toastie weather

 My husband has just walked in with this:

This is what happens when you work just along the road from a Lidl - random purchases occur. Actually as we have no toastie-maker currently and Miss M is quite partial to them, it is a good thing (quite apart from it having a 'Singe-o-tron image burner'!).

But it's not really toastie weather.  It is warm. Really warm. I mean, for here. I look back on when I lived in New Zealand in my teens and wonder how we coped with temperatures of 20+ degrees all summer. A couple of days of 19.5 degrees and Scotland melts, men who should not expose their pasty beer bellies rip off their shirts in joyous anticipation of 'getting a good colour', red shoulders reveal white bra strap marks, and schoolchildren don't bother changing back from their PE kit after PE. And people mutter 'if that was summer we've had it'.

 Meanwhile in my garden the first poppy is unfurling,

 and the sun is showing up snail trails on the patio. Snails do meander a bit don't they? When the sun was at the right angle I could see metres of trail, drifting around apparently aimlessly but presumably with some sort of snail method in its madness.

 I know as a gardener of sorts I'm supposed to hate snails, but I just don't. I find them entertaining and endearing. The only thing I hate in the garden is dandelions, and that's only because the garden is so small and could easily get swamped in dandelions.

 There were several snails in the garden a few weeks ago and I painted spots on their shells to identify them, but either the paint has come off or this (or perhaps these - I'm not sure it's the same snail in these pictures) is not one of 'my' snails. I'm trying not to give it a name.

Whee!

There's a distinct lack of knitting or making of any kind in this blog at the moment. Partly it's summer term busy-ness and partly warm-weather laziness. But it's also that I had a weirdly swollen thumb over the weekend and at one point was wondering whether I'd somehow broken it without noticing - yeah, I know, how? But really it was hugely swollen, wouldn't bend and was extremely painful. And then suddenly it deflated, started bending and the pain eased though it's still a bit tender on the joint. So I've been giving it a rest and haven't been knitting this week at all, which has seemed a bit weird.

Miss M is home from her dance class so we're off to make toasties!