How I Spent Yesterday

- it wasn't all that interesting, I'm afraid.

I started out with the laundry that had to end up cluttering up the family room on the clothes airer 'cos it kept on raining. I'm not complaining about the rain, of course. Heaven knows we need every single drop of that but it certainly doesn't help with getting the washing dry. It was chilly enough for us to have the heater on for most of the day, something we rarely do, so the washing was dry enough to fold and put away this morning.

Then I decided to do a bit of on-line shopping. Got on amazon.com, found what I liked and they wouldn't let me buy it. There have been some taxation changes here - long overdue and quite reasonable - and Amazon can't or won't work with their third party sellers to incorporate them so you can't buy anything that is not directly from Amazon like say Kindle e-books. Dang.

Okay, I thought, I'll go directly to the manufacturer's website and buy from there. Nah uh, they just flicked me back to amazon.com. This was seriously frustrating. The item I wanted is a gadget for fastening bracelets and necklaces. My arthritis makes this pretty much impossible these days and Pisces makes such a production of it when I ask him to help that honestly it's not worth the hassle to try to wear anything I can't fit over my head. To be fair he does have bigger fingers than most and this makes gripping small jewellery catches difficult. Why do they put such tiny catches on jewellery you and millions of women ask? I'm guessing it's largely to save on costs but the reality is the cost increase would be infinitesimal and it would make life much easier for everyone who wants to wear a piece of jewellery.

Having reached peak levels of frustration I wandered out into the garden between showers - and this was much more satisfactory. The seedings I planted earlier in the week - kale, broccoli, pak choy, bok choy, lettuce, coriander and dill plus some Sweet Alice and kangaroo paws - are all looking great and obviously enjoying the rain. As well the seeds I put in a week or so ago are almost all up so soon there'll be sugar snap peas, snow peas, carrots and beetroot plus more lettuce and pak choy - these will replace those already in the garden as they're harvested. The only ones not yet showing are the red onions and spring onions. I'm particularly pleased the seeds are coming up because most of them were on trays out in the open when the drenching storm we had at the beginning of the week hit and when I finally managed to get out to check on them they'd been standing in pools of water for at least a day. I figured that if the over watering hadn't finished them off the pelting rain would have washed them out of their seedling containers but most - for now at least - seem to be doing well.

Add in a couple of hours of French and German study and a bit of writing where I fixed up some very obvious plot holes - well not so obvious now - and my day was pretty much done with equal parts of frustration and pleasure.

I was tired by then and ended up watching It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World - a very silly but thoroughly entertaining movie. Pisces, who almost never watches a movie, enjoyed it, too.

So that was yesterday. I wonder what today will bring.