A flower

Dyer's chamomile

Longest Day

It's been a warm and sunny week.  Little Cat has also been lounging around in the garden, and for the odd moment or two, so have I. It's nice to have the deckchair out. We checked out various weather forecasts and to our amusement rain is due from Wednesday lunchtime onwards. And when does the school term end? Wednesday lunchtime of course! Well, we'll wait and see.

I love the marigolds in the garden - most of this year's are yellow but there's also this orange one too, looking as fresh and luscious as an orange ice-lolly (of which we have several in the freezer).

I inflated the paddling pool the other day but the slight slow puncture from last summer had become two punctures and it deflated fairly rapidly. So when I was doing the grocery shopping I got a new paddling pool too. That's warm weather shopping for you - bread, milk, ice-lollies, paddling-pool.. The Boy, though a good swimmer, is not fussed about messing around in water  - too old at 11? (I'm not, at 43..)  Or too much like a cat, like his father? But Miss M adores splashing around in water and was delighted with the new paddling-pool. To be honest I'd have got it anyway!

Today was a slightly cooler day and although there was plenty of outdoor time, we spent some time playing Munchkin Zombies. Oh, and eating leftover pizza from yesterday.  My Beloved had bought the game on a whim last week, but we weren't sure if the kids would enjoy it. Miss M, at seven, proved herself capable of playing it and fine with the adding up involved, but there were tears at the end when her brother won (not because he'd won so much as because she had plans for her next turn and didn't get to play it out), so although there is quite a lot to take in and remember when you first play it, I'd say the 'suitable for age 10 and up' is really more to do with emotional maturity than anything else. The Boy suddenly got the hang of it halfway through and turned into a mini version of his gamer daddy, and trashed us at the end. I'm not very good at games like this and was fairly muddled, though amused by it.

We're gradually finding games we all enjoy - Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, Get Bit.. Mostly we've found about these by watching Tabletop. I'm not into board games in the traditional sense, but some of these untraditional ones are great, especially Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert which are co-operative. The Tabletop episode for Forbidden Island had me laughing because John Scalzi's rationalisation for why it was a good thing they lost was the same as mine the first time we lost at it.

I think I'll go to bed now. This morning I was woken at 4am by two men walking down the road having a fight, absolutely screaming at each other. It was a bit unnerving. That was technically just before sunrise, though in fact it was pretty light by then, so it really has been the longest day.

The cowcat

It's been quite warm for the last few days, and rather airless and stuffy at night (this may be partly to do with the blackout blind, but I'm not doing without the blackout blind in June) and I have been having weird dreams as a result. I rarely remember dreams for more than a minute or two after I wake up - you know that sand trickling out of an hourglass feeling, when you can feel a dream trickling away from your memory? 'There was a.. thing.. and then the.. hang on, was there also a... It's gone.'

The other night I dreamt that my cat was a calf. A calf given to sitting in the catmint peacefully, but still capable of bounding up the fence and perching on top looking uncertain. I woke up and laughed. And kept chuckling at the thought for the rest of the day. I'm still smiling.

As you can see my cat is black and white, not unlike a Holstein Friesian. He is also of a placid, almost bovine nature, except when he goes wide-eyed and has a mad half-hour, somewhat like Simon's Cat's Crazy Time.

As the weather has been warm he has been hiding in long grass and making nests for himself.

Seeing pictures of Tally the Somewhat Catlike Husky the other day probably influenced my subconscious.

The long grass is what we generously call our lawn. The cats are more inclined to stay in our garden if they have places to lurk so we're leaving bits of it long. I saw a beautiful frog in the long grass near the pond the other day so obviously they prefer a bit of cover too. The bees are loving the garden at the moment too, and I'm still planting flower seeds in rather a random fashion, so who knows what will pop up in the garden next? Well, that largely depends on whether the slugs and snails cease and desist their activities, so I'm just off out to collect as many as I can and relocate them to the playpark down the road.

summer term frenzy

Every year it takes me by surprise - the Easter holiday drifts by and then we're into the summer term frenzy and so much happens that I'd like to blog about, but there never seems to be any time. The days get longer, yet somehow shorter, and my to-do list gets ever more unmanageable, and the weeks fly by far too quickly.

At the end of May there was a long weekend and we headed to the Highlands to see Mum and Dad. While we were there we saw an oystercatcher nesting in an overflow carpark at the Highland Wildlife Park. She was very defensive of her nest and the staff had put out traffic cones to protect her well-camouflaged eggs.

And back at Mum and Dad's, the duck who has adopted them and flies in most days for a snack.

As we edged into June we had the school's fun day, for which I did what felt like an epic amount of baking (somehow when you do what feels like an epic amount of baking it only ever amounts to enough to fill a few plastic tubs) and manned the coconut shy. There was a bit of lemon drizzle traybake left. I'd never made it before but it's a very forgiving recipe and turned out perfectly. I'm not really that much of a cake person, but this was quite good.

School sports day got cancelled at the last minute due to torrential rain and the teachers, PTA (including me) and teenage helpers from the high school, cobbled together an indoor alternative which left us all knackered.

And I caught a cold, which always seems so unfair in summer. Accordingly I treated myself to a copy of Pompom Quarterly  - I ordered last winter's issue, because there's a hat pattern in it I really like and I don't really do summer knitting. Out of season it may be, but it's lovely.

Then the sun came out again and I found this gorgeous bee in my garden:

I think it's a red-tailed bumblebee and is apparently quite common but I've never seen one before.

The sky was so blue I went round the garden taking pictures of the underside of the flowers and plants. My favourite is this poppy - the contrast with the sky is so strong.

The garden's looking quite happy actually. Quite exuberant in fact. And nicely quiet. The school year finishes a week on Wednesday and the frenzy continues until then, so I'm hoping for a few quiet (and dry) spells when I can sit in my deckchair and appreciate it all.