This and That

What's been happening at our place these days?  Restrictions have lifted a little and we can go out more, and we have each had a couple of local trips recently.  Robin has been down to get rid of the recyclables – this service had been closed during lockdown and only just reopened.  And I went to our just opened fruit and vegetable market the other day – but I was horrified when an unknown customer patted me on the shoulder to tell me she was right behind me.  Don't touch me, I exclaimed, and she certainly shouldn’t have been so close!  But mostly we have been staying at home, keeping safe.

The Autumn weather continues to be calm and sunny, although the temperatures have certainly dropped overnight.  We decided to cook on the BBQ on Sunday, and had a chicken and baked potatoes cooking away on the Weber.  Mmm, it certainly smelt great while it was cooking away and finished up with lovely crispy skin.  It was delicious!

Chicken for dinner

There's been time for a few jobs to get done.  De-icing the chest freezer didn’t take as long as expected, and what a difference it made.    The ice on the back lawn took all day to finally melt away.

Ice on the lawn

Then our rhubarb garden needed attention.  I wanted the rhubarb lifted, split up, and replanted.  When they were dug up, we found that one side of the raised garden was rotting away, and this required some of Robin’s carpentry skills to fix it. We were still in lockdown, so luckily he found a spare piece of timber he could use.  There was lots of banging, sawing, and screwing long bolts on to the corners, and the job was finally done.  Before we replanted the rhubarb, two buckets of pony poo, courtesy of the Menz Shed, was dug into the garden.  Rhubarb plants love pony poo!  We will have to wait a while for the cut back rhubarb to grown again, but all of the pieces have started growing new leaves, so that's good.

Working in the rhubarb patch

What else?  The fold out clothes line bolted to the back wooden fence  seemed to be getting loose, I informed Robin.  No doubt a load of wet washing is fairly heavy, and I had visions of the whole thing falling down one day soon.  Seems that the bolts needed tightening, and now it is as good as new.  Some shrubs needed trimming back, and several lightbulbs needed replacing.  Have you noticed that these were all “blue” jobs, so all for  Robin to attend to?  But I’ve been extra busy too, cooking up some tasty treats for us both. So he is not really too hard done by.