Thursday 18th April...

Today started out promisingly enough - dry at least - so we were on wood tidying duties otherwise we were in danger of not being able to get out of the back door!  We have amassed an eclectic mix of logs and wood over the past few months and now that we are unlikely to be lighting the wood burner until the winter it is a good opportunity to get organised - older drier wood moved to one of the storage areas, newer greener wood put to dry.  The wood in the picture above actually didn't look that much before it was all cut up.

John cut all the planks into pieces of similar size and got them stacked up - we should have realised that this was a recipe for disaster - it might have been dry when we did it but the rain gods were obviously laughing at us and by the end of the day it was soaking - bugger!

We had been inspired by what the Bailey's had done with the shutters we gave them and so we decided to use our last lot on the big blank wall at the back of T&V corner.  John also wanted to replace the wires we had used to hold up the morning glory last year with the trellis that Mum and Dad had given us.  We got started on the project - John offered the frame up to the wall so that I could get an idea of what it would look like and the space inside that we would need to do something with - mosaic?  mural?  mirrors?

Dad's friend Frank (who will be 90 in May) has asked me to sort out some DVD's for him to watch - I got the complete boxed set of Hornblower ready together with the BBC series about the islands of the South Pacific but was a complete duffer and left them behind when I left for Pickleball this afternoon.  As it happens Dad wont be seeing Frank just yet and in the meantime John opened up the Hornblower boxed set and got hooked watching it.  It is 'Sharpe' for the Navy without Sean Bean unfortunately!

I set off for Pickleball (minus the DVD's) and picked up Vicki en route - we were calling into Mum's for a light lunch before running ourselves ragged!!  I had to pick up some 'Creacote' as we are staining everything in sight!  We also called into the Euro Shop so I could get some cheap mirrors - this is what we have decided to put inside the shutter in T&V corner and into GB Euroland for Pork Pies and Ice-creams!

We sat outside for lunch - it was warm and bright at Mum and Dad's and it was pretty warm whilst we were playing pickleball but if we looked over to the hills we could see it was looking pretty black indeed.

Driving home the weather deteriorated dramatically.  As we approached Kathikas the rain was running in rivers down the road and we reckoned it must have started to rain shortly after we left this morning as there was so much water lying on the roads.  Vix had to make a run for it - that is her in the middle of the photograph but you wouldn't know!

When I got home John was cold and fed up - the weather had put paid to his plans for the day and all the wood we had sorted and stacked was about to float down the hill towards Polis - just our luck.  There was a little brightness to our day - I had a text from Irene to say she had left me some of my favourite chocolate up at Sharon and Sean's to say thanks for feeding the cats.  We are going to have to ration ourselves but felt that we deserved just a little bit today because the weather was so awful.

I blame the Scrimshanks.