Being Dave Gorman-ish

Dave Gorman is a British comedian who made a name for himself by finding all (well, enough for a tv show) the other Dave Gormans in the world and then going to meet them.

I thought of him the other day when I googled myself (not out of vanity, it was a work thing..... no really it was...), and I was not only not the only person with my name in the googliverse, but the other one (who is a healthcare worker in Saskatchewan apparently) topped me in the results.
Queenie lost the top spot in her own SEO project... doesn't bode well for her future in deh world of deh online ...

But actually, after the shock, I was really thrilled. I have a very unusual name, so finding an exact namesake was pretty cool after about eight years of intermittent searching.

So then this evening I thought... Twitter has a search function...

And I'm able to blog because Himself and Little 'Un have gone fishing without me. Not that I wasn't invited. But it was that kind of invitation you get after they've spent four hours in the shed getting two rods ready and preparing the worms for trout and the thingummies for mackarel just in case, and discussed possible spots for both possibilities and packed the car and put on their fishing boots and are heading out the door sort of pretending I am welcome to come along.

So I said no.

Because if I were to go there would be delays because there would have to be blankets and chairs and thermos', and strawberry shortcake and all kinds of shenanigans. Which is why I don't get invited in the first place.

So it's all good.

I went mackarel fishing once and caught about fifty and it truly was the coolest thing I've ever done apart from taking the hooks out of their poor mouths and killing them.

Anyways, back to Twitter... where nobody dies... unless they're tweeting from Iran.

First of all I put my surname in the search engine and came up with someone who loved my brother's online tennis commentary from Wimbledon so much they posted it to Twitter.

Tennis?

Tennis!!!!!!!!!!!

D'ya have strahwbrees widdat, Baz?

So then I got myself orientated and typed my surname into the Find People engine which is what I meant to do (although it is always nice to see my brother online).

Aaron from Dallas, known as GoPearl, is an artist and writer who works hard saving companies money on their telecommunications. And only tweets about that. He sounds like a typical corporate dick, which is a pity because he's probably miserable (well I would be if I was an artist that had to spend all my time being a corporate dick).

Aaron, what you need to do dude, is to engage in the family tradition of sarcasm loaded with irony in your tweeting, in order to survive. Probably wouldn't save the companies that much money though.
300 followers.

Such a waste of a perfectly good following...

Benjamin from Arizona, otherwise known as Skulljammer is a comic book writer and has been up for 54 hours meeting deadlines.
120 followers. (plus me now so 121).

Dave won't say where he's from but he's moaning about the absence of UK adapters and he sounds like a Brit. He's here for a good time, not a long time.
34 followers.

Probably should vote for mr cameron next time then dave, if you're so fucking jingoistic you can't buy a universal adapter, yet so embarrased you can't put BRIT on your profile.

Matt from Phillie State doesn't like to use his full 140 chtrs. 'chillin'. 'summer'. 'witness'. etc. Having said that, he mourns the passing of Harry Kalas, the celebrated Phillie sports commentator who passed away during a commentary recently.
34 followers too.

A man of few words.

Must be from the Queen Dad branch of our surname tree.

Scott, also known as Mr. Blur, who is from a phone number rather than a place, is an avid cyclist who is tired of people thinking the world is their ashtray.
31 followers.

Well, guess what, Scott, me and my big fuck-off SUV, we're tired of people thinking the world is their velodrome.

Shannon, otherwise known as Supergrrrl, from Toronto is funny. And the first girl on the list.
30 followers. One of which is The Onion.

Attagirl!!!

John is my personal favourite. He appears to be in Iran, and he has the mullet to blend in well. But he's no Persian so far as I can see.
Give me liberty or give me death.
28 followers.

Here's a thought. You could actually pretend you were somewhere you weren't and tweet about it and get away with it, couldn't you... or am I missing some major Twitter honesty protocol.

This is my problem with Twitter.

That and the fact that the person from The Coast who is tweeting from the virgin mudfest is either really stressed or getting really drunk and incomprehensible, so even if I wanted to memorise the tweets and pretend I was at the concert I might make a big faux pas.... but then I could just pretend I was drunk....

which really is the key issue I have with twitter.

there is no truth protocol when you are dealing with 140 characters or less.

Having said that, look at all the nice people with whom I share DNA whom I have tracked down in just one hour.

There are pages and pages and pages of people with my surname on Twitter.

Follow one. Just for the hell of it.

Me, I'd go for the BeachBandito, otherwise known as Bruce.

That's me when I'm old.

Without the beard obviously.

Foggy times in the Maritimes

"To get people to care about your blog they have to not care at all about your "blog." And they shouldn't. Just words on a page, after all. They need to care about things much more interesting than that.Those things are: The story. The content. The offer."

I am stealing these words from a PR guy in Halifax, Joel, who describes himself as a vegan nerd and marketing asshole. Which I like. He has a blog about social media which you can read here.

He goes on to talk about different types of offer, and the content/ story they should contain.

I fall into his what happens in my life variety blogger I think.

The offer: catch up on what I'm doing without paying for a phone call/ reading FB/ writing me an email to ask whassup.

The content: sporadic, a bit same same, and generally self-obsessed.

The story: right now the story is that there's been no sun here for a long long time and so everyone in Halifax is becoming mildly psychotic, including me and Himself.

So yeah, sporadic, same same, self-obsessed, mildly psychotic post coming up.

If I could be arsed.

Maybe I'll just check the Weather Network again instead ... to see if the Weather Canada joke's finished.

The joke being that the prairie foodbowl is suffering a terrible drought this summer and we are flailing in fog and drowning in mizzle here on the Eastern Shore.

I have already checked it twelve times today.

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/index.php?product=weather&placecode=CANS0057#ltermfx

OHMYGOD... the sunshine peeping out from the clouds picture is up for Sunday!!!

No wait, it says cloudy periods.

Cloudy periods means the cloud cover will be so deep that it can creep into the house when we are asleep and make our hair wet, like it did last night.

Thunder storm tonight.. oh goody.

Maybe it will clear the air, said Himself.

Maybe. Maybe the psychotic stress headache we are all getting from the humidity will go away and then the sun will come out in our hearts, if not in our atmosphere.

Maybe.

Tina called to see if we wanted to go camping.

Apart from the fact that we lent all our gear away for the weekend... eh no, I am not spending tonight in a thunder storm in a tent that is located five hours drive from here, I said.

Only 60% chance of a storm, she said. We're leaving right now if you want to come.

I love Tina. She is the most optimistic person I know.

And they are going to New France. Where the sun always shines...

No, I'm too depressed.

Canada Day, I spent trying to plant our vegetable garden up to my knees in mud.

There is nothing more irritating than being completely mud-struck while being harassed by enormous horse flies.

Enormous horse flies who were vying with the blackfly and the mosquitos for the tasty bits of me located at the base of my spine, my ears, my elbows and the bits of the backs of my knees that were above the mudline.

I lost it.

FUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKING STOOOPIDDDD COUNTRYYYYY!!

I threw the spade down and watched it get sucked into the ooze that is my dream garden.

IWANNAGOHOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Poor Himself.

He always thinks I want to go home when I cry and say I want to go home.

Oh lord, he says, trying to cheer me up, imagine what the pioneers must have felt like!

IMAGINE??????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IDON'TNEEDTOEFFIN'IMAGINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I started looking around with that look in my eye that Himself knows means I am looking for something to kick to death so he ran into the house and got me a beer and made me drink it so I got the hiccups the way you do when you are crying and drinking a beer really fast at the same time, so the horseflies won't get it.

After a while it kicked in and I felt better.

But the sun better come out soon.

DO YOU HEAR ME, MR. FOG???

Universal engager with the private

What a lovely occasion: Alice Munro celebrated in Trinity College Dublin (my alma mater of course... and the Queen Dad's.... and Gypsy's now too) for winning a prize awarded to her by a panel chaired by Jane Smiley, who was interviewed by Colm Toibin about that choice.

If I wasn't so delighted about the choice, I'd have Da Envee...

You can read about it here:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0626/1224249575138.html

Cabbages and cherries and things that go slime in the night.

Despite being at the tail end of sick in our house - Himself was the sicker and was taking killer antibiotics - we managed to have a nice weekend and get lots of yard work done.

I suppose I get to do the flower beds because I am a girl. And girls like flowers.

I am not one of those girls particularly.

I mean I like a nice herbaceous border as much as the next person, but you can't eat one nor can you donate it to Feed Nova Scotia come harvest-time.

Having said that, someone who used to live here put a lot of thought into the flower beds in front of the house. So I feel like I should resurrect them.

Currently they are buried in buttercups (hundreds of stringy roots with nothing to pull onto), dandelions (we all know about those bastards and the way they snap off and grow back), and some feathery weed thingy that has a root system comprised of interlocking elastic bands with a plant popping up every three centimetres along the elastic.

Really.

It has me stumped. I've never seen it before.

So I weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded and eventually cleared most of the weeds from one bed and saved about six plants, a hosta, some silver lace and a couple of gladioli that sat shivering in the cold tundra that was the newly weed-free zone.

Which meant of course that I had to go to the garden centre and buy fill-ins. I got a tray of Creeping Jenny and Allysium and some foxgloves (I am determined to have hummingbirds this summer) and hopefully they'll cover the bare ground before the buttercups rebound.

Mmmm, planting bedding is sooo much funnn.... not.

Himself and Justin who was over for a visit were playing with power tools nearby, in order to avoid weeding.

PZWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE..... 36 volts, man... that's a nice piece of iron, dude ... PZWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.................... listen to that, man.... hey, let's 'fix' the deck......

Prob'ly shoulda dug the bed out, said Justin, in between drilling holes in the deck.

Prob'ly.

The second bed is so much worse than the first one I don't know how I am going to even start.

Prob'ly should dig the bed out...

Goddamn, I hate giving into weeds.

As well as the beds in front of the house, we have four big deep beds alongside the driveway, made of old railway sleepers, which are quite nice but are painted a disastrous shade of rust.

To hell with flowers I thought. Just got in and dug the dandelions out and we planted veggies there.

Himself put the fully loaded 36 volt drill down and made himself available to supervise this, as veggies are much more interesting than flowers.

So I/ we/ us planted cabbage, broccoli, beets, chives and parsley.

Ho hum, a couple of hours passed and I was passed out in exhaustion on the couch with a nice glass of pinot noir when Himself went out to check them for the umpteenth time and realised that crumbly old sleepers are where SLUGS live.

So now we are on slug patrol.

Apparently, in a rare episode of garden alignment, slug genocide was taking place in Ireland at the same time.

Poor slugs.... there's nowhere for them to go.

Firstly, we cooked a big pot of mussels and ate them on the deck and then we smushed the shells up and sprinkled them round the cabbages.

Didn't work.

Not enough mussels.

Last night, we were out at 10.30pm with a torch killing them with a kitchen knife.

Thirty eight.

If you're interested.

This evening we found two, so we have put beer in jar lids and are hoping that the slugs will die happy rather than at the hands of Himself the Slugvader.

Of course, none of this healthy constructive positive gardening activity can call itself the real action of the weekend, which was the official planting of the cherry trees.

While I was deciding between the yellow bedding or the blue, Himself found some CHERRY TREES.

To go with the tomatoes, no doubt.

So we've planted our first trees here. A nice little milestone.

Saturday night, we tested our fire pit (built for Polly's visit in August). First impressions are pretty good - nice draught, not too much smoke, hopefully we'll have a wind-free week and we can have a couple of nice evenings in the yard.

JD the squirrel finds a new world order

The feud between Himself and the squirrel living in his building ramped up a notch last weekend.

For those of you not in the know, the nature of the feud is based in the concept of 'his'.

Which one of them is the 'his' that the building belongs to.

The squirrel, having spent the previous Fall and winter living rent-free in the building, thinks it's his building.

Himself, having paid for the building, is pretty sure that it is in fact his building.

The noisy chatter that he gets from the squirrel every time he walks into the building to pick up a tool (in order to do some work) PISSES HIM OFF.

What does that goddamn squirrel do but eat corn all day?

But my man is nothing if not slow to anger.

A veritable leviathan progressing through the Bay of Fundy when it comes to rage.

But even the calmest leviathan will swallow a Jonah, if he won't shut the hell up!!

That is why last weekend, despite my best efforts at averting revolution by cleaning up evidence of grand theft corn, Himself went into the shed to do something and realised that the squirrel had gotten back into the carefully wrapped-up sack of cracked corn (which I had carefully placed in the thick plastic bin) and there was cracked corn all over the building.

ALL OVER THE GODDAMN BUILDIN'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MY GODDAMN BUILDIN'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The squirrel had managed to eat through the plastic this time. As well as the sack.

GODDAMN SQUIRREL, BATHIN' IN CRACKED CORN HE IS!!!!!!!! LYIN' BACK JUSTA SWIMMIN' AROUND IN IT!!! THINKS IT'S HIS EFFIN' CORN!!!!!!!!!!

I could hear the roaring from the house.

I'LL SHOW HIM!!!

Retribution was swift and brutal.

Every kernel of cracked corn (and when it was all found, it was a substantial amount of corn) got swept out of every crevice in the building, and the whole lot was put out in the yard in a big pile.

NOW!!

HE'LL HAVE TO SHARE!!

SERVE HIM RIGHT FOR BEING GREEDY.

Suddenly the rabbits, crows, wood pigeon, robins, jays, chickadees and other critters who had spent months getting by on just a tincture of cracked corn, provided to help them stay above the critter poverty line (with not even an increase to help with recent rampant corn inflation) .... they are all in carbohydrate heaven right now.

PARTYTIME!!!!

All the daily foraging routines have been disrupted in order to partake of the sudden corn largesse.

I have no doubt that this summer will see abnormally big baby critters emerging from dens all over the yard.

The babies will no doubt turn into a me-me-me Critter Generation Y and will break our door down in January demanding carb-rich three course meals, $120,000 jobs, and/or better EI (I mean corn) payments if this largesse doesn't continue.

Last night according to Himself, we even had Bob Rae the big old silver raccoon who pretends he's not living in our yard, come along last night for a bit of chow.

Seeing as it was goin' a beggin'.

If I was the squirrel, I would take my beating and my sudden eviction from the squirrel Versailles that is our buildin' like a man squirrel, and go find a new place to live.

Because the squeaking of tumbrils is quietly, but definitely discernible above the rhythm of the waves that is the soundtrack to our yard.

If I were JD the Little Red Squirrel, I would seclude myself, reflect on my loss and return in a few years... when the corn is gone... refreshed, with a new, superficially sustainable way of keeping everyone fed.

But no. He hasn't the wit to do it.

He is camped out on the pile of cracked corn, fighting everyone off.

As if he can.

He has been there all day according to Himself, who is home with a chest infection.

Instinct has kicked in and he's an aggressive little bastard.

JD the Little Red Squirrel ... not Himself.

Why wouldn't he be?

He's used to having most of the corn to himself.

He's used to being the only critter who knew where the corn was kept.

He's used to having unlimited access to the corn, to people turning a blind eye to grand theft cracked corn, to squirreling away some extra corn for the winter.

He's fighting for his political life as they say.

All the fat he's put on over the last couple of weeks is worn off him.

Our crows - we have three of them who are inseparable and who have that brilliant dark sense of humour that crows sometimes have - our crows have him driven demented.

It's so simple it's beautiful.

Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre take turns to run at him, wings spread, until he panics and runs away under the building.

While he's cowering under the building, they pick slowly and desultorily at the corn, with their backs to him of course.

After a while he can't help himself and he chatters at them like an Albanian matriarch with four fields to plough and every son in a tower.

That's when they leave the pile to have a big lawerly convocation on top of the old pine tree, or to stare intently at something moving over by the lake. (Probably the mo-fo eagle nesting on the island).

Ahaa.... JD thinks!! The Fools!!!

Back he goes for a moment, and every time a swarm of starlings swoop down from absolutely nowhere, kick his skinny red ass again and grab their piece of the action while the crows stare into the middle distance and nod knowingly at each other.

JD has to retire defeated from the bombardment that is those locusts of the birdworld.

JD the Little Red Squirrel has learned two simple, irrefutable facts.

The buildin' does in fact belong to whomever pays for it.

And Himself, who paid for it, is a force to be reckoned with when his ire is raised ....

....

... We had an election in Nova Scotia this week.

It was quite the game-changer.

The forthcoming redistribution of the provincial corn will no doubt be just as entertaining to watch as the antics on Eagle.

Me... I'm rooting for the crows.

And scanning the horizon for starlings.

A Neck like a Jockey's B****x

As they would say at home.

GM has I mean.

General Motors, I'm talking about.

Or Government Motors as they call it now.

Here's their ad about the fact that they had to get a multi-billion dollar bailout from the taxpayers of the USA and Canada. I'm posting this mainly for the European readership - we have this advertisement inflicted on us approximately every twelve minutes if we are sad enough to be watching cable television.

The similarities with the all-American Budweiser beer commercials are obvious - they even have the thundering hooves of the American Mustang (which is a competing brand, no??) ... I wonder do they know they shoot mustangs nowadays.

Nice to see they're spending my money on getting down to business.... We're not going out of business, we're getting down to business.

Oh you are, are you? WTF were you doing up to now?

See, see, we have a photo of a solar panel in our ad, that means our cars don't use gas.

They just sold the Hummer brand to a Chinese company.

Roll on the resource wars...

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/06/02/new-gm-ad-breaks-online/

This ad makes me so mad I could spit. And its ubiquitousness means that it is being hard-wired into people who make their cultural decisions from televisual images..... which appears to be most people these days.

Terrifying manipulation of the people using their own money.

Can't we ban this stuff?

I mean, we ban drugs?

This is worse.

Headache gone

That's all I have to say right now.

Hope is giving me a headache

I've had a headache for two weeks now. The back of my neck is being squeezed by an unrelenting vice grip. And my stomach is in knots. Churning, burning knots that end when I sleep and start when I wake up.

This morning I thought, okay, it can't be the cold I've had. It must be stress-related. So I went through all the things that are going on in my life to identify the stressor.

I don't really have any stressful goings on in my life right now though.

Not compared to what's happened in the last couple of years.

Himself and I have reached a plateau of calm right now.

Of course, when I eventually figured it out, it's so blindingly obvious I can't understand why I didn't realise it.

It's election stress!!

Not that I'm involved in electioneering. For the first time in my life, I have a job which forbids me to be involved in the democratic process.

I am closely following two sets of elections, which are being fought by all the people I have worked with and cared for and fought with and yelled at and laughed with for the past twenty years.

And ironically (or maybe I am just the biggest election Jonah in the world), for the first time in my life, my friends and colleagues and comrades and fellow adventurers are poised to win both sets of elections.

No wonder I am weeping with the stress of the hope of it all.

Thank goodness I am not involved this time.

I would be a basket case.

Speaking of hope, this morning, I watched some of Obama's Cairo speech.

Into history he walked, loping onto the stage in that incredibly rangy relaxed way he has. Speaking in front of 3,000 people who must be so relieved to see a man who is supposed to be their enemy but who looks just like them. Quoting their holy book back to them so eloquently. Speaking about duty, the way their Muslim faith does.

I am not alone in my hope.

I listened to Michael Moore on the radio this week. He was being interviewed about GM. He was in no mood to forgive them their Flint sins. The interviewer asked him whether he was hopeful. He said he was full of hope for the future, because his new President was sly as a fox, and he reckoned if anyone could steer America back on track it was him.

Was this how my parents felt in 1961?

Himself was born 92 days after Kennedy was assassinated, the world was probably still grieving. I came along six years later, among the last of the Gen-Xers. With a few small fillips, we have only experienced a paucity of vision and leadership in our lives.

We have lived through the 73 Oil Crisis, the Northern Ireland conflict, the Quebec question, Reaganomics, Mulroney and NAFTA, Thatcherism, US meddling in Central and South American democracy, the hunger strikes, the ozone layer, the fall of Communism, continuous conflict in the supposedly civilized Mediterranean region (Basque separatism, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, Libya), Bush I, Monica Lewinsky, Bush II, 9-11+ other bombings, two wars over oil, the failure of the New Labour dream, the destruction of democracy in Haiti, Tianamen Square, the continual rearrangment of the rubble that is Afghanistan, the rape of the continent of Africa by disease and colonialism, and the gradual disintegration of trust in all of the political and public institutions we were (well I was, Himself is a total anarchist at heart) taught to believe in - politics, religion, public services, charitable organizations, educational institutions and most of all, the benign shadow of the Land of the Free.

Now we are nearly middle-aged, as well as the beginnings of chronic back/leg/joint-ache and the growing finality of the realisation that we will never ever be rich/idle/debt-free, we are facing into global warming and peak oil and the dismantling of the welfare state model round about the exact time we will be needing a nursing home bed.

No wonder I have a headache.

I have had my hopes dashed so many times...

Today though, I am only going to think about the fact that this time next week, the wheel may have turned a little bit towards my way of thinking.

Farming dandelions while Aloysius sleeps on

The sun finally came out today. As well it might, it being the end of May and therefore the day before SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I woke up at 5.30am because a) it was an amazing sunrise which my body obviously wanted me to see, and b) the virus that felled Himself and Queenie has morphed into the streaming nose bit, which is good because that means it's nearly over, and bad because I was sleeping with Aloysius Snuffelupagus last night.

No, I didn't know his name was Aloysius either. There you go. You never leave this blog without learning something useful.

I lasted until about 6.40am and then I had to get up to get away from the noise.

I banged the door on the way out of the bedroom just to drive the point home.

But it was worth the early start to sit on the deck and listen to the birds justa singin' their little hearts out. Susan Boyd my ass - I counted eleven different melodies, most of them coming from pretty drab little birds.

We have a lot of smallish, brownish type birds that I haven't nailed yet. As well as blue jays (but they don't sing, they scream), a pair of wood pigeons who sound like owls, a pair of robins nesting in a tree near the driveway, chick-a-dees, the woodpecker of course, and a bird that sounds like a blackbird but I don't know what it is here.

Today, Raven visited us. That's the first time I've seen him.

Raven is of course, very important in Aboriginal storytelling, and his role in stories is very ambiguous, so I don't know if Raven is good or bad.

Whatever Raven feels like being I think.

And Bunny was sitting in the gravel pile munching on dandelion flowers.

How do I get Bunny to sit in the lawn and do this....

I wish I had a million Bunnies.

I should just call what I do in the yard what it is and tell the world I'm a dandelion farmer.

Anyway, I can't type for much longer because my hands are sore from weeding. I spent all day on the flower beds and really you can't tell I did.

The problem is my response ability. It's not up to a Canadian summer yet.

In Ireland, around March, weeds start to poke their heads up, and you mutter, yes.... hmmmm... must weed that bed.... and eventually you either get it done bit by bit, or you are useless, and the weeds get big and then you have a problem.

In Canada, around the end of April, the ground is still frozen for the most part, and it's about minus 3 in the morning, so there's nothing to be done unless you get a great day. Then in May, you start getting everything ready (Irish style) ... buy seeds, plant seeds, water seeds, mow lawn, get compost, draw garden plan, browse stores which open on Mother's Day, etc.

Then it's late May and suddenly its plus 10 in the morning and there are a gazillion fucking weeds where there was nothing but mulch the day before.

So instead of the nice day planting you had planned you spend the day communing with the fecundity, wondering if this is a plant or a weed.

Thankfully, the plants are similar enough so that I know what is a weed and what is a plant, but they come up INTERTWINED...

Anyways, because of the early start, quite a bit of the list got done. Himself got up and even though he is still ill did his best to help out with the heavy stuff.

So the beds are done, the pruning is done... I made one serious error so one of my plants look like it shaved its head with a lawnmower... the path to the front door is freshly gravelled, the lawn is mowed, (we only have one million dandelions now), the whipper snipping done.

Himself even tried to do some transplanting in the greenhouse, but it appears to have been taken over by hordes of angry biting ants. Judging by the bites on his feet.

Those of you who know me know that several years ago, I had an extraordinarily bad night one night. It involved a tent, a carpark, a horde of biting ants, a one horse town in central Venezuela, and a carload of copulating gauchos. It was traumatic. Needless to say I won't be going in the greenhouse until they've been eliminated.

Getting places.

Finally.

Of course, after a day of sunshine, there will be one million more weeds tomorrow.

Surprises with the morning coffee

Facebook is full of Irish friends enjoying the sunshine of the June Bank Holiday weekend.

Goddamn them all!

Here it is not a bank holiday weekend.

It is raining.

And we are still struggling with whatever insidious virus felled us this week.

Himself is still asleep, so I made my morning coffee and perambulated around the garden.

I'm starting to realise I've bitten off a little more than I can chew.

Without a Paddy.

This morning, I found a pile of wild strawberries blooming by the side of the shed.

And a slug in the greenhouse.

Curled around one of the zucchini plants.

How did he get in???

Today I really need to start transplanting those seeds into the beds we put into the greenhouse.

The grass needs to be mowed again.

We have too much grass. We could just mow the lawn and nothing else and that would be a full-time job.

The flowerbeds need to be weeded.

The main garden beds need to be worked on - we don't even have them cleared enough for topsoil.

I need to whipper snipper around the yard.

I need to prune some bushes so they'll grow up instead of out.

And all I want to do is go back to bed.

Bah. Hate being sick.