12 March 2011 (Saturday) - Back to the Garden



I was again working overtime this morning. I’m getting a bit fed up with working most weekends, but the money comes in useful. I came home shortly after mid day to find ‘er indoors TM in the throes of housework, so I felt duty-bound to join in somehow.
So I had a pootle about the garden. It’s now mid-March, so I turned on the pond filter, and the thing spouted water out of everywhere except the nozzles from which water should come out. I turned it off, took it apart, got stagnant water everywhere, reassembled it and found the leaks were even worse. I then shouted swear words at it, not because that would achieve anything, but because doing so is rather expected on occasions such as this.
I recalled my blog entry from Feb 22nd when I was at the pond shop looking at new pond filters and I wrote “The current one will (hopefully) do for this year”. Perhaps I’d spoken too soon? But before driving down to World of Water in Rolvenden for a new filter I decided to have one last go at the existing one. I eventually managed to stop the leaks. It’s fixed for now, but it remains to be seen for how long it will hold. I can’t really complain about the thing – it’s been in use for four days longer than the astronomy club has been going (a diary is a wonderfully useful thing sometimes!) But it will need replacing at some stage soon.
There’s another reason to be doing more overtime.

I then gave the lawn it’s first mowing of the year. Extracting the lawn mower and strimmer from the shed took some doing – they were buried under “My Boy TM’s fishing gear. But I mustn’t grumble – with his broken foot he can’t really do anything about the house.
The strimmer and mower struggled to cut the lawn – it really should have been mowed ages ago. I filled the compost recycling bin with the lawn trimmings; the lawn was that overgrown.
For all that I shall now be mowing the lawn on a weekly basis, and pootling about the garden, I absolutely loathe and detest gardening. It is an ultimately fruitless fight against the second law of thermodynamics (did I mention I'm a Chartered Scientist?) No matter what you do in the garden, and how hard you do it, a week later the garden will look as bad as it did a week ago. I honestly believe gardening is a pastime for people who have yet to discover the concept of "hobbies”.

Talking of gardens, for want of anything better to do this afternoon, we had a look round the new garden centre that’s opened. “Dobbies” had all the standard garden centre tat that all garden centres had, and quite a lot more besides, including a very good ale selection (!) The place was really crowded. I heard that Bybrook Barn garden centre wasn’t happy at the prospect of Dobbies opening up. I can see why.
As McDonalds was over the road we had a quick bit of pudding before coming home where I had a bit of a snooze until ‘er indoors TM set off for the Saturday night film-a-thon. I went along last week: this week I stayed at home with “My Boy TMand we watched the sort of (non-mucky!) films that his mother wouldn’t like. After two hours of World War One violence I ran him round the road to his friend’s house. I had a plan to get my telescope out, but it was raining hard. NeverWinter, here I come…

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