Wet Thursday
Okay, we are not coming from the best place I’ve ever been in terms of morale and achievement. It took me FOUR HOURS to write two paragraphs of PEG II today. Mind you, they were pretty interesting paragraphs, once I got them nailed to the page so they couldn’t escape.* But it was not a happy four hours and this has cast a pall.
Also it’s been tipping down rain most of the day, to hellhounds’ and my lasting unjoy and antidelight. At least the garden(s) got watered; I have been noticing the last few days with something like shock that some things are beginning to try and grow, despite the fact that we’re still getting down below freezing about one night in three, and things that grow tend to need water. Yesterday I was staring at the plants in pots on my front steps at the cottage and muttering, I object to using watering-cans outdoors in February.** Feh.
Handbells this evening. Hellhounds and I arrived back at the cottage only moments before Niall; I’d been waiting for the rain to let up so we could walk. Ha. Eventually we walked anyway, so I was still in mid-towelling-off stage when Niall knocked on the door.
So, how did you enjoy handbells on Tuesday? said Niall.
Wet dog, I said briefly, still towelling.
You need to ring more bob major, said Niall.
I need dry socks, I said.
You did really well ringing the trebles, said Niall.
And the floor is a lake, I said.
The trebles are really hard, and your striking was very good***, said Niall.
I HAVEN’T GOT TIME TO RING HANDBELLS MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK, I said, hanging wet socks and dog towels over the Aga railing.
You should come again, said Niall, I know you’ll pick up major† really quickly.
Fortunately Colin arrived at this opportune moment.†† And we wasted some time talking about conducting. Grrrrraaaaaugggh. . . .
* * *
* The image that comes to me involves cats, cat carriers, and vets. In a relatively low-cat existence, I’ve nonetheless had some very exciting times in situations involving cats, cat carriers, and vets.
** Indoors, of course, I spend half my life carrying watering-cans around. There are afternoons when I’m running late^ when hellhounds and I walk back to the cottage, stay just long enough for me to water the plants^^ and then turn around and go back to the mews.
Nontraditional use of small heavy lamp. Originally I had the hippeastrum turned around the other way, so the lamp was merely propping it. But the second stem has been growing over-enthusiastically toward the light, so I figured I’d better turn it around. Which meant bondage.
I am going to be in so much trouble when the roots on these get going. 
Those of you with gardens and too many plants making a mess on your window sills will know the way that however many pots you have, of all sizes, shapes and materials, the one(s) you want will have moved to Montana when you weren’t looking. Unless you live in Montana, in which case they will have moved to Sri Lanka. This is what there was.
And these too.
Aren’t these pretty glasses? I love the swirl through the stem. 
But what the hell do you do with them? They’re for champagne, and I realise that if you give grand parties where there are lots of ladies in wasp-waisted dresses and crimson lipstick and gentlemen with slicked-back hair and dubious moustaches and the champagne flows like the rain in Hampshire flat glasses are probably elegant and fashionable. But those of us who nurse our one or two glasses of champagne over the courses of long evenings at our computers^^^, want flutes.# I float broken-off flowers and pruning accidents in these glasses occasionally, or pot pourri, which is to say handfuls of petals from my garden. ## But I HOPE we’re getting late enough in the season that when these flower-stalks start diving over the brims I can just prop them against the windows### without coming downstairs to hyacinthicles some morning after a cold night.
^ ie most afternoons
^^ tripping frequently over hellhounds, who have taken up locations in the middle of the floor the better to glare at me since they want me to come upstairs and sit down at my desk so they can lie in their favourite bed in my office.
^^^ SIGH
# Cheap flutes. So if we break one, we’re only crying over the champagne.
## They will dry out nicely if you remember to stir them with a finger every time you walk past
### And I wonder why my windows are so smudgy
*** Horsemucky, just by the way. My striking was not good. What was remarkable, however, was that while I was chiefly being dragged through by the other ringers, I did have some concept of the shape of the pattern and what was happening. This is bad. This means I want to do it again.
† Major is eight bells, remember. The point about Niall’s Tuesdays is that there are enough people—enough people who know what they’re doing^—that we can ring major. Colin, Niall and I on Thursdays can only ring minor because there’s only three of us, and so six bells.
^ Especially Fred. Fred is a Legend in His Own Time. Fred would be scary if he weren’t so nice.
†† My neighbours across the road often return from somewhere while our Thursday evening handbells are going on. I never draw the sitting-room curtains—only my across-the-road neighbours could see in anyway, their house is very well set back and the cottage’s ground floor is a long half-stair up from road level. If they can see us at all through the heavy windowsill foliage, they will see three heads bent forward in a kind of circle, nearly motionless and clearly intent. They might conceivably see the occasional flash of a raised bell. It amuses me to imagine what they might surmise we’re up to. . . .
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.