After all of the excitement of yesterday’s party at my next-door neighbours, I must have slept very well as I did not awake until just after 5.00am. Then, fatefully, I fell asleep again and only work up about a quarter of an hour before I normally leave to attend Church. So I aroused myself from my slumbers, threw on sone clothes and got to church at just about my usual time. Today was one of those occasions that happens about once a month where our usual church organist is given a ‘rest’ day and two of the parents with good singing voices and expertise in playing guitars lead the congregation through their Sunday hymns by performing in the front of the altar. After the usual uplifting sermon, we had a slight variation to our routine as an ex-headteacher (I imagine) was raising funds to finish off the erection of a clinic in Zimbabwe. We needed to raise about another \u00a310,000 to finish off the building by putting on its roof (which could not be done brick by brick as happened with the rest of the building) So we went into the parish hall and partook of delicious chocolate cake whilst also making our contributions to help the building project. The church hall had a series of photographs documenting the stages of the project and the whole reminded me of the work of Meg’s cousin, Margot, who worked as a VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) medic in Sierra Leone. What Margot did, and I believe on more than one occasion, was to take a huge collection of photographs in the form of slides and then get herself invited around a series of fund-raising occasions (organised, for example, by Rotary) and then raise funds in this way. She contacted what was then British Leyland, I believe, to beg a LandRover for practically nothing and told us that she could build and equip a one ward clinic in Sierra Leone using local building materials and labour for about \u00a320.000 so the project in Zimbabwe seemed of a similar nature. The good news is that the government in Zimbabwe had promised to fund the staffing of the clinic once the building had been constructed. So after all of this, I made my way into town but stopped at a well known local hardware store with an excellent reputation which I know is open at this time. I needed to buy a stiff yard broom to complete my weeding and tidying up activities on the gravel border I have been resurrecting. I dithered over whether to buy a 12″ or an 18″ brush but settled on the former as it was a lot cheaper. Also, the brush unit was supplied with a specialist plastic fitment which meant that it would child’s play in the future to put on a new brush head when needed, probably in a year or so. When I was a boy I always seemed to affixing new broom heads to staves and in these days, one was affixed by hammering in a nail or screwing in a screw through the guide hole which was part of the brush head manufacture – so things have moved on. I went and put some petrol in the car and collected by Sunday newspaper before returning home for a smidgeon of breakfast. After this, I assembled together some teak oil and a paint brush so that I could give the handle of the broom a seasoning of teak oil given that it would ‘live’ outside under the eaves of the house and will probably give a second or a third coat later in the day. Whether all of this can be done day I am unsure as fairly heavy rains are due to fall in the next day or so so I would like to get my sweeping up activities done first. Whilst the weather was fine and I had some weeding tools to hand, I weeded about a third of a gravelled area I front of the house and so, one way or another, I have had quite a busy morning so given had leapt out of bed first thing in the morning, I allowed myself the luxury of about 20 minutes rest enjoying a cup of tea whilst snuggling in the contours of a ‘bean bag’ inherited from my son. I then lunched on some ham and grilled vegetables saved from a day or so back when had prepared too much food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So having spent at least a couple of hours hand weeding my gravel border, I dashed out whilst the weather was fine and before the onset of the anticipated rains to literally ‘a-salt’ my gravel border, which job must have taken me five minutes at the most and which I will anticipate should keep this gravel border weed free for at least the rest of the season. I very carefully ensured that I put just the right among of salt in the border that my gardening sources indicated. The day before I had secured my neighbours permission to my gravel salting but I promised to stop short of the area abutting his garden so that he would not suffer from any run-off that could occur after heavy rain. Now that I am. into gardening mode again, I need to record quantities of materials used and dates deployed so that in future years I can use this as a reference point. My American friend texted to say she was busy with domestic jobs (like hoovering her flat) but was coming to round in the early evening. I have been ensuring that I have all of my ‘ducks in a row’ with U3A activities and although I record everything on a special wall calendar some times there are clashes with other commitments and one can miss a date. because I had to stay in for the TV delivery about ten days ago and I was unsure about the next Spanish conversation class which happens to be this Thursday. I suspect that I have commitments one way or another each day of the week forthcoming but Monday may well be a very wet day which limits any outside jobs like lawn mowing. I see that by consulting the web, the football World Cup (shared between Mexico, USA and Canada) is due to start not next week but the week after and we will be exposed to some 5\u00bd weeks which may be far too much for many, I suspect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After all of the excitement of yesterday’s party at my next-door neighbours, I must have slept very well as I did not awake until just after 5.00am. Then, fatefully, I fell asleep again and only work up about a quarter of an hour before I normally leave to attend Church. So I aroused myself from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8312,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8311\/revisions\/8312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}