The Garden: The Day After I Arrived Back

The garden has survived the winter very well all things considered. I did a first cut of the grass on Friday and it had not grown anywhere nearly as much as last year nor as much as I had expected.

These are not actually in the garden but in the field on the other side of my boundary.

But these splendid islands of colour are in my garden.

Andrew's tree: it survived.

I'm not sure what this is but it'll be a shame that I have to cut the grass and decapitate it all.

Close-up.

A lovely solid unscathed windbreak and cat hiding place.

The bird table used to be here. Heaven knows what theses seeds are.

Not looking too bad, all things considered.

Windburn!

CJ planted these about this time last year.

Tadpoles by the thousand

The pond's looking good.

The fuchsia need some attention.

The trees are ok thanks to Dave and Pat who replanted them after a very severe gale had corkscrewed them out of the ground. The stakes Dave used will outlast anything the wind has to offer. At 3" square surely they will. They will!!

Computers: Don't You Just Love Them?

I had a Good Day yesterday. Leastways I keep saying that to myself. I was all set with an 0530 start to achieve so much. The first thing was a posting on this Blog about my garden here. But 'twas not to be. My trusty laptop had a "catastrophic hard drive failure" - just after I'd remarked that it was doing so well. Who says that there is no God and that he isn't all knowing and that he doesn't have a very odd sense of humour. Oddly I was terribly calm about the whole thing. All my data was backed up except an up-to-date copy of my PGP encrypted files. The only ones of those that matter and that I don't have elsewhere are all my passwords and bank accounts and the suchlike which will be a real nuisance to re-create because I use such a variety of passwords with different user names and email accounts. Ah well. So now I have to decide what I'm going to do to bearing in mind that I need one because I go away on Wednesday. But, hey, at least I'll have a faster machine with a hard drive of more than 40Gb so I won't have to cart all my data around on external hard drives.

Back in Eagleton

Where are the saucepans? They should be in a pull-out drawer next to the sink. But the pull-out drawer is on the other side of the kitchen. Ah. There shouldn't be another side to the kitchen. Wrong kitchen.

The strange thing is that, when I woke up on Friday morning having had only just over 5 hours sleep since I arrived home, I knew exactly where I was. So why during the day could I not find things in a house I'd lived in for so many years?

I have come to the conclusion that my Geminian personality is running true to form and I really have adapted to having two lives, two homes (before I'd been living in a temporary home now I have a permanent home in New Zealand - one to which I will be returning in 6 month's time).

When I went to the Co-op in town on Saturday morning I was quite surprised to realise how much of a stranger I felt.

But all this will pass and in a few days. That will be just in time for me to leave the Island to go to a niece's wedding and then bring my Brother - CJ - back here for a while.

So there we are the first of the new postings on this Blog. Hopefully the next one will be a bit more interesting.