Happy Hour

Another busy day in the building site/garden. Digging over beds in the 'cool garden' (a reference to its temperature rather than its trend-setting nature); settling the location for the first of two 'hot gardens' (ie, in the sun) and making a start on digging that; more taking up of the top floor floor, with associated carrying down many stairs of rotten wood, rubble and tiles.

In direct contradiction of the saying that 'a change is as good as a rest' it turned out that alternating between the two activities (hauling heavy clay tiles down the stairs and hacking turf off clayey/gravely soil) was not what you might call 'good' in any sense. Even when (searching for a solution to the problem of what to build my 'hot garden' raised beds out of) I realised that the tiles I was carrying down to the rubble pile might look rather smart stacked up in a wall, and therefore spent some time trying (with mash hammer and big chisely thing) to hack off the inch thick mortar from the back of the tiles, it turned out that changing between three activities also didn't amount to 'a rest'. However, when I added in gently potting on some perennial sunflowers and standing vacantly staring into space, that worked better for me.

The other activity of the day was, as you can see, escorting a swallow off the premises. He was clearly too early for cocktail hour. I also mustn't forget to note Mr B's 'Dad of the year' entry yesterday. CarbBoy appeared, looking rather glum, as his newish wooden sword had fared rather badly against next-door-boy's large stick and was broken in two. No sooner had I said "I'm sure it'll be fine, perhaps you can just use a stick too" than Mr B had knocked up a rather snazzy replacement sword from some bits of wood he found lying around.

A fine roast beef dinner (though Mr B tells me it was not as fine as the one I missed last Sunday; though today it had Yorkshire puddings which must count for something) and Doctor Who has everyone satisfied with the day and the kids off to bed early for what feels like the first day of term tomorrow. CarbBoy managed to conjugate all the verbs required for tomorrow's test, so I guess it didn't matter that we 'forgot' about homework.