nishatalitha

It has been a productive weekend, mostly regarding housework and gardening. We have lots of marigolds coming up between the poppies and daisies, so to give them a better chance at life, I shifted some of them out and found we had more than expected. There are some other things coming up as well which don't look like weeds, so I'll wait until they flower to see what they are.

We also have a Christmas tree, thanks to mashugenah who was wonderful and transported it for us and was very patient when I had a complete mind-blank as to where the Te Aro Community Centre was and thought it was in Aro Valley somewhere... It is a shiny and pretty tree. Very gaudy. We couldn't fit every decoration we owned onto it but we made a good attempt. I feel very strongly that Christmas trees should be radiata pine and have as many decorations on them as one can manage.

Today the three of us had lunch with a retired couple from church. There are various things we have in common, but one of them is gardening. So we now have a couple of baby parsley plants to replace ours, which went to seed, and four geranium clippings for brightly coloured geraniums. The clippings are in the ground, the parsley is yet to be planted.

I also made pesto from a recipe I got off a workmate. While not bad, it does have 1/4c tightly packed mint leaves and the juice of three lemons in it, so it's too minty and lemony for my taste. Don't think I'll use that recipe again. I used Italian parsley as the base (it just said parsley) and I don't think curled leaf parsley would have made any difference. It's nice to be able to make these things from herbs that are in your garden.

At last, it has started to rain. It's still muggy but now there is a breath of fresh cool air through various windows. Which reminds me, I should close the window over the hydranga before I go to sleep. It is the second night on clean high thread count sheets and while the pattern is hideous, they feel wonderful and call me now...

( SF Meme )

Since today has been nice and sunny and since C and I skipped church, we did stuff around the house today.

By which I mean we did some housework and some of the dishes and laundry and then maudlinrose and C hacked at the gorse with secataurs and a trowel. The pile I had left tripled in size and we could see more of the hill behind the house.

Then I made lunch and bl9_knt and purplesparkler came around, followed shortly by thesane and P. and they had a hatchet in the back of their van, since they were up here for a medieval camping thing and bl9_knt took the hatchet and chopped at the gorse and the pile is huge and we can see a house through the trees which was utterly invisible to us before!

We'll trim down the big pieces of gorse trees with the secataurs and buy a hatchet ourselves and chop down the trunks into firewood. Then we need to let our landlords know what we've done.

But C. is the queen of chopping with a hatchet - it was very impressive.

And after there was roast and potatoes and ice-cream and good conversation and I think I'm ready for bed now.

It's been a good day.