Man at Work

I putter in the back garden messing around with square foot gardening. It generally falls to Bill to deal with the front lawns and garden, bless him.


And when he finishes this part, he has to go over and do the other patch.


I think he spends most of that time taking out and putting away the mower.

Round the Roundabout

It took me a while to get the hang of roundabouts. My driving instructor thought I was too quick in approaching them and too slow in going through them, but I have mostly got the hang of it now; in fact, I think they are brilliant. I'm sure they were invented for people like me who get misplaced and need to circle a bit to review their options.


Of course roundabouts come in all sizes from painted circles on the pavement to ginormous hills surrounded by cloverleaf highways.


I'm not a huge fan of our local authority, but I think they did a cracking job on this roundabout in our neighbourhood. I walked around it a number of times and I've seen others taking pictures of it as well.

12 Hour Birthday Cards

Margaret from the sewing group has been really patient in translating sock pattern instructions for me. So when I saw her birthday was this week I decided it was time to have another go at a fabric birthday card.


Enid's birthday was also this week and I didn't want her to feel bad at not getting something special as well. Also, Enid's 42 year old daughter, Dawn, died last month, after a lifelong debilitating illness. I thought it would be a lovely sight to see Enid smile.


In fact, I've always meant to do special cards for all the dozen or so ladies at the group, only things didn't seem to go to plan during first few months of this year. Anyhow, I made the two cards in parallel. Of course I only started at the weekend when I needed them done for Tuesday...


I used the ideas I learned from Ruby when she showed me how to make the sewing box. I thought the finished product was a few steps up from the one I made for Hazel, but they aren't quick to make. Loads of fun, though. And of course they went down a treat.


I hadn't finished putting Margaret's together when I went to the sewing group on Tuesday (and when I took these photos), but she only lives about a mile away and so I dropped her finished card off when I went out for a run today.

Pink Snow

I commented to Bill the other day about the lovely white and pink trees. He warned me that I only had about a week if I was going to


get pictures. So last Sunday I went for a walk to find some for you and I saw what he meant. I did finally find what I was looking for.


And then I got completely carried away with photographing flowers. So brace yourself...

Swiftly Flow the Days

Bill remarked the other day -- as he does around this time every year -- about how astonishing it is that the days are so much longer than they were in the winter. I'm always astonished that he's astonished. He has lived here all his life.

I will admit that the difference is noticeable. Just out of curiosity, I looked up the differing lengths of days today in various locations, and I was even more astonished (are we sick of that word yet?).

Newcastle, UK: 15 h, 5 m (3:24 longer than yesterday)
Oklahoma City: 14 h, 27 m (2:37 longer)
Salt Lake City: 14 h, 2 m (2:08 longer)
Los Angeles: 13 h, 40 m (1:43 longer)
Perth: 10 h, 42 m (1:32 shorter)
Sydney: 10 hours, 36 minutes (1:39 shorter)

Alphabetic Gardening

Those of you who know me know I'm not a natural gardener; I have to push myself to get the experience I need to improve my gardening skills. It came far easier to me to play around with charts and graphs on my laptop (in bed with coffee) or to put all my seed packets into alphabetical order to make things easier to find.


When it came time to get out and do some seeds-in-ground kind of thing, I discovered that my chart showing the month for planting (taken from a gardening book) didn't always match what it said on the seed packet. So I've ended up spending 30-60 minutes here and there going through the packets and finding what needs to be planted about now.

I'm not doing too badly, I'm down to Mange tout and as Dwarf runner bean seeds were filed under 'D' we might yet get some of those this year.



I managed to break the courgette plants when I moved them into bigger pots. I'd left it so long they were very gangly and caught on everything. Can't say Bill is mourning the lack of zucchini's, however, I may have another go yet.

Tomato and pepper seeds went in at the same time as the courgettes and they survived the transplantation. I need to get out there and stake them up with some panty hose strips for support soon!

Happy May Day!

Monday, the 4th of May is a Bank Holiday over here in England. What with getting a 4-day weekend over Easter, an early May Bank Holiday and a late May Bank Holiday, I always thought those two months were pretty brilliant. However, I never understood why a largely secular country like the UK would go so overboard about Easter when the US never has, or what was the significance, if any, of either of the May holidays here in the UK.

From cursory reading I find that May Day is a pagan celebration of their first day of summer, or of spring planting, depending upon which website one reads. I was sort of thinking that the early May Bank Holiday might have something to do with May Day, but apparently not.

You would be forgiven for thinking we all feast and prance around the village Maypole on the 1st of May over here, but I've yet to ever see it. In fact, the celebrations in this area appear to be few and far between. I suppose most folks are at work on Friday before the long weekend.


One website says that the US doesn't celebrate May Day because the Puritans didn't care for the holiday. No church cared much for the holiday, it would seem. In fact, Mayday and the Maypole were abolished in the 1600's over here.

I heard sometime soon after moving here that the US didn't celebrate May Day because it was connected with the labour rights movement. That didn't make much sense to me, as I didn't think labour rights organisations would be fighting for the right to feast and prance...

This website does a good job of explaining about the ancient history of May Day and then the labour fight for an 8-hour day in the 1880's in Chicago. It's a pretty scary story, actually, but most of us are grateful that we had 8 rather than 10-12-14 hour work days. Once the authors of this website go into the modern May Day stuff, I lose interest, though...

And why is Mayday the code word for a distress signal, anyhow? Turns out it's from the French, venez m'aider, meaning 'come help me'.


Anyhow, Happy May Day!