Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand before you know it, three days have gone by and you haven’t put a blog post up. The last two days have been spent in a frenzy of gardening; mowing the lawn, re-seeding the bare patches of the lawn, pruning (I nearly wrote ‘pruining’ which, according to the male owner of this house, is what we’ve done to the buddleia) ripping up nettles and chopping up logs. These are now waiting to be collected by the owner of a wood-burning stove.
BYKI (Before You Know It) reminds me of a series of language books we had when the children were small. They claimed to teach Latin, French, German and probably just about every tongue known to humankind, before you knew it. Well, we tried them and before we knew it, they hadn’t really learned very much. Still, that was the state of play with just about all academic learning we tried at home. Unless they were in a group, they didn’t want to do it.
At the moment I am waiting. Waiting to hear about my application to Everybody’s Reading Week, and waiting for a couple of Quakers to come and visit me. In the meantime we are being visited by some bumblebees who seem to have made a nest in our roof. The builders next door said it was wasps, which just goes to show how little they know about hymenoptera; anyone could see at a glance that these were much too fat for wasps. Mark reckons they are bumblebees, though what type we don’t know. The consensus seems to be to leave them alone and eventually they’ll disappear. Fortunately we are not allergic to bee-stings.
Neither am I allergic to nettle-stings, which was fortunate as yesterday my arms were covered in them. Nettle-stings are actually quite beneficial, especially if you are prone to rheumatoid arthritis; the remedy is to whip the joints with nettles.
I hate waiting for people. You can never concentrate on anything. Which is probably why this post is so unfocussed.
OK I’m back now. The Quakers have been and quaked – or perhaps quoken – and I have heard from Everybody’s Reading and they’re not. Or at least I’m not. Budgets are tight apparently – who knew? – and my application cost too much. Last year I asked for more money, and got it.
Sarada Gray 