And since all this loveliness cannot be Heaven, I know in my heart it is June in Scottish Meanderings
- June 30, 2021, 7:03 a.m.
- |
- Public
So the laugh of the month is the fact that, after shelling out to get my side of my neighbour's hedges trimmed in my last entry, she went and got them dug up 3 weeks later! Could have saved myself some dosh!
It's fairly made a difference to the space and light aspect of my patch though I have to admit but I hadn't quite realised just how much privacy the front 2 hedges gave me. This is the view before and after from my garden chair.
Opens it up a bit doesn't it? And also gives everyone a lovely view of my desperately peeling rotten old front door which was nicely hidden previously!
As is obvious and should have been included in my last entry, there's a tad more greenery abounding in my front garden than the back so when the weather's nice, that's where I sit and although it's lovely to see more of the street when I sit out the front now I do feel a tad more 'exposed'. However I don't get so much blocking of the sun either so - swings and roundabouts.
I can just about manage to keep the grass cut and do basic weeding at the front throughout the summer and I'd like to carry on doing that as much as I'm able. I plan to get some more colour into it - some nice border plants for next summer, maybe another azalea in a different colour - I'm fancying red.
Can anyone give me advice what to do with daisies and weeds/moss in the grass? I read you can just pull them up rather than spraying them but when I tried that I was left with unsightly patches. I bought grass seed but can’t figure out how to put it down in just those areas but keep mowing the whole lawn (if that makes sense)?
When winter comes, I'm going to get the willow tree replanted over a bit because, as you can see, it's come off its stake and folk have to fight through it to get up the path when it's in full bloom! Trying to get Ruari in the buggy past it was a feat and a half I don’t mind telling you.
I might get the Japanese Quince bush at the door taken out as well and put something nicer up there - I used to have a lovely 'Buckeye Belle' Peony but it vanished for some reason so it would be nice to have another one. Or maybe a Laurel bush.
Reading Project
Ever since I was bedridden with the worst of the CFS, I've slowly started to claw back as much of life as I could. A lot of that was done by sheer hard slog - 5 minutes at a time, 10 minutes at a time, building up some strength and resilience until I was left with what I now call 'a diluted life'. But a life nevertheless.
Certain things still elude me though and for some strange reason, one of them seems to be reading a book. Not reading per se because obviously then I wouldn't be able to keep up with you prolific lot every day but there's apparently a block to picking up a book and getting immersed in it somehow. And it’s not the book itself because I picked out old favourites from the bookcase thinking I just needed to regain the habit itself but it didn't work.
For a previous avid reader this has caused me great sadness.
So I decided to make it into some sort of project and see if I could somehow get myself back on track with it.
I set out some basic rules.
I will read for 30 minutes a day no matter how bad I feel.
🤗
I will check to make sure I’m retaining what I'm reading.
🤗
I will not read anything I've already read (if possible).
🤗
I will choose from my own reading material in the house at first.
🤗
I will choose something I know to be good so is more likely to hold me.
🤗
I will keep track of books on Goodreads so that I can see the progress.
I decided the reading location was probably pretty important - at least at first - I needed a sort of nook of some kind with decent lighting which I didn't really have but made do with my tub chair in the sitting room and the lamp behind it.
I used to do all my reading in bed but that wasn't working as a viable time because I don't feel too well late at night so that would get in the way - or I would be so sleepy that I would only get a couple of pages in before the book would plonk on top of me! And I tried reading via a Kindle on my iPad or phone but that didn't seem to work either.
So last Monday in the early evening I curled up in the chair with ‘Conversations with Primo Levi' by Ferdinando Camon -
At 76 pages, it wasn’t too onerous in length as to be too off-putting. And it worked better than I thought - my half hour turned into an hour and a half and I devoured it all in one sitting!
Greatly encouraged by this, I browsed through the bookcase the next night for my second selection and decided on ‘The Guernsey and Literacy Potato Peel Society’ because it looked like a fairly light, easy read.
And I managed to do an hour without too much problem. The following night it was only 45 minutes but I’ve had another hour and a half stint since then so it's got off to a far better start than I'd hoped because I've been plugging away at this for a while without success. My fervent hope is that it will begin to feed on itself and start to give me the pleasure it used to give me before.
Ironically I found a very apt paragraph in it last night -
'That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and the tiny thing will lead you on to another book, and another bit there will lead you on to a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.'
That's exactly what I want to happen.
Mike
My nephew, Arran, messaged last week to say his Dad, my brother Mike, had been rushed in to the Emergency Department with a collapsed lung! Apparently he thought he had a bad case of hay fever or maybe a bad asthma attack so the doctor asked him to go to A&E for an ECG and that's when they discovered it. They drained it, he got the drain out the next night and they let him home the morning after.
Whereupon he went straight to work🙄 Just for a few hours though and felt well enough the day after that he was attempting some gardening. They said if he hadn’t contacted the doctor when he did it’s pretty likely he would have had a heart attack and may not have made it but they still couldn’t say what caused it.
I don't have a good feeling about this but I'm hoping it's just the normal dread that we've all reached 'that age' (Mike's 74) where something serious could happen at any time. He's been through the mill with heart problems having had a triple bypass a couple of years ago and he lives on his own - a bit of a loner with no family nearby - so I worry about him needing extra care because he would NOT be the kind of bloke to welcome carers or help of any sort.
Fingers crossed it was just a one off🤞(It doesn’t help that the other night I dreamt I was telling someone “I lost my brother two weeks ago” and it was definitely Mike I was talking about😳).
Alfie
So on Saturday Alfie (Nikki’s new puppy) was allowed to come to his new home and I was there to see the transition which went remarkably better than we thought it might. The plan was for me to go out on the Saturday rather than the Sunday because it was the girls' weekend for going to their Dad's and we thought less people might be a good idea for his first day. However Joel's fiancée, Sarah, was expecting her first baby at any minute and they were just waiting on a call from the hospital for her to go in and be induced so the girls were staying at home.
I still went out because it was easier for Nikki to go up for him with just Lily and then I could stay and look after Lilah and Ruari. When they came back, we all stayed in Nikki's bedroom at first to try and get him used to a small space and his cage and he did well with that, making friends with my slipper and Ivy in equal measure (Poppy just did a lot of sniffing the air and Daisy took off once she got some biscuits, no doubt packing her case for pastures new :)
Then we took him out to the garden in case he wanted to pee and he did a lot of exploring out there and got used to his collar and lead. He didn't seem phased by the number of people or cats or anything although kept flaking out in exhaustion every so often which was really sweet. He ate some food and later did a pee and a poo in the garden which Nikki got terribly excited about, thinking she was going to have to deal with little accidents all over the place at first!
I left them at 9 p.m. playing in the sitting room -
Her plan was to try and tire him out for bedtime then put him in his cage at the bottom of the bed but she sent me a text at 11 saying 'the crate training is going splendidly' and this pic -
- beaten down by copious whining! And that's where he stayed sleeping soundly the whole night until she got woken by a lick on the nose at 7 a.m. which I would say was a pretty good first night all told. Later on she took the cage into the sitting room and despite following her around all morning, he went into it all by himself when he wanted a nap and was quite happy with her sitting on the settee.
Trying to get him used to being in it when no-one’s in the room for when they have to go out is proving a harder nut to crack though. She can work at home for most of the holidays but may have to go to another nursery about 30 miles away for one week and obviously will be out and about with the kids in the summer holidays where it may not always be practical to take him as well. So that’s a work in progress but it’s early days yet.
New Stepsister!
Sarah had her baby - a little girl - on Sunday so that’ll be a different dynamic for the girls to get used to when they go to Joel’s. He and Sarah also got engaged on her birthday recently which I thought might do a number on Nikki but she seemed to be handling it quite maturely.
On Monday she texted to ask if I’d sit with Ruari while her and the girls went to the hospital to see the baby in the evening. I thought wow this is good and said yes. Then I got a text a couple of hours later saying Joel hadn’t got back to her so ‘clearly he doesn’t want them to visit’.
I said Sarah maybe wasn’t ready for visitors yet and from experience, I know that the birthing partner gets inundated with messages, calls and texts from friends and family after a baby is born and it takes an inordinate amount of time to reply to them all so Joel could be a bit overwhelmed with everything. (Nikki and Joel weren’t together when the girls were born and he wasn’t at either of the births).
‘I suppose but his kids should come first’ she replied.
I had to quietly chuckle at the irony of that statement!! Maybe we're not quite at 100 per cent maturity after all :)
It's fairly made a difference to the space and light aspect of my patch though I have to admit but I hadn't quite realised just how much privacy the front 2 hedges gave me. This is the view before and after from my garden chair.
Opens it up a bit doesn't it? And also gives everyone a lovely view of my desperately peeling rotten old front door which was nicely hidden previously!
As is obvious and should have been included in my last entry, there's a tad more greenery abounding in my front garden than the back so when the weather's nice, that's where I sit and although it's lovely to see more of the street when I sit out the front now I do feel a tad more 'exposed'. However I don't get so much blocking of the sun either so - swings and roundabouts.
I can just about manage to keep the grass cut and do basic weeding at the front throughout the summer and I'd like to carry on doing that as much as I'm able. I plan to get some more colour into it - some nice border plants for next summer, maybe another azalea in a different colour - I'm fancying red.
Can anyone give me advice what to do with daisies and weeds/moss in the grass? I read you can just pull them up rather than spraying them but when I tried that I was left with unsightly patches. I bought grass seed but can’t figure out how to put it down in just those areas but keep mowing the whole lawn (if that makes sense)?
When winter comes, I'm going to get the willow tree replanted over a bit because, as you can see, it's come off its stake and folk have to fight through it to get up the path when it's in full bloom! Trying to get Ruari in the buggy past it was a feat and a half I don’t mind telling you.
I might get the Japanese Quince bush at the door taken out as well and put something nicer up there - I used to have a lovely 'Buckeye Belle' Peony but it vanished for some reason so it would be nice to have another one. Or maybe a Laurel bush.
Reading Project
Ever since I was bedridden with the worst of the CFS, I've slowly started to claw back as much of life as I could. A lot of that was done by sheer hard slog - 5 minutes at a time, 10 minutes at a time, building up some strength and resilience until I was left with what I now call 'a diluted life'. But a life nevertheless.
Certain things still elude me though and for some strange reason, one of them seems to be reading a book. Not reading per se because obviously then I wouldn't be able to keep up with you prolific lot every day but there's apparently a block to picking up a book and getting immersed in it somehow. And it’s not the book itself because I picked out old favourites from the bookcase thinking I just needed to regain the habit itself but it didn't work.
For a previous avid reader this has caused me great sadness.
So I decided to make it into some sort of project and see if I could somehow get myself back on track with it.
I set out some basic rules.
I will read for 30 minutes a day no matter how bad I feel.
🤗
I will check to make sure I’m retaining what I'm reading.
🤗
I will not read anything I've already read (if possible).
🤗
I will choose from my own reading material in the house at first.
🤗
I will choose something I know to be good so is more likely to hold me.
🤗
I will keep track of books on Goodreads so that I can see the progress.
I decided the reading location was probably pretty important - at least at first - I needed a sort of nook of some kind with decent lighting which I didn't really have but made do with my tub chair in the sitting room and the lamp behind it.
I used to do all my reading in bed but that wasn't working as a viable time because I don't feel too well late at night so that would get in the way - or I would be so sleepy that I would only get a couple of pages in before the book would plonk on top of me! And I tried reading via a Kindle on my iPad or phone but that didn't seem to work either.
So last Monday in the early evening I curled up in the chair with ‘Conversations with Primo Levi' by Ferdinando Camon -
At 76 pages, it wasn’t too onerous in length as to be too off-putting. And it worked better than I thought - my half hour turned into an hour and a half and I devoured it all in one sitting!
Greatly encouraged by this, I browsed through the bookcase the next night for my second selection and decided on ‘The Guernsey and Literacy Potato Peel Society’ because it looked like a fairly light, easy read.
And I managed to do an hour without too much problem. The following night it was only 45 minutes but I’ve had another hour and a half stint since then so it's got off to a far better start than I'd hoped because I've been plugging away at this for a while without success. My fervent hope is that it will begin to feed on itself and start to give me the pleasure it used to give me before.
Ironically I found a very apt paragraph in it last night -
'That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and the tiny thing will lead you on to another book, and another bit there will lead you on to a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.'
That's exactly what I want to happen.
Mike
My nephew, Arran, messaged last week to say his Dad, my brother Mike, had been rushed in to the Emergency Department with a collapsed lung! Apparently he thought he had a bad case of hay fever or maybe a bad asthma attack so the doctor asked him to go to A&E for an ECG and that's when they discovered it. They drained it, he got the drain out the next night and they let him home the morning after.
Whereupon he went straight to work🙄 Just for a few hours though and felt well enough the day after that he was attempting some gardening. They said if he hadn’t contacted the doctor when he did it’s pretty likely he would have had a heart attack and may not have made it but they still couldn’t say what caused it.
I don't have a good feeling about this but I'm hoping it's just the normal dread that we've all reached 'that age' (Mike's 74) where something serious could happen at any time. He's been through the mill with heart problems having had a triple bypass a couple of years ago and he lives on his own - a bit of a loner with no family nearby - so I worry about him needing extra care because he would NOT be the kind of bloke to welcome carers or help of any sort.
Fingers crossed it was just a one off🤞(It doesn’t help that the other night I dreamt I was telling someone “I lost my brother two weeks ago” and it was definitely Mike I was talking about😳).
Alfie
So on Saturday Alfie (Nikki’s new puppy) was allowed to come to his new home and I was there to see the transition which went remarkably better than we thought it might. The plan was for me to go out on the Saturday rather than the Sunday because it was the girls' weekend for going to their Dad's and we thought less people might be a good idea for his first day. However Joel's fiancée, Sarah, was expecting her first baby at any minute and they were just waiting on a call from the hospital for her to go in and be induced so the girls were staying at home.
I still went out because it was easier for Nikki to go up for him with just Lily and then I could stay and look after Lilah and Ruari. When they came back, we all stayed in Nikki's bedroom at first to try and get him used to a small space and his cage and he did well with that, making friends with my slipper and Ivy in equal measure (Poppy just did a lot of sniffing the air and Daisy took off once she got some biscuits, no doubt packing her case for pastures new :)
Then we took him out to the garden in case he wanted to pee and he did a lot of exploring out there and got used to his collar and lead. He didn't seem phased by the number of people or cats or anything although kept flaking out in exhaustion every so often which was really sweet. He ate some food and later did a pee and a poo in the garden which Nikki got terribly excited about, thinking she was going to have to deal with little accidents all over the place at first!
I left them at 9 p.m. playing in the sitting room -
Her plan was to try and tire him out for bedtime then put him in his cage at the bottom of the bed but she sent me a text at 11 saying 'the crate training is going splendidly' and this pic -
- beaten down by copious whining! And that's where he stayed sleeping soundly the whole night until she got woken by a lick on the nose at 7 a.m. which I would say was a pretty good first night all told. Later on she took the cage into the sitting room and despite following her around all morning, he went into it all by himself when he wanted a nap and was quite happy with her sitting on the settee.
Trying to get him used to being in it when no-one’s in the room for when they have to go out is proving a harder nut to crack though. She can work at home for most of the holidays but may have to go to another nursery about 30 miles away for one week and obviously will be out and about with the kids in the summer holidays where it may not always be practical to take him as well. So that’s a work in progress but it’s early days yet.
New Stepsister!
Sarah had her baby - a little girl - on Sunday so that’ll be a different dynamic for the girls to get used to when they go to Joel’s. He and Sarah also got engaged on her birthday recently which I thought might do a number on Nikki but she seemed to be handling it quite maturely.
On Monday she texted to ask if I’d sit with Ruari while her and the girls went to the hospital to see the baby in the evening. I thought wow this is good and said yes. Then I got a text a couple of hours later saying Joel hadn’t got back to her so ‘clearly he doesn’t want them to visit’.
I said Sarah maybe wasn’t ready for visitors yet and from experience, I know that the birthing partner gets inundated with messages, calls and texts from friends and family after a baby is born and it takes an inordinate amount of time to reply to them all so Joel could be a bit overwhelmed with everything. (Nikki and Joel weren’t together when the girls were born and he wasn’t at either of the births).
‘I suppose but his kids should come first’ she replied.
I had to quietly chuckle at the irony of that statement!! Maybe we're not quite at 100 per cent maturity after all :)
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