A day of rest!

Another Sunday almost over. How restful they are....Gardening, Window cleaning..including our LARGE conservatory, and all the other chores around the house. I haven't worked as hard all week!!...and I mean ALL week was less work!! I am shattered! It is amazing what damage a little rain can do with warm weather and a garden. The weeds seem to grow like the triffids in the film.... our nastirtiums had covered over about 12 feet of patio area too. It took me half an hour to find the pot plants in amongst them, so I had to attack them with shears. My lawnmower kept telling me to get a tractor and make Hay instead of cutting the grass.(jungle not lawn)...at least the weeds in the lawn help keep it green, the moss turns brown in the heat very quickly.
As you can gather, I'm not a keen gardener, but Christine won't let me put the garden under concrete and water...more water than concrete of course.

I still have to re-do my pond, it sprung a leak last year and has been dry for 6 months. I filled it in with rubble so I could turn it into a patio area and move the pond up near the house and conservatory. Christine has decided I should re-do it down the other end though, and leave the lawn area, so thats a job for next year...A big earthmoving monster with a mechanical digging arm is called for, I am going to do the job right!...paddling pool is nothing! next time my friend the heron paddles in my fish pond he's gonna sink. I am going 5 feet deep and increasing the area from 18 by 14 feet to 20 by 18, plus a nice streamy area with a big flow instead of the little waterfall we used to have.

In the mean time I do like my pot plants, I have loads of mediteranean plants like bougainvillia, Bird of Paradise Flowers, Hibiscus, Canaes etc. which grow outdoors during the summer and spend the winter in the conservatory. (I can't get the bird of paradise to flower this year though, I think they are too well fed, its all leaf growth on them.) C says I pay more attention to them than her, I tell her it's because they need more help to look beautiful. She's good at making that answer look believable, but one of these days I'm not going to get away with it.

It's 9.50 local time here and it's already dark, the evenings are drawing in fast. I'm looking out the window behind the computor screen and I can see the silluette of the birch tree at the end of the garden against the sky. There isn't a breath of wind and the sky is almost cloudless, but I can't really see the stars there are too many street lights in Dublin for stargazing, just another form of pollution.

C is going away for three days in the morning, our son is not going to be home tomorrow either, so if I go to the studio all day and come home in the evening it will just be me for dinner...I hate eating alone...No I mean it ; I HATE eating alone, I've decided I'm not going to...I'm going fishing with Noel, we will eat together on an Island on the lough..........Well any excuse to go fishing! so if there is an entry to the Blog tommorrow it will be short and late!

I have made arrangements to collect Noel at lunchtime, I can put a few hours in at the studio first...I've a couple of canvases to sand down in preparation for painting, the weave is a bit too fine leaving the surface very smooth after the priming process so I need to roughen them up a bit to give a good grip to the paint. I would hate to think of the oils flaking off from the canvas as I've seen happen with the fine detail canvas. Normally I get the coarser canvas but I bought this lot over the net and until it arrived I didn't realise it was going to be so smooth and fine.