished and the tulips are blowsy and on the way out.  The snowdrops have vanished and the cowslips have gone to seed.  Even the bluebells have begun to fade.

But I have hawthorn and apples smothered in blossom, laburnum dripping flowers, lilacs and roses in bloom, buds on the waterliles, new poppies popping out every day and the swifts and swallows are back over the paddock again. 

Sadly I found my first fledgeling drowned in an open water tub yesterday but the jackdaws are still busy in the chimney top.  I have robins nesting in my honeysuckle and keeping me company when I work in the garden.

 

Thinking of fledgelings, Felix at 9 months is walking now and says hello.  It's his genetic inheritance to be advanced <g>

Tags: Garden

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Ups and downs

An online buddy of mine has today blogged about things he wishes he'd done in the past and things he'd still like to do. He's made one or two other entries on a similar theme lately and he set me thinking.

Perhaps most people suffer from a more or less draining sense of ennui from time to time, or at least I do and no amount of counting my many blessings helps to get me out of it.  Of course it passes in time and I settle back down again altho sometimes the knowledge that I will 'settle back down again' is of itself slightly depressing. 

 

For myself, I'm considering the notion that I'm a temperamental yoyo under tight self-control.  I'm an emotional 'intensity' addict who's gone cold turkey. 

I also think that getting older is a factor, not because I couldn't still enjoy at least the highs of the yoyo, but because I can't count on beng able to recover ground lost while I was yoyo'ing. 

Yoyo's after all, are intended to while away children's time.

 

Does any of this make sense?

 

Wet Monday Rant

A few pics from my garden today

While I had my camera out today I thought I'd take a few snaps of my garden.  None of the planting is unusual or outstanding at all, but what's wonderful about it is SPRING! 

Bluebells:

Cowslips:

Pasque flowers:

Marsh marigolds:

Forget me not:

Tulip in grass garden:

Crab Apple blossom:

Plum blossom:

Awww bless.

Today my little dog had surgery to remove her dew claws.  She's either ripped them until they bled or torn the nails off on five different occasions and at last I decided that enough was enough.  When I took her this morning she was doing her usual sucking up rolling over adoration job with the vet until he picked her leg up to have a looksee and inadvertantly touched the dew claw she hurt last week.  Her whimper of pain was so pathetic that he actually blushed.

 

 

I fetched her back at 4pm. bandaged up to the gunnels - not that her gunnels are especially high.  She looks such a sorry little soul and altho she'll be feeling a lot better by tomorrow, her bandages have to stay on for 10 days.  No getting them wet, so the vet says.  Nil chance of them staying pristine for long no matter how careful we are as she's never been very accurate when it comes to lavatorial aim.  I'm awfully sorry for her, but I'm sure not going to be holding her over a drain to wee <g>

Eureka moment

 

My hamlet has existed for a minimum of 1000 years.  It is mentioned in the Norman Conquerors' Doomsday Book as having numerous farms, villeins, mills, mines, oxen and slaves etc and so I know for sure that it was thriving long before it was listed for taxation purposes.  What a sad thought - that people living here have been paying tax for a thousand years and we still have no drains or sewage other than that we provide for ourselves <sigh>

 

My 4 acre paddock which is the other side of my garden fence runs up to within 100 yards of the 13thC Church and buts onto the road leading to the Church, the parish Pound (where stray animals were impounded in olden times) and the parish pond and pump.  I think that's a pretty good reason for believing that people have walked and worked my land for centuries.

 

Yesterday afternoon found myself waving a metal detector, the hub toting a spade, the dog carrying her stick and 4 impertinently nosy ponies quartering the corner of the paddock nearest the Church.

We stomped up and down through horseshit until the air was a brown and distinctly pongy miasma.  Every so often I would go rigid with excitement as my skull was blasted by a piercing tone from the headphones and the hub would gird his loins and set to digging.  The very first hole went down, and down, and down some more until the spoil heap looked like he was digging a grave.  Yup, an old lead water pipe.  Followed as the afternoon went on by an old billhook, gate fittings, metal caps off probably poisonous agricultural cans and then one after another absolutely humungous shire horse shoes, the largest 11" across.

 

Then the battery went and I traipsed back to engage in a fruitless search for a replacement while hub and dog returned to the field of victory with a bin bag for the spoils.  Of course if the battery hadn't gone we'd have found buried Norman treasures, possibly Saxon brooches too, doubtless Elizabethan cape clasps, definitely something hugely valuable and historically exciting.

In fact, if it didn't look like there might be a spot or two of drizzle today I'd be out there right now.  There'd be no stopping me. 

 

Indiana Jones?  Ha, not a spot on me mate.

Don't look, no nix!

On Monday I took Constance to Lake Vyrnwy for the day and we walked into the hills alongside a river which runs into the lake, Connie whinging 'are we there yet' all the way.  Once we arrived at some falls I sat to get her drink and fruit bar picnic out and took this pic in which she's wearing her full complement of warm dry clothing:

 

 

Within 2 minutes she'd decided to cross the river by leaping from stone to stone; as she later explained she thought if Gyp could do it so could she given that she's 6 months older than the dog. 

Gyp could, Constance couldn't.  One very wet Constance had to strip off to her tee shirt - every other stitch of clothing was sodden with icy mountain water, and she mooched back to the car wearing only her tee shirt, wet wellies and her coat this time whinging that she had no knickers on and that Gyp was a mean dog for leaving her in the water.

 

 

10 minutes later she was going full pelt on the assault course without a care in the world.  Being 5 is fantastic.