Blooming lovely

How could I not post this? Taken from within the warmth of my kitchen it definitely counts as a lazy blip. I do have shots of elder leaves bursting forth - taking in winds so strong that the tree had to be held firmly in place to get any kind of shot. But I couldn't resist the colour of this ranunculus - in fact, I had to turn the saturation down a bit as it looked too unreal on screen.

At lunch the kids brought home the slightly irritating news that the carneval is postponed until March. Still, at least that prevents me having a March panic about what costumes we will wear. CarbBoy asked if he could go as 'a Scottish person' so has been bought a kilt, ghillie shirt and the teeniest sporran you've ever seen. Too cute. In other lunchtime news, TallGirl's class is building a basket to go under a balloon they will be launching into space in April (ok, not space, but really high). Today the man came from Toulouse to see if their basket thingy was good enough. He pronounced it 'too ugly to fly'. Eek. Wrong material and bad cutting apparently. Ah well, still time to try again.

Loony weather today: sunny, rainy, and then in the evening wind so strong it blew our electricity off half a dozen times (hence the lack of blipping on the day) which was irritating while on the phone to my mum - since our phone is an internet phone and every interruption resulted in a 5 minute wait for the modem to boot up again. It also resulted (the wind, not the power cuts) in our sun shelter finally and terminally breaking - it had been a bit dodgy since a huge snowfall on the fabric roof bent it - but the wind blew the concrete feet clean out of the waterlogged ground.

Today there was a clear enough spell that Mr B came out in the garden to clear his lungs of the noxious stuff he's painting on the (now clean) joists in the room he's fixing to deter any fungus that might still be lurking. Whilst there we nailed up some squirrel food and had a chat about the veg garden. Hurrah! It seems my garden plans mesh neatly with Mr B's HUGE SHED plans so I will start digging as soon as this rain stops.... (I've decided going to a 10 x 15 metre garden in year one might be a bit ambitious... so we'll start with a smaller plot - which I can hand dig - and expand it each year.)