It was a rather warm night last night – I didn’t sleep that well. Being wide awake far too early (as usual) I got up and over brekkie peered into the Internet. It was much the same as ever. Despite the Prime Minister having extended the final phase of lock-down last night, there seemed to be more interest on-line in Jodie Whittaker not appearing on the cover of next year’s “Doctor Who” annual. There was speculation that this was because she is leaving the series. I’m wondering if this is because she was even worse in the role that the one they wheeled on in the late 1980s deliberately to kill the program off.
I sparked up Magic Map to see if the woods we found yesterday would be acceptable to the geo-feds for cache hides. I got rather confused with Magic Map, and eventually asked Gordon for help. He understands the Magic Map where I don’t. It didn’t take him long to work out that where I had planned had scheduled monuments on it and so geocaches wouldn’t be allowed. Oh well…
I then drove my car (with its full load of rubbish) round to the tip. Ashford’s tip has this system where you have to book appointments to get shot of your rubbish. There was an entertaining five minutes as the chap in the car directly in front of me hadn’t booked an appointment, and he had the right arse as the tip staff told him to go home and book an appointment and escorted him out of the tip (with his car still full of rubbish).
I came home, and with er indoors TM” doing whatever it was that she was doing I went into the garden and made a start on today’s project. We’ve had our garden pond for fifteen years and we are on to our second pond filter. The filter does a wonderful job, but it looks awful. A great big green box just sitting above the pond, I had a plan to disguise it, and with the camouflage netting having arrived yesterday I made a start on boxing the filter. Stage One was to simply build a box around the filter. Despite breaking a drill bit, it didn’t take that long to build, and it took even less time to find out I’d made it too small. By the time I’d got the box to the right size er indoors TM” had finished doing whatever it was that she was doing, so we got the dogs together and set out on a little adventure.
Pausing only briefly to collect Rolo (“My Boy TM” was having his boiler serviced!) we drove the family wolf-pack down to Orlestone Woods. Knowing it would be warm we chose Orlestone because it has a lot of shade, and we took plenty of water for the dogs. Sadly nowadays we have a seriously diminished family wolf-pack, but we had a good walk. We only saw one other group as we wandered; a couple of old men who were brandishing some sort of large net about. Were they catching butterflies? Pogo had seen them and wasn’t at all fussed about them until Rolo went up to see what they were doing. Pogo then got very shouty; he is in no way top dog (that has always been Rolo for all that he is tiny) but Pogo does see himself as protector of the pack.
Fortunately (like dear Sid used to) Rolo hates water so he came home clean. However Pogo doesn’t mind a paddle, and Treacle is the archetypal swamp-monster. They both found plenty of ditches in which to wallow as we walked. So having taken Rolo to his home we came home to bath time.
As er indoors TM” scrubbed the stagnant mud out of Pogo and Treacle’s fur I went back to the garden and did Stage Two of disguising the fish-pond filter: I got the camouflage netting onto the box I’d made earlier. Within minutes of my hammering the netting into place so “not-so-nice-next-door” came into her garden and made a point of making a lot of noise as she watered her plants. Now (I have to wonder) who waters their plants at the hottest part of one of the hottest days of the year. Was she deliberately provoking the dogs (again)? She did go indoors at the dogs’ first bark.
I had this idea to neatly arrange the netting over the box, but it didn’t go on as neatly as I’d hoped. In the end I clouted in as many clout nails as I could and tied the rest of it into place. With the camo-box in place it just looked like a camouflaged fish pond filter rather than a plain fish pond filter. But after a little judicious rearranging of the rockery it didn’t look too bad. Will the camo-box survive? It has to be said that the thing was built with no expense spent. I made it out of wood left over from when we had the roof done and from the water feature I built last week, and put it together with whatever screws I’d found when I tidied the shed a few days ago.
I then spent a few minutes generally pootling in the garden. Cutting back the jungle that pours over the fence from “not-so-nice-next-door” (I have asked her to pull it all back!) and pulling weeds from shingle kept me occupied for a while.
With er indoors TM” Zoom-meeting her chums I turned on the telly and watched something I’d missed recently. The second episode of the new series of “Inside No 9” was rather good. I shall pretend that the series started with that episode, and that what had been billed as the first episode was something else entirely…
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