Progress report

It pleases me to record progress in the garden. As will be evident from the extras to this entry, which show both "before anything (from February/March this year)" and "after sorting the flowerbed but before sorting the crazy paving", the crazy paving in the front has been choked by weeds and moss. I've devoted a good deal of brute effort to scraping out as much as I can from between the slabs. Obviously the crazy paving is not in good condition. It's as old as the house. It really needs to be replaced with something more to our taste. But that won't happen in the short term, and meanwhile it looks *much* better now that you can actually see the pattern (and also the big holes where the paving stones have gone....). I've started slowly sorting through the remaining stones that came out of the flower bed when we dug it over. Quite a lot of the larger ones have been positioned in front of the concrete slabs that now delineate the edge of the bed. I want to sort the rest of them by size, so that the smaller ones (and the bits of rubble not stone) can go in the bottom of the herb planter that we bought on Fettes Sawmill. The bigger and medium sized ones will be saved for other garden projects yet to be conceived. Once that's done, and we've done something about the upper layer which is currently grasses and various forms of cranesbill, as well as some shrubs that need cutting back, I think we can declare the front "finished" for now, and move on round the side of the house. 

I did the "gardening" in the gaps when not actually working. I had one meeting, but apart from that I made good progress on rewriting the introduction to the paper I'm editing, which has given the paper a different and more intellectually adequate framing.

Later on, I went to Shandwick Beach for a swim, so I've added an extra of the Beach looking South East. It was a lovely refreshing swim. It was raining when we went in (not as hard as it rained in Tain where Mr A got caught in a vigorous shower just as I was leaving to go swimming), but mainly it was quite sunny. So although the water was cold, it was great to feel the sun on my head.

I was thinking that the pots in the front would need watering this evening, but I think it rained enough to render that unnecessary.