Last week was a particularly good holiday but (as I have found so many times) you can’t beat your own bed. I slept for nine hours without a break last night.
On waking I had a sudden panic about the puppies so shot downstairs to see that my coming downstairs had woken then. We went into the garden (because that’s what you do when you get up!). The pond looked OK, but until the thing is back to full filtration I shall be keeping an eye on it. The pups did their thing, and I gathered it up. I also found quite a few dried-up things… before we went on holiday I had a major rummage around making sure I’d cleared all the errant turds. Obviously quite a few eluded me.
As I pootled in the garden so not-so-nice-next-door was in hers. Had she looked in my direction I would have smiled, but she made a point of moving about so that her back was always to me. A feat which clearly took some doing.
I put some washing in, and made toast before having a serious fight with my lap-top. I’ve been using the Firefox browser for years but more and more the thing simply doesn’t work when I start up the lap-top. I start it and it hangs. So I close it and re-start it and nothing happens. Maybe after five or so goes it eventually starts working, so I tried using Chrome this morning. It worked (eventually), and I wasted far too long playing bubble pop games until the washing machine finished.
I hung out the washing, put more in then started a day in the garden. First of all trimming back the overgrowth from not-so-nice-next-door. That only took an hour. I then had a go at the bush overhanging from nicer-next-door before hanging out the undercrackers on my eco-friendly twenty-first century green technology (which some might describe as the clothes horse which I’d put in the garden). If we have to have a heatwave I might as well make use of it.
And then I made a start on sorting out the mess coming over the back fence. I really need to have a word with the chap whose driveway comes past the back of our house. The previous owner put the gate in the wrong place. According to the deeds of our house his garden starts once the drive comes past our garden, *not* before it. If he’s amenable to me giving the tree a pruning it won’t forget, all is fine. If he kicks off I’ll have to speak to a solicitor and that might get messy.
“er indoors TM” sorted a rather good lunch (there’s posh!) of baguette and stilton and as I scoffed it I suddenly has a stroke of genius. All morning I’d been looking at the fish pond; worried about the reduced water flow through the filter. Reduced water flow would result in reduced oxygen levels, and so many fisheries locally have reported oxygen crashes recently in which pretty much all the fish die simultaneously because of catastrophically low oxygen levels. I suddenly remembered that three residents ago in nicer-next-door, him who went off to run a pub gave me a load of stuff from his garden pond (that he’d closed down years previously). I can remember him saying that I had a pond and he didn’t, the stuff he had would be of more use to me than it would to him, and if I didn’t want it I should chuck it away. Being something of a hoarder I stuck a large crate of pond stuff in the shed, and today I dug it out. There was a rather large pump in there, and after fifteen minutes it was in the pond and powering a very basic fountain. It doesn’t look particularly pretty but it is making lots of bubbles, and that’s want the pond needs.
I then shifted the rockery about, scooped away loads of shingle and wired in the (supposedly) waterproof double socket to power both the ultra-violet bulb that I have got and the one which is coming. As I scooped shingle and hoiked boulders I uncovered a little slow-worm. Back when we first dug the pond there were loads of slow worms in the garden; I hardly see any these days.
All that I did today was so simple to type, but such hard work to do (and in temperatures over thirty degrees too!). By this stage I was ready to drop. I got out the Doctor Pepper and sat reading “Jeeves and Wooster” until “er indoors TM” said dinner was ready. And a very good bit of dinner it was.
I’m absolutely worn out… and my hand is so painful (from where I spiked a screwdriver though it yesterday)
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