Wet, wet, wet
It’s raining again. Sob.*
Hard frost last night; I have to get a new max/min thermometer, I like gloating over the news it brings.** But Wolfgang’s roof was white when hellhounds and I ambled out to go back to the cottage*** and I drove home very gently. And then we had a lovely blue, sunny hurtle this morning† and I spent most of the afternoon bent over the computer and ignoring the increasing darkness outside the window †† and when I took hellhounds out before tower practise it was starting to drip in a surly and ominous manner, and by the time I got out of practise again††† . . .
It was raining.
* * *
* Metaphoric sob. I refuse to add any more wet to this atmosphere.
** Or not, of course. —You mean it didn’t get any lower than 36°F and I wasted twenty minutes getting all those plants indoors??^ However from the floral wreckage this morning it clearly froze last night. I’ve spinelessly left the jungle indoors today which is no doubt why it’s warmed up again. I will take it/them out tomorrow . . . and we’re due another hard frost either Saturday night or Sunday.
Atlas, on his own intiative^^ has moved some of the cultch . . . I mean crucial and necessary boxes and pieces of furniture around at Third House so I can, for example, get at the windowsills in the house as well as the summerhouse. I’ve got the physical space for my jungle.^^^ Not so much the time space and the head space. I’m now looking forward to my next week off after Christmas Eve. I am trying to suppress the memory of what happened during my last week off.
^ And will need another twenty minutes to schlep them back outdoors again. What takes the most time are (a) the Door Dance for bringing anything in from the front: the front door of the cottage is a stable door and it opens directly on the chimney breast with barely clearance for a row of hooks with too many coats on them+. Then you either veer immediately right into the kitchen and fall immediately prey to the hellhound gate, which will probably have several interested hellhounds appending, or veer immediately left and . . . actually you can’t veer immediately left, because the door is in the way. You have to back through the gate (and the hellhounds) and, since you’re carrying a large pot with a plant in it, you then get to manipulate the door with one foot++, which requires some quite balletic moves since there’s a top half as well as a bottom half, and have I mentioned the long heavy draught-suppressing curtain that hangs over the door?, until you can drag yourself, and your pot, past+++, and into the sitting room, which has been pre-swathed with plastic garden sheets.++++ Note that all plants more than two feet tall go on the floor in the sitting room. —And (b), groping around outdoors in the dark for stuff I’ve missed. I regularly have already gone back inside, locked both doors, shoved both draught-excluders against the bottom edges and the two towels-on-a-dowel over the middles and pulled the long heavy draught-excluding curtains across . . . and remembered that there’s a geranium/begonia/chocolate cosmos/osteospermum/tender fuchsia/little green thing+++++ still out there. Somewhere.
+ And a pile of All Stars at their feet. Although in fact there is not room for the pile of All Stars, which can therefore be relied on to scatter and leap in all directions, like a well-trained regiment ordered to break ranks, and trip you up from all sorts of unexpected angles.
++ Or pedulate, if you prefer
+++ Several coats will fall down in the process, and will arrange themselves in such a manner as to disguise the small select band of guerrilla All Stars hiding beneath them.
++++ After last winter’s resident grow-light~ I had a lot of plastic sheeting, to protect the furniture. I have no idea where most of it is.
~Which is now up at Third House installed in the bubblewrap-lined summerhouse, waiting for me to get organised. Sigh. My geraniums and begonias are still, somewhat bemusedly, flowering, and I like being the only person on the street with plants nutty enough to be producing summer flowers in December.
Including Old Blush, aka Parson’s Monthly Rose, who usually does produce a few flowers in December if the weather anything like lets her, although she will probably close down for a few months in the new year, and let the hellebores and the honeysuckle and the witchhazel and the winter clematis and the daphne odora take over.
And also, just now, including my little winter-flowering, not-frost-proof camellia. I hadn’t noticed she was flowering till I was casting around for things I’d forgotten to bring in. See above. One of her purposes is to flower before the indoor hyacinths and narcissi do—she smells good. I hope she’s not planning to get much taller. She’s pushing the two-foot limit for sitting on the top of the hellhound crate.
+++++ I’m afraid I’ve killed the rather riotous fallen-off bits of my Magic Bells Kalanchoe which Peter gave me for my birthday a year ago. The original plant is growing away like anything, despite my complete cluelessness, but it produces offsets in its elbows with their own roots, and these tend to fall off and then say, Plant me! Plant me! I haven’t got enough windowsills, so I’ve shoved ’em outside. And I have trouble remembering that the temperature at which water becomes solid is not an absolute: there are, for example, plants that don’t want to get anywhere near freezing, and Magic Bells is one of them. Oops. I don’t need thirty offshoots—especially if they’re all going to get several feet tall—but I don’t like murdering things either.
^^ If perhaps inspired by random moaning from yours truly
^^^ Good gods don’t let me think that or I’ll buy eleventy-seven more house plants. During my week off.
*** Having spent a good ten minutes trying to defrost the car lock the other night so I could get the key into it I was bold and decisive yesterday afternoon and didn’t lock the door. I thought that on the whole, in a tiny car park that contains two BMWs and a Lexus, chances were that car thieves would leave the (dented) 14-year-old VW Golf alone, and would probably even permit the boxes of Robin McKinley books^ to remain untouched on the front seat.
^ Waiting to be dropped off at Third House. And waiting . . . and waiting . . .
† Or would have, if I hadn’t had a Very Bad Night and was feeling pretty hung over. I went to bed thinking about a particular small squiggle in PEGASUS, which I admit was probably a mistake with the Ultimate Deadline gibbering at me from way too little a distance away . . . and then couldn’t get to sleep and lay there drenched in a variety of terrors, including Not Finishing By Deadline and Never Sleeping Again^, and eventually fell into that semi-comatose state where you’re pretty sure you’re dreaming but not absolutely sure, and there were hellhounds with wings and then a visitor showed up at tower practise and I recognised him at once as the evil magician and . . .
^ The two could be connected
†† After all it’s December. It starts getting dark again before it properly got light.
††† During which I successfully negotiated plain bob triples inside. Edward, who is one of these unnecessarily good ringers who has to be reminded what it’s like to be a member of the rank and file, clearly has difficulty understanding why I am so boggled by a simple touch of plain bob triples. It’s plain bob, isn’t it? It’s just like plain bob minor except there are two more bells. Ahem. Four hellhounds is just like two hellhounds except there are two more of them. Eight hundred pages of a novel is just like six hundred pages of a novel except there are two hundred more pages.^
^ PEGASUS is only about 120,000 words. It just feels like more. It will be longer than the Encyclopaedia Britannica by 23 December.
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