A VERY HOT Weekend.

I can't believe how HOT it has been this weekend.  It is still 28 degrees outside in the shade this evening and almost 8.30 pm...  I am absolutely dripping - I can't move without breaking out into a sweat.  Okay so that is probably a bit of a gross way to start a post, but it is what it is. HOT.  Definitely a heatwave for sure.

I think it was even hotter today than it was yesterday as yesterday morning I managed to get some gardening done by mid morning - today I have barely done anything - it has just been far too hot for me.  Gosh never thought I would say that!

So here we have Saturday morning in the garden:

Before:

After:

Much tidier.

Before:

After:

Tomato plants also staked up.

I also weeded the above bed, but more difficult to tell in this photo.

I dug up some more potatoes in the orchard garden as well as beetroot, a couple of onions, radish (which I had for lunch yesterday) and picked a load of beans which I prepared and froze.

In the afternoon I did a little bit of art, but the paper wasn't so good for what I was trying to achieve.

I think I much prefer to paint things on smaller pieces of paper, than the larger sizes!

I am so out of practice, having not painted for several years now, I think it is going to take me a while to get back into it.

No photos for Sunday - as I say just too hot to do anything really.

Art on Friday

Gosh the last two days have been absolutely scorching!  Needless to say not a lot has been done in the garden.  I haven't gone for a walk either.  I was going to go this afternoon and then I remembered I was expecting my grocery delivery sometime between 2 pm and 10 pm and hadn't received a time (as don't often get a signal for the text to come through) and although it will probably arrive late this evening, I thought knowing my luck if I did go out for a walk, then it would arrive while I'm out!

I ordered an art book the other day to encourage me to get back into painting again.  I haven't got a book on how to paint leaves and flowers and saw this one, read the reviews and decided to get it. I am quite pleased with my rose picture, although not so much with the picture of the fern.

So this was Saturday.

I'm just loving the colour that is starting to appear in my garden.  

Pretty bluebells

Pink blossoms

Purples

Whites

A vibrant orange poppy

The rockery bank is really starting to come alive with plants.

I wonder if this is the same oil beetle I saw the other day?  I doubt it.  Busy chomping away on a blade of grass.

I cleared two round bins full of nettles today.  My arms are currently letting me know just how much I pulled, they are stinging and prickling away!  Doesn't matter how careful I am, I still get stung.

I planted out some of the courgette plants, and watered the rest of the seedlings and took notes about how they are all growing.  Tomorrow I need to put more earth in my potato bags, as I noticed this evening they have really grown the last couple of days.  I also discovered that some of the peas are starting to sprout in the very top garden by the compost bins, which is wonderful to see.

The sky was atmospheric again this morning on my walk.

I walked up along the cliff and then down to my local bay.

I didn't go for quite as long a walk today as I wanted to get home in time to phone my Dad in NZ.

The tide was a long way out this morning.

Tomorrow morning I plan to get up extra early as I want to drop an 'Easter' rock off at a house up the road where I know they have a little boy, and then the rest down our road.

I painted these today.  

Happy Easter 2020 wishes on the back.  

Hopefully it will brighten the day of whoever finds them.  I won't hide them too much as I want them to be found tomorrow.

Last night I finished my little rag dolls

They now have hair and shoes.  

Decorating, Gardening and General Update Ramblings.

This Last week we had our lounge redecorated.  The last time it was decorated was in around 2005 if I remember rightly.  It needed freshening up and after the windows had been serviced and then painted this year it needed to be done.  We decided to go for a lighter colour than we had, but when the decorator put the paint up that a local shop had mixed, it was a completely different colour!  It was green instead of a very light yellow.  The shop refused to exchange it or refund and unfortunately as we hadn't paid the shop directly for it it we didn't really have a lot of comeback.  If we had bought it we would have stopped our Visa payment, but the decorator paid for it and then we paid him, and as it wasn't strictly his fault, and he is a good guy and decorator, we just had to swallow it.  But despite our efforts to support and 'shop locally' this shop has now lost any future business from us.  It was quite clear that it was a completely different colour.  In the end we decided to just play it safe and go and purchase the original colour we had on the walls which is 'Daffodil White'.  Fortunately I had remembered what it was!  It is now looking much better as the green just really didn't suit that room at all.

In the garden I have been quite ruthless with the pruning of my roses.  They had become far too big and straggly, so I have cut them right back and hopefully I haven't annihilated them and they will come back next year okay.  I have also really cleared out the bed beside the house as that had also got very unruly and overgrown.  Hope to plant a few wintering flowers in the spot if I can find something I like.

I've actually been staying up at my son and daughter in law's place while they have been away and have done a fair bit of gardening there as well.  I worked on their front garden, it was very weedy and had stumps and roots, and various unwanted saplings coming up, so I dug all of them out and dug the garden over.  

They live near a canal so I have been enjoying some walks along the canal (have already posted two of my walks) and also a lot of footpaths through fields and have been enjoying walking those as well.  They are very lucky to live where there are so many lovely walks to do straight from the house - especially without the constant roar of the horrid M25 which is what we have round here.

The fields are starting to get a bit muddy now so boots are needed, but still very pleasant to walk them.

I had a bit of fun using the black and white setting on my camera.

To be able to walk round such beautiful fields and the canal on a daily basis has been wonderful.  Wish we had such nice places to walk here at home.

Back home now.  

We had the plumber come out yesterday to replace a radiator valve that was replaced earlier in the year!  It was faulty so it was replaced under warranty which was good, and while they were out we had our kitchen tap replaced.  This proved to be a much longer job than expected, for a variety of reasons.  We ended up not using the tap we had bought for the kitchen as it turned out it was a quarter turn tap, which I hate as they are far more difficult to control the flow in my opinion and when your water pressure isn't very good, which is the case for our hot, it meant that it had very poor flow indeed.  Not only that it didn't sit right on our sink and wobbled.  Fortunately we had bought another and that had proper taps that you can turn and adjust the flow as you want, which meant the hot water flowed a lot better too.  Not only that but it sat on the sink unit much better.  We will return the other tap as it really was not fit for purpose.  Not only that, it should have said on the packaging that it was a quarter turn tap.  He also fixed our under sink water filter so we were able to reinstate that which is good.  So my above sink filter that I brought home from NZ with me, has been 'retired' for now.  It means we have more space which is good as well.  

This post is more for my records than anything else, so that I can look up the names of paints etc we have used and when things were done around the house.  It has proved an invaluable record for things like this.

I can't believe just how fast the year is going past.  I need to book my ticket to NZ in the next couple of weeks...I have been putting it off for a variety of reasons...as whenever I go, I never want to come back to England again!  It is so lovely spending time with my family, and so hard to leave them.

Day Thirty One - The Month that Was.

Photo of the Day:

Art Prompt: Own Choice

Raven in Flight

Gosh it is the end of the month already!  It really does seem to have zoomed past ever so quicly.

Looking back at October....

At the end of September I made a goal to clear my sewing studio by the end of October, thinking that having whole month I should be able to achieve such a task.  Well I failed - although I am going to try not to look on it as failure, but rather progress as so many other things have also happened over the last month.  I have made real headway on getting some actual treatment for my existing pain and also the pain that has plagued me since April.  Whether this treatment will work, is yet to be determined, but I am hopeful and that is a step in the right direction. Because of this I have had MANY trips into London which of course take up time.   I HAVE started clearing my studio, but to the outsider it wouldn't be at all obvious as it is still a complete mess in there, and now our dining room is a mess as well with stuff I have sorted to sell!  Perhaps it will be cleared by the end of November?

Over the last 21 days I have made 13 Ebay sales which amounts to 24 items, so that is progress in itself.  I also have a pile of boxes and bags that I need to take to the charity shop which I hope to do this week.  I have more items to list as well and hope to get them done in the next couple of days.


I managed to take part in the 'Photo a Day for the Month of October Challenge' on Flickr.

Here is a mosaic of days 1 - 30, with today's photo being at the top of this post.

I have also completed the 'Every Day in October' Art Challenge, although this has been a bit more difficult to keep up with.  I went back to art, but have to stop while having my acupuncture treatment as unfortunately this is on the same day.  I will try to find out if there is another group I can go to on a different day.

A Mosaic of Days 1 - 30 with today' picture at the top of this post.

I have quite enjoyed this challenge, although some of the prompts were really not my thing.  As someone who doesn't 'do' Halloween, quite a few of them were orientated towards that.  All pictures have now also been added to the appropriate day as I had missed uploading some.  Some of these I am not at all pleased with, others I am.  But the whole idea was just to go with the prompt, not take too long over it and I think I have achieved that.

'We' have started stripping the wallpaper off the walls in our master bedroom, and hopefully that will be fully decorated by the end of November.  We have had to change our plans slightly as we were going to get someone in to do the whole job, but due to my medical expenses, we have had to change that, so now hubby is doing the stripping and prepping of the walls and the painting and we will get someone in to do the wallpapering, IF the price is right.  Otherwise it could be along time before it is ever finished!  Of course doing this has meant that now the lounge is full of stuff that we have moved out of the bedroom!  So I hope we don't have any visitors for a while as the house is quite frankly a mess.  We have also had the floor measured up for carpet, so now just have to go and choose some.

One week into October I decided to start going on the elliptical trainer/exercise machine (as well as the walking the dogs).  I have managed to go on it 13 days out of 23 (56 %) so far which isn't too bad, as some of those days I had to go into London and have various tests etc...  I have also started the physio exercises, and do those daily.  I am now on Day 4 of those. 

Another thing I have started to do is practice my clarinet again as I just miss it too much to not play anymore.  It still hurts a lot, but the pleasure I am getting from playing is almost counteracting that.  So although early days yet, I will see how I go. I have played 17 out of the 23 days, so have achieved 74%  - not bad, especially again considering some days I haven't felt like it, or have had trips into London.  I have tried to play before and I think I managed about three months before I had to give up again.  Hopefully with the treatment I am getting I will be able to continue.  Mind over matter as they say.  I worked too hard for too many years to throw my music away. 

I finally got round to banking some cheques, only to realise when I was paying them in one of them had been written out incorrectly - the words and numbers didn't match up.  Now our bank no longer has a branch locally it is more of a hassle to have to go to the bank as it involves driving, paying parking charges etc...  Such a nuisance our local branch is no longer.  Seems crazy as the population in our town has increased!  I hate to think what the older people do now - perhaps they have changed banks, I do know at least a couple of people who have done this.

Because I had to drive to another town to do the banking and pay for parking I figured I might has well have a look round the charity shops.  They don't tend to interest me as much as they used to, not sure if I just feel I have enough now, or because you can't get the bargains that you used to be able to get.  I did find one thing though for my 'old people' collection that sit on the picture rail that runs down the length of our hallway.

I haven't seen this one before.  Love the donkey!

November tomorrow!  The nights are already drawing in, and it was definitely a lot colder today than it has been.  It is pitch black outside already and it is only 5 pm.  Brrr...I don't like these colder darker days. 

Day Twenty Five

Photo of the Day:

'Rhapsody in Blue' 

It has been a really lovely day today, although I don't feel I have appreciated it quite like I should have done.

Something upset me last night, I didn't sleep well and it seemed to spin over into today despite my best intentions not to let it.

I did bake a lovely lemon cake for my elderly friends (both in their nineties!) and went to visit them this afternoon.  They are always pleased to see me and I was able to bring smiles to their faces, so that was good.  I forgot to take a photo of the cake before I took it to them!

The dogs went for their daily walk, in the sunshine today which was nice.

The leaves of the Maple tree in the sunshine looked so lovely.  I should have zoomed in!

Some yellow brightness in the garden.  Lovely to still have some roses flowering.

Tonight  for dinner we have got left over Pumpkin, Cheese & Onion Flan that I made yesterday.  It is very tasty!

Now if only I dispel this feeling in my stomach!  Clearly I let things bother me too much.

Tomorrow I have the second of my acupuncture visits - I am hoping that the positive effects last a bit longer than eleven hours this time.    On Friday I start my Physiotherapy sessions - that should be interesting.  I hope the Rheumatologist is right and that this guy is really good and CAN help me as I am paying a fortune for the sessions!

Art Prompt:  Hot Air Balloon

Another painting done completely freehand without drawing it out first.  Not especially happy with this either.