Wedding preparations

Melanie was clearly relieved when last weekend I told her I could see no earthly reason to keep the rather attractive net curtains round the swimming pool.  We’ve been here over a year and I can see no seasonal advantage to them.  

 
We have occasionally had strays wandering around the garden, but, Ruth aside, we’re generally not skinny dippers and anyway the curtains sagged so that they would have hidden our own sagging.  So, the curtains are down.  The pool looks a little tidier and they will go to school as part of the charity fabric collection… unless of course Melanie’s looking for a budget bridal train.

Spring

Ruth was the first to spot signs of spring this year – possibly rather premature ones judging by how cold I am right now.  She took these photos on January 7^th.

 

Team work

We have mice, so we got a cat.  Now the cat catches mice.  I hate it.  When the cat wasn’t here, the mice kept out of the way.  They probably came and nibbled the butter, but I didn’t know.  Now Izzy likes to bring the mice into the sitting room to play.  Is it my imagination or does she like to catch mice on Mondays and Thursdays – choir and pub nights?  It’s not that I feel sorry for the poor little mice, though there are times she makes Abu Ghraib looks like Butlins; the problem is that I really hate mice.  I’m a wimp.

Bonny isn’t such a good mouser, though Izzy has been known either to give up or lose track of a mouse that Bonny then relocates, but she does enjoy the game.  It must seem to the mouse like it’s dealing with a small and intellectually terrifying torturer with a burly thug, silent but menacing, always over her shoulder (though in this case while the torturer’s tail flicks with evil the thug’s tail wags with unbridled enthusiasm).

Why our swimming pool leaks

I spent a good part of the week that Ian’s been away moving the “fleet” around.  The BMW needed its MOT and in order to get its certificate needed the tyres replacing.  The Mini’s brakes did something alarming the day before Ian left last week.  When the front brakes were fixed Wayne at the garage recommended we don’t leave the back brakes too long so I took it back in to fix that… and just to complete my week, dropped off the Subaru so he can see if he can find the leak in the washer water as now you may as well save yourself the effort of opening the bonnet and just pour the screenwash directly on the ground.

In the course of all these garage visits and because Wayne’s been unable to find the letterbox for dropping keys and bills, we got to talking about the house.  Apparently he used to come up here as a kid to swim.  I told him the girls love the pool but it’s probably not quite what it was, that it has a leak.

He wasn’t at all surprised: he’d heard Norman had had a little difficulty when a tree started growing through the floor of the pool.  I guess that could cause some movement.

I love that we’re still picking up little gems about the house.

Incy wincy hasn’t a hope

Storms are battering Britain today.  When the weather is foul our house feels rather safe, and yet not far from the elements.  We are well protected with few windows on the road side of the house and the garden side has tall trees and a hill behind.  So while we hear the rain and wind hammering on the roof, we feel pretty snug.

This morning I was looking out at the storm and caught sight of something blowing frantically between the trees.  I called Ruth over to look, it was the ladybird swing that had taken on a life of its own.  Ruth ignored me – she’s reading the Oz books Catherine gave her for Christmas.

As I talked to myself, there was a sudden change in the sounds nearby.  The water was no longer tumbling down the drainpipe but sounded like it was just being poured off the roof.  A moment later, more water noises joined the orchestration of the storm – a tap had turned on inside the house, right by my ear.  Water was pouring into the pool room.  It was being channelled down through a huge cobweb.  I called the girls to run for cups and the duster.  The cups were to catch the water and two were needed because it was pouring in so fast that regular emptying was required; the duster was because the water sieved through the cobweb wasn’t coming down evenly so there was no way of knowing where to put the cup.

I stemmed the flow and dusted… the ultimate multitasking.  But what a mistake.  With no cobweb the water just poured down the work into everything, the brickwork, the shelves, the curtains, the books.  Quick, find a spider.  I always knew dusting was a bad idea.

The problem proved to be relatively minor, a few too many leaves, plus a ball that shoots from a toy gun, stuck in a sloping gutter/drainpipe (what is the official angle at which a gutter becomes a drainpipe?)  Ian had already spent ages unblocking the gutters and the downpipes in finer weather (and bad weather too, if I recall correctly) so my task wasn’t too bad.  But boy the water was cold.