A new week begins...

Today was just a quiet day at home for us - it was another hot day so actually we weren't too upset that we didn't have anything planned.  As we had been out last night I had delayed the end of the weekly art/craft/photograph challenge  so that it finished last night and I was doing all the admin and publishing the results for the entries in "Something from my Childhood" and uploading the albums and the polls for "Something Blue" and announcing that the next challenge is "Glass".



The Lockdown Challenge started out as a bit of a laugh between me and Stalker Bill - just to give us something to fill our time when we were forced to be indoors but like Topsy it grew and so at the height of the lockdown we had a large number of regular entrants.  As things have relaxed the number of people able to find the time has diminished a bit but there is still a core few who really enjoy stretching themselves and it feels like we have created a nice little, international, community.  John and I always like to enter something even if it is only to make the numbers up.  This week for the Something Blue there is a stylised photograph of John's eye and a hastily created watercolour of a blue whale.

I need to have a day in the garden this week as everything has started to grow - we do still have some colour although not a great deal as we have had a very long prolonged period of exceptionally hot, dry weather.

I had a little visitor on the clementine tree watching my every move.  It was a very bright green grasshopper with a massive pair of eyes.

We moved the clementine this year - it has been in the garden for five or six years and done absolutely nothing - it hasn't grown much since we moved it but it has at least retained its leaves which is a bonus.

We have seen very few Praying Mantis this year which is strange - I remember the first year we were here we had a resident pair which we named Dave (after David Cameron who was PM at the time) and Sam.  I don't know if the cats deter them but something has caused the numbers to drop.

We do, however, have a couple of the bright green caterpillars munching their way through the vine.  I shall try and contain them but they can strip it pretty quickly and it is looking good and providing shade so I would like to keep it that way.

Now that we have the pleasure of the company of the Witch and the Weasel we knew it would only be a matter of time before the question of the Green Area raised its head.  For some reason they have a complete bee in their bonnets over this patch of land which is to the side of their house and that of 10a.   Most, if not all, developments have space allocated as Green Areas which I guess are supposed to be planted up and look nice.  We have two and to be fair when there were only two houses permanently occupied no-one was bothered about them until WW decided to do up their property.  We think it must be something about the uncared-for land attracting snakes.  Anyway we contributed to it being cleared once which was supposed to have been a once and for all exercise but the guy did a terrible job and disappeared so we refused to contribute again.  We liked it looking wild and it had, until a day or so ago, some beautiful oleander that were in full flower and a low dry stone wall along the edge which John had built - it did until WW slipped some digger driver a fiver and he bulldozed the lot - and broke the pavement by the looks of it and then some poor guy was tasked with putting stones around the base of the fir trees and an edge of stone rather than the wall.  We now have a rather unattractive dust-bowl to look at.  Nicky and I are thinking about keeping hens - so this could be the ideal place!!

One piece of good news today - Argy phoned and they have rebooked their flights and hope to be with us for at least some of what remains of the summer.  We have everything crossed.