Waking up...
Escher the Brown Dog
Waking up grumpy. Silliest reasons. New Zealand lost the cricket World Cup Semi-final. One of my Jazz choir songs is too fussy-hard to teach. Another midnight wriggler (AKA a mouse), thanks to Minimus the cottage cat. And the possum right outside my window in the small Silver Birch tree, making gargling zombie noises. So rude!
Thursday March 31st
What to do? Ha! Get the dogs up. Face the day with a smile. Fix what can be fixed, and file (or forget) the rest. Simplify the jazz song (Chilli Con Carne) before next week's rehearsal. Forget the cricket - 'tis only a game, being played far away in India in the middle of my night.
Praise my cottage cat. Clever Minimus. Look for beauty in nature. Pretty big-eyes possum. But there's more! Take the dogs to the dog park. We all love the dog park. Then (ignoring untidy kitchen) make a nice cup of coffee, take a deeply positive breath, and go gardening.
Rose - Maybe Charles Austin
Then have a really good scrub in the shower and a hair wash, and put on subtle perfume. Cook a lovely meal for Non-Gardening Partner because he is really nice to the dogs. Oops - he's really nice anyway. He's mowed all the house lawns.
Will you accept this rose?
Then the Piece de Resistance - The Bachelor (oops) on TV, two episodes to fast forward through. So silly. Moosey, will you accept this rose? No way, Jordan, until you shave that silly wine-bar beard off and fix the back sheep fence.
Six Hours Later...
Much, much better! So what have I done? A great general tidy-up. I've dug out the Lavenders from the front of the Birthday Rose Garden - they've never liked it here. I've trimmed the perennial variegated Scrophularia, and pulled out some pieces which were mouldering (?) away underneath a large green Phormium. I've tried to nip all the dead leaves out of this, too. I've done the lawn edges, raked up the loose grass, and trimmed more Shasta daisies.
Winnie the Border Collie
And all the time Escher has been snorting his way through the depths of the garden. I think he has been following mice trails. He has been in a nose frenzy all day. Winnie has stayed with me, and I have thrown her ball hundreds of times. Rusty has been charging around barking at the bellbirds and the fantails.
Fluff-Fluff :- Fluff-Fluff is my most faithful gardening cat.
And in the middle of this busyness, Fluff-Fluff the Fearless (my big fluffy ginger cat) has been relaxing in the middle of the back lawn, sunbathing his tummy with his legs in the air. Somehow the dogs all manage to avoid him when they run past. Mind you, having always lived with big dogs, he has the sense not to move.
Friday April 1st
I was supposed to be going hiking today, but the hills are covered with clouds and drizzle. So the dogs and I have been out twice, and now we are going gardening. Hopefully it will be a good dogs' day. Escher!
Room for Roses!
Later...
Amazingly good, all the dogs and me. I checked the large flax that Escher was snuffling around in for hours yesterday. He'd uncovered some sort of burrow beneath the roots, and a quarter of the flax fans were rather loose. So I chopped them out, and in the process harvested a whole bucket load of red potatoes. Now this wee garden looks so much tidier, and there's proper room for more recycled roses and for some extras like pretty perennials. Thanks, Escher the brown dog, my garden director.
I'm very happy with the dahlias. I'm glad I grow dahlias. I'm extra glad that I remember to dead-head then, because this really works. They produce the loveliest colours to enjoy in the garden - particularly the sunset pinks, oranges, reds, and yellows. And many have self-sown themselves - so generous!
Oh, by the way, it's amazing that March has finished - that certainly was a quick march, hee hee! And it's April, which is the real autumn month for me. No April fooling around, either, and definitely no more grumping.