16 April 2023 (Sunday) - Gardening, Tenyham

 

Again I woke feeling like death warmed up. I lay in bed for a while hoping I might nod off, but didn’t, so I got up in the naive hope that I might perk up.
I made toast; I say “made”, I actually burned the stuff. How did that happen? The toaster usually only warms the bread at most. But the lap-top sprang into action far faster today than it has done for some time.
 
I had a little look at the Internet. It was still there. This morning my Facebook feed was somewhat political. There was a lot of stuff about the ongoing NHS strikes with some of the more vocal people having no qualms at all about showing their ignorance. Extremely right-wing minority parties aren’t going to support strike action. Do union activists *really* not realise this?
And there were a lot of posts about the local elections. All from either the independent candidates (who have formed their own party!) or from the Conservatives who now go under the name of “local Conservatives” presumably to distance themselves from the national party? There has obviously been some squabbling behind the scenes though; my local independent candidate was the Conservative mayor the last time I looked. And an independent in a neighboring ward used to be as thick as thieves with the local Green gang.
For some reason neither the dribbling democraps or the Labour party seem to be making much of an effort on social media locally. Have they given up?
 
Being up far too early I left “er indoors TM and the dogs sleeping and started farting about in the garden. First of all I got the old fluorescent tubes out of the two pond filters. That took some doing; the filters instructions say the fluorescent tubes need changing every year (which they do) but they give absolutely no guidance or instruction about how you actually get the things out. Getting the tubes out is easy; getting them out without destroying the filter is entirely a different matter.
I then took the old leaking poggered hose pipe off of the reel and pulled off the bit that connected it to the tap. Well… I tried to pull it off. It wasn’t going anywhere. Eventually a Stanley knife showed it the error of its ways. I attached it to the new hose pipe I got last weekend, run it out and set up my pond filter cleaning arrangement in which I suspend a humungous flowerpot over the drain and wash the fish poo out of the filters.
A minute to type; two hours to do.
 
By then “er indoors TM was up and about so we installed dog-proofing into her car. Yesterday when we went out (and came back) we started with three boot dogs and ended up with only one as the puppies jumped the back seats. Now (to their disgust) they stay put.
We drove up to Tenyham to carry on the Munzee mission that we started yesterday, adding sixty to the clan total, and getting myself a “Beginner Cubimal Wrangler” badge whilst I was at it. With ten of us in the clan and five hundred “Greenies” needed between us, in theory that is fifty each. In practice our clan is world-wide and some are currently in sub-zero temperatures and understandably aren’t keen on scraping the ice off of lamp posts to find the bar codes to scan.
Whilst we were at it we found ourselves walking past two puzzle geocaches that I’d solved ages ago, so we did the geo-thing with those.
As we walked we saw an aquatic shop so I got a couple of new fluorescent tubes.
 
We came home. The dogs went to sleep, and I installed the new tubes into the filters. Far easier to type than to do. After an hour’s fighting I finally got the filters going. They are leaking a bit, but the leaking water is dripping back into the pond.
I then relocated our humungous “Neptune” statue to behind the filters; I think he looks better there. And then it was time to mow the lawn and pull weeds out of the gravel.
After two hours this morning and another two hours this afternoon the garden looks pretty much the same as it did when I started.
I hate gardening; such an ultimately futile exercise.
 
“er indoors TM boiled up a very good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst Bailey snarled at the telly. She really wasn’t impressed with “Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly”.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so busy in the garden earlier. I’ve caught the sun, I really ache, and the cold has moved on to my chest.
I’m fed up with feeling grotty…
 
And today marks two years since my little Fudge died…

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