For most of the autumn, we've had the excuse that the weather at the weekends was just so bad that there was simply nothing we could do about the piles of rotting leaves, bent and crumbling shelf boards, exhausted plant pots with greying straw, wood offcuts, and plastic washing-up bowls full of rainwater. They just had to stay where they were and look ugly and offend any neighbour who looked out of their first-floor back window.
We woke up this morning to a howling gale but by lunchtime, the wind and the rain had subsided and we once again had sun. OH had used the morning to turn the spiced fruit that had been soaking in brandy for the last month into a Christmas fruitcake so he declared that, with the cake already in the oven, he couldn't leave the house. Alright, I said, I'm hitting the garden.
Hardly 10 minutes later, he appeared at my side as I was pruning our blackcurrants. "Only a third of all branches", he admonished, helpfully. We then compromised by pulling out a virus-infested redcurrant and then we both hit our respective strides, with OH cleaning the pond and myself pruning like a dervish -- the plum tree, the apple tree, the fig tree, the broom, the little box shrub in a pot, bits of conifer hedge, the lemon balm, some raspberries... Then I ran out of things to prune and decided to tackle the half-collapsed battery of water butts behind the shed. Four big full rainwater butts had stood there for more than a year now, but because I hadn't placed them on the correct base, the bottoms of two of them had curved around the beer crates that I'd put them on, with the weight of all that water. They were leaning into each other and into the thin fence with next-door. I drained all four tubs, dispensing with about 500 litres of brackish rainwater, and OH helped me move them out from their tight spot behind the shed so that they can get a good wash in the rains that have been forecast for tonight. Got the ladder and cleaned the leaves out of the guttering -- felt very virtuous. Then I moved that horrible clown-coloured metal shelf system that we've inherited from the previous house owners years ago behind the shed. I'm going to use it to stack some of that almost-free greenwood we've cut.
In anticipation of the worst winter of the last 100 years (says one weather forecaster), I've finally moved all the potted plants that we haven't managed to plant yet out of the outdoors Victorian bathtub on the patio, where I'd kept them all this time, and onto soil, with warming leafmould piled up around them to protect them from the frosts. Hope it'll work.
Experimentally, we didn't fire up the woodburner this morning so all the house has had is 2 hours of central heating early this morning. It's now 19 degrees in the living room -- it was 20 degrees this morning because the chimneybreast has been radiating last night's heat. 19 degrees is not massively comfortable but I'm still sitting here in a t-shirt so the insulation the house has received this year is clearly having an effect. Going to hoover the living room now, then start up the fire... lovely. By this point, OH will have vacated the bath so that I can have a quick rinse. Because there's so much methane involved in cleaning away so much soggy, half-rotten organic matter, I now smell like a cow.
Tonight, I might do 2 things: OH has tasked me with designing a bottle label for one of his brews and has accepted my suggestion of something abstract-expressionist so I could whip out my graphics tablet and attempt a half-arsed doodle while watching Tatort on German television with one eye. This would be especially enjoyable since I've just read about the govt's proposal to increase the minimum unit price of alcohol to between 40 and 50p to discourage people from binge drinking, meaning you'd now be looking at paying at least £1 per pint of beer or cider at the supermarket. Wow, I thought when I read that. That is, as Sir Humphrey would say, "courageous". Not that it really bothers me though. I'm more of a milk drinker and the price per pint is currently 25p if I buy Tesco Creamfield. And OH has been producing very quaffable cider out of Lidl apple juice for perhaps 40p a pint if you also include the cider yeast and various sundries needed for making the stuff yourself.
The other thing I might do is to continue trying to get my head around GameMaker, a computer game-making software you can download for free. I'd already given it a go last Christmas and made a Bouncing Fruit Salad with Bombs type of game, but had then not done anything with it since. But I've got some good new ideas for games and really want to put something together. Yesterday evening, I'd been working on a scrolling-shooter game with flying planes over water firing virtual bullets, and all I managed to sort out was a couple of different animated propeller airplane gifs. At least I got them to fly and appear randomly and fire. Unfortunately, when I got to the next level, I must have programmed something wrong because instead of one plane, I suddenly had two on top of each other -- they'd doubled at the next level. Must look at the task tree to see where the mistake is.
Postscript from the pheasant: just had the last of the pheasants and dumplings for our evening meal and, sure enough, I bit on shot. Thankfully not hard -- my right molar still seems in one piece, and only its filling seems somewhat compacted -- but it did put me off game birds a bit. Maybe I should invest in a second-hand metal detector to run over the meat?
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