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Pink etc
I told you I’d show you my floral extravaganza again after I messed with it a little.*
Pink.
And just in case you think I’ve put all the pink in front to make an impressive photo, this is what it looks like from the other side. 
Meanwhile . . . it’s snowing. It’s not snowing like it’s snowing in Virginia, for which I am deeply thankful, but it’s still snowing. I’ve decided I want a conservatory. Once I finish recovering** from putting the weight-bearing floor in Third House’s attic I’m going to knock down the sitting-room wall into the garden and start putting up quadruple-glazed glass walls and solar baseboard heaters. I might put French doors in the main bedroom and have a sort of full-length bay window on that side too. And then I can fill it/them with tea and china roses and sasanqua camellias and orchids and greenhouse carnations and hippeastrums and freesias and maddenii rhododendrons . . . and chocolate cosmos and begonias and osteospermums and geraniums year round, and I don’t know what all else because I don’t have a conservatory and therefore try to avoid knowing too much about what I can’t grow.
And have I told you about the sedum roof? Yes. I also want to slap a green roof on Third House, which, unlike the cottage, has a nice gentle slope so the poor sedums won’t have to hold on with their fingernails. I’m not looking forward to getting planning permission*** for this but maybe by the time I get to that point† planted-up roofs will be commonplace and the government will be giving us eco-promoting grants to do it. A girl can dream.
Meanwhile I need to be grinding on with PEG II so I can finish recovering from putting the backlist-bearing floor in and begin saving up for the conservatory. And then Marechal Niel†† and I will sit with our feet up in the warm at Third House and admire the snow drifts.†††
* * *
* The kitchen magnet, which on my screen at least you can’t quite read unless you already know what it says, declares: They lied. Hard work has killed lots of people. It could have been a lot worse, given my collection of kitchen magnets.^ I tend not to remember to check for stuff like what’s behind something when I take pictures indoors, and this can be a dreadful mistake.^^
^ One tiny benefit to losing the old house and living in a cottage so small that everyone but the occasional urban flat-dweller suffers extreme claustrophobia upon stepping over the threshold+ is that I have felt free to get out my old collection of crass and insolent kitchen magnets and indeed to augment it. In the old house I used to worry about the grandchildren. Who are mostly by now too old to be disturbed by kitchen magnets, but they’re still all so polite.
+ Books not only furnish a room, they crowd you right out of it. Sometimes several rooms. Sometimes all the rooms in the house.= I was very amused when Diane in MN posted in the forum about lining hallways with bookshelves, and how well this works . . . till you run out of hallways. Yes.
= Okay, the bathroom only has books on the windowsill. Well, almost only.
^^ Some of the biggest cobwebs in England live in my cottage. This is a combination of deplorable housekeeping and a slight soft spot for spiders. I don’t want them on me, you understand, but a nice small tactful English spider that stays quietly in its corner will probably be left alone to get on with it. However any spider showing artistic initiative such as manifestations of ‘radiant’, ‘terrific’, or ‘some hellhound’ in web-weaving is totally welcome forever, and if it would like teeny weeny beakers of champagne or slivers of chocolate these will be provided.
** You’re all buying multiple copies of PEGASUS, yes?
*** Both Third House and the cottage are in a Conservation Area which means you need planning permission to prune your rosebushes—careful, you and your secateurs are altering the amenity level of the neighbourhood—and gods help you if you want to change the colour of your house. Which in fact I do. But not this year. I can’t face the paperwork. And Third House has this whacking monster Leylandii which is so frelling tall the army helicopters trip on it when they buzz overhead and I looooong to have the ugly thing down—and my neighbours are longing right along with me—but the Tree Removal Form is forty thousand pages long and looking at it makes me lose the will to live.
† After everyone has bought multiple copies of PEG II.
†† http://www.classicroses.co.uk/roses/m/marechal_niel.html We had one at the old house and while she was in a relatively sheltered position I don’t think her essential hardiness was the problem so much as her habit of trying to produce her first flush of big fat buds early enough to catch the last frelling late frost of a bad year. And unlike, say, Agnes, who is another early one, if she gets frosted, she sulks. Agnes heaves a deep sigh and starts growing a fresh lot of buds. But then Agnes is a rugosa and rugosas are tough. You have to be firm with your rugosas. Undisciplined rugosas eat unwary small children and absent-minded gardeners and are probably John Wyndham’s original source for triffids. I love rugosas. Just by the way. I have Agnes at the cottage. She’s doing really well. It’s a good thing I don’t get many visitors. With her and Souvenir and the three Mmes and a few others I have perhaps not introduced you to yet, it’s dangerous out there.
††† There are of course other problems with indoor gardening. One of the reasons the floors don’t get hoovered very often at the cottage^ is because I’m busy moving all the plants off the windowsills to clean the encrusted plant sludge off the window glass and the painted surfaces. Did you know that dark red geranium petals will stain your white woodwork? Gaah. And I want an entire conservatory? Well. Yes. I am insane. This is not news.
And you know those pretty little hyacinth vases? You put your bulb in the top and just add water? How about the fact that once the flower spike grows your hyacinth will plunge top-heavily over the side?
Creative use of large pile of magazines.
Creative use of Kleenex box. This bulb was a freller to begin with since it insisted on growing leaves at both ends.
^ aside from melting vacuum cleaners
PEGASUS Tuesday
It has been a seriously sucky day. It started with oversleeping by two hours. Which meant I did at least get two hours of sleep, but this is still not optimum. I’m used to having bad nights, and a lot of the time it’s not a totally huge deal; for one thing, if I can’t sleep, I turn the light back on, and read. Insomniac nights are probably my best opportunity for catching up on all the homeopathic journals I go on subscribing to; I have found through trial and error that I will be less pissed off at myself in the morning (I’m going to be tired; at least I can try not to be pissed off) if I’ve actually done something with that time I would rather have been asleep in. But in the middle of the Week of the Copyedit Nightmare, I don’t dare. I put a pillow over my head and try to count sheep.*
I have cancelled Blondel so many times that when I finally go next week** I will probably find I’ve forgotten his street number—I’m sure I remember his street*** but assuming that I will have let the RaspBerry go flat† and in this mobile-phone era the nearest public phone†† being about a mile away I am having no trouble at all imagining††† trotting up and down that hill looking for a front door that seems familiar. . . . And Niall was having one of his Upper Level Handbell Evenings tonight which I had briefly entertained a fantasy of taking an hour off this evening‡, if I’d got my daily page count sufficiently appeased by then, to attend long enough to have a go at plain bob major‡‡ Silly old me.
There have been a positive cascade of yucky publishing details that discretion, a desire to go on getting published by someone, and Fear of Merrilee prevent me from detailing here, much as I long so to do.‡‡‡ One bright spot however is that—I remember telling you that this was happening, but I haven’t been telling you how many times we’ve gone over the Final Cliff of Failure and then been snatched painfully back to the possibility of firm ground, and let me tell you, standing on the possibility of firm ground is unpleasantly vertiginous—we do, in fact, have a cover for the new YA edition of the much-repackaged SUNSHINE.§ I thought the end of last week that this had crashed and burned at the foot of the Final Cliff of Failure—they wanted to use a photo cover and I Have This Thing About Photo Covers.§§ And there wasn’t time to try again. Was. Not. Time.§§§ I knew this. So I went off to have a sulk over the weekend# and . . . lo and behold, yesterday they had magicked something out of nowhere and today . . . we have our cover. Yaay. ##
And then there is PEGASUS. PEGASUS, as often happens at this stage, is rapidly deliquescing into mrgmp*&^qvvvll%@j????frell. I should get through it tomorrow, leaving myself an evening### and the following morning to make sure my notes look like they make sense, whether or not they relate sensibly to the manuscript, before I shoot them back to Putnams. Supposing I can recognise relative proportions of sense/nonsense when I see it/them. If you’ve got any candles to spare, I could use one or two.~
Let’s have a couple more pictures of roses. 
And then I’m going to go lie down in that bed thing again and think about sleep.
* * *
* Or pegasi, or hellhounds, or bottles of champagne, or roses, or bars of Green & Black’s. . . .
** Yes. Next week. Nothing shall come between me and a voice lesson next Tuesday. Although we’re just about going to be starting at the beginning again. Larynx? Soft palate? Vocal cords/folds? I forget. Coming in on a note all by yourself with no accompaniment? Hell. I remember that bit.
*** Nothing is sure in this life, especially when it relies to any extent on my memory.
† Oh, it’s good for another day . . . oops
†† Mobiles fry your brains! Bring back phone booths! And stop ripping out the old red ones^ which are not merely an ornament to the countryside and an enticement to the tourist trade but a haven in a sudden hailstorm! Ask me how I know this! And yes, I can get the hellhounds in too!^^
^ Unless you’re going to do something really wizard with it http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/8385313.stm
^^ Disturbingly underfoot is kind of their default position anyway, unless there are rabbits, pheasants, or trundling bits of wind-galvanized garbage to attract them.
††† But I have a vivid, one might almost say overactive, imagination
‡ Note that Blondel, with commute, takes two hours, and he’s earlier in the day. There was never any way I’d’ve got enough pages done by midafternoon.
‡‡ Eight bells. Ie needs one more person than Niall, Colin and me.
‡‡‡ Mmph! Mmmmmblrggggglphmp! ARRRGH!
§ All my books have been through the odd new edition or two, but SUNSHINE is in a league of its own. The one constant is the Neil Gaiman quote.
§§ Also about Body Parts. What is it about pieces of people that is so popular on today’s face-out bookshelf? Ugh.
§§§ This is all based on a promotion opportunity that will either include SUNSHINE or it won’t. The promotion is already scheduled.
# I haven’t had time to sulk. I have three weeks’ work to get done in six days.
## Yes, I’ll post it here when I can. I think they’re still gajoining up the squirglicks and blethering the gazambles. Art departments. You know.
###Will I make it to Ditherington bell practise tomorrow night? Stay tuned
~ Although Luke’s need is still a whole lot greater. I think we’ve still got about a month before the next big consultants’ summit.
PEGASUS Monday
AKA Dead person walking. Well, comatose person sitting in a chair. The hour and a half I spent staring at one paragraph yesterday is still a personal worst, but there’s always tomorrow.*
Meanwhile. It’s February**, it’s cold, dark, nasty, I have another frellingest of frelling deadlines*** in two days, and I want roses. 
And then I’m going to bed again, which is a standard recourse for tired and late at night, although this works better for some people than others. Lately the effort hasn’t been really great for deriving any sleep out of, but it’ll make a change from this chair.
* * *
* And the day after. And then . . . And then it’s Thursday, and the whole show goes back to my publisher, lions, tigers, bears, elephants, bareback riders, bearded ladies and highwire acts^ . . . petrified paragraphs, chryselephantine commas, scintillant semicolons^^, the lot. And then . . . and then there’s PEG II. Oh gods. You know, lots of people write series. Real series. One book after another after another after another after another. Meep. I think I missed that gene. Meep.
^ No clowns. We don’t do clowns.
^^ I tweeted yesterday+ about the fact that I punctuate by ear++ which regularly brings me into collision with well-bred copyeditors: every frelling book it brings me into collision, to be precise. There was an outburst of solidarity in response to this tweet—as it happens at about the same time as Melissa Marr tweeted a new blog post: http://melissa-writing.livejournal.com/393726.html
I knew she had been a teacher, but that’s all I knew. I did not know that she used to teach grammar, and liked it. Wowzah. Meanwhile, if you want a good, crisp, funny+++ basic breakdown of sentence types, here it is. But the bit that pastes my ears back is that she says: ‘I know that my familiarity with grammar & mech[anics] has been as much (more?) of an asset to me than anything else so far. . . . It’s not as fun as conferences, and honestly, it’s not as QUICK as some people want. . . . I firmly believe that it’s a necessity. I KNOW that you don’t need to network (I certainly didn’t) or go to “what[‘s] hot in the market” panels. You can do that stuff, but it’s not required. What IS required is knowing how to play with words. I think this stuff is essential.’ Emphasis mine.
I entirely agree that knowing how to play with words is essential, and I agree that writing—good writing anyway—is hard work. I also agree that networking and panel-attending is mostly fluff. It can be interesting, it can boost energy and morale, and yes, you may learn something. But mostly writing is about sitting at home and staring at the screen/piece of paper.
But the idea that any storyteller gets there in any manner fundamentally by her knowledge of grammar just blows me away. What little I know about grammar and structure as grammar and structure is strictly after the fact. I can, for example, tell you something about how I put my stories together because they’re there on the page in this shape rather than that one and therefore it is possible to say things like that I have an unhealthy love of semicolons and of starting sentences with conjunctions. I can’t begin to imagine thinking about this before the words have gone down on paper.
Ultimately however . . . whatever works. So all you secret sentence-parsers out there . . . it’s okay. It’s okay (ahem) to know what you’re doing. And your copyeditor will love you.
+ I also tweeted yesterday asking what the computer equivalent of sharpening pencils is and got way more suggestions than is good for me. (I especially liked the one about lining up your desktop icons with a protractor.) One of the most frequently mentioned is cruising the internet in one form or another. The bottomless abyss I find is the work-related stuff—I know that reading back issues of http://xkcd.com/ and http://wondermark.com/ counts as goofing around, but shouldn’t I want to know about stuff like the ever grinding-on of the Google mess: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/01/authors-google-rights-grab-books?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Or the details of how an old-fashioned print publisher managed to twist Amazon’s tail (anything that twists Amazon’s tail is a good thing): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/01/amazon-macmillan-ebooks-apple?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Well. Yes. But there were advantages to being sad, clueless and retro. More spare [sic] hours, for example. I also sort of miss the shock of what? when Peter reads something out of the newspaper or the New Scientist that I got off Twitter an hour or several days ago.
++The tweet in its entirety reads: I PUNCTUATE BY *EAR*, OKAY? GET USED TO IT. ::Clutches semicolons to chest::
+++ ‘I . . . made up my own examples for class [because] weird sticks better’
My favourite (now, read this, and tell me if you’ll ever have any trouble remembering sentence types again):
‘QUICK CHART
SIMPLE: He ran.
COMPLEX: When the zombies chased his girlfriend, he ran.
COMPOUND-COMPLEX: When the zombies chased his girlfriend, he ran, but they caught him too.
COMPOUND: He ran, but the zombies caught him.’
** http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic15617.html although that should be right off your feet
*** I swear I’ve had nothing but frellingest deadlines since about . . . August. 
Laundry. No, FRELLING laundry
I am sooo looking forward to stomping down the main street toward Peter’s washing machine carrying a large backpack full of dirty laundry.
Described it this morning on Twitter like this: Got home last night* to dead washing machine full of WATER & wet, soapy, dirty clothes. Joy. Fixer man cn’t cm till nxt Tues, MORE joy.
Last night I wasted most of an hour trying to persuade the wretched apparatus to finish what it had started. Failed.** It lay there making moaning noises and spasming feebly. And—just by the way—it’s a front loader, and the door locks when there’s water inside. This is a good thing, except for the watching through the window at my clothing developing long green beards of water weed. I eventually BAILED IT BY HAND. Very, very long-term readers of this blog may recollect a washing-machine rant long, long ago on lj, in which I imprecated the designers of washing machines who include a filter—oh, a filter, sounds good so far, you think?—which is protected, as Ladon the golden apples, by a special arcane vessel containing dirty water. I have no idea why the dirty water is necessary. But it means every time you want to clean the filter—of, perhaps, critter hair—you have to bleed off the dirty water first. This whole agglomeration lurks behind a small trap door about a palm’s-breadth up from the floor . . . which means the largest vessel you can use for dirty-water-catching purposes is only about three inches deep. A cereal bowl, say.***
I bailed out a full washing machine cereal bowlful by cereal bowlful last night.
It took a long time.
What’s going to be even more fun is walking down main street carrying a large backpack full of wet, soapy dirty laundry.
Meanwhile I spent way too long writing last night’s entry so I am going to be SHORT tonight. SHORT. SHORT: lasting or taking a small amount of time † ; relatively small in extent. But I thought you might like to see Rose of the Week. Do you remember that I raid the florist’s†† after bell ringing on Sunday? Cut flowers last so shockingly short††† a time I often take pictures of them because . . . because I am a nut case. I’m the only one who ever looks at the photos.‡ But there’s evanescent and then there’s, hey, I spent money for that thing I want to know it existed. ‡‡ Also, I was thinking, I need photos of flowers in January. And February. And March. . . . We may do this again. 
* * *
* Deeeeep dark secret I am about to REVEAL ON LINE because I am lame, silly and a narcissist. I am enjoying walking home at mmmph o’clock in the morning. And the hellhounds clearly do too.^ However it only works at mmmph o’clock in the morning; normal people are still walking their dogs at 11, and going home at midnight-thirty on a Saturday night because of frelling service ring Sunday morning the streets are like the blasted Riviera in July, and I think I’ve told you that the one dubious pub in this town ^^ is about eighty yards from my front door. ^^^
But a little bit later and it’s just you and the bats, and this time of year you don’t even have bats, and the night and the silence go on a very long way, and in that silence stories you weren’t expecting start whispering to you from the shadows. I get lazy about using Wolfgang to commute—for example if the snow had hit a few weeks ago, schlepping four hundred pages of manuscript hard copy back and forth in my knapsack would have got very old. And the sad creaky middle-aged truth is that even ten pounds of knapsack starts to make my vertebrae feel rather compressed after about twenty minutes, and, except at mmmph o’clock, hellhounds and I are usually going the long way. Some long way or other.^^^^
^ Ooooh! they say. To be abroad in the pit of darkness and, possibly, chaos! Oooooh! The only drawback is the hissing at them when we first saltate out the front door of the mews and commence to ricochet with excitement around the courtyard under everybody’s bedroom windows. All right, you can’t hiss No! and you can’t even hiss Ssssstop that! very effectively, but you know what I mean.
^^ I wonder how many of those heat-flushed drinkers this last Saturday woke up Sunday morning with exothermic head colds.
^^^ The cover versions of Smoke on the Water get really tedious by the end of a long hot summer. +
+ I’ve probably said this before, haven’t I? Consider it a mark of just how tedious.
^^^^ Two hours a day is a lot of walking. We need to take every opportunity to fill up our saltation card.
** Had an email from a friend that said, I’m in a crummy mood anyway, so it’s okay if I spend the evening folding laundry, right?
I one-upped the hell out of her.
*** Yes, I’ve tried bigger things—baking dishes and so on—but the slosh factor is rather diabolical.
† subheading: seeming to last less time than is the case; passing quickly
†† Another of my disturbingly ungreen habits, I’m afraid, like commuting in Wolfgang
††† Speaking of short
‡ Till now.
‡‡ For one brief shining moment. T H White was nowhere on roses, and neither were Lerner and Loewe. Feh on them.
And a Fabulous Friday
I am eating sweetcorn/corn on the cob the way corn was meant to be straight out of Peter’s vegetable patch and into the steamer, and having rung a Perfect Touch of Stedman doubles tonight at practise.* It doesn’t get much better. And while it’s a difficult philosophical point, I think I will accept that successful touches of Stedman doubles are, for me, an acceptable trade-off for the absence of Maine wild-blueberry pie, which sweetcorn always makes me think wistfully of.**
So Peter and I went on our Unexpected Free Friday Afternoon*** expedition to the big garden centre today as planned.† I am so not safe in a garden centre. †† This is mostly the wrong time of year for planting anything, except for sudden panicky fillings-in where things have inconveniently died—it’s too late for the summer stuff and too early for the autumn. But a lot of perennials—the tougher ones anyway—you can pretty much plant whenever you get around to it. ††† Take . . . roses, for example. No! No! Get me away from the roses! I’ve just ordered . . . mmmph‡ . . . roses! I don’t need any more roses! I need fewer roses than I’m about to already have!‡‡
In some ways nurseries and garden centres are worse than bookstores, because plants are alive. Books may whisper, Buy me! Buy me! as you walk past‡‡‡ but I find the guilt is less if you resist.§ They’re indoors, they’re warm, they’re dry, they don’t need to be fed, watered, or hurtled. Especially at an off time of year in gardening terms, there are always plants that through no fault of their own haven’t sold. Some of them can just hunker down and wait, but some of them are getting pot-bound and unhappy. You’re never supposed to buy a pot-bound, unhappy plant, like you’re never supposed to buy the puppy/kitten/budgie/crocodile sitting sadly in the corner, because even if there was nothing wrong with them to begin with there’s a point of bad care past which they won’t recover. I popped several things out of their pots to see how bad the news was—uggh—steeled myself, and put them down again. I only bought one plant!§§ One! §§§ A little pale-yellow rhododendron that I’ve grown before, but it seems to have got left behind at the old house and I was glad to see it again. I admit it was sitting sadly in a corner but I’ll give it a nice new bigger pot and some friendly ericaceous compost and trim off the dead bits and . . .
And speaking of pots. My restraint may have more to do with how big Wolfgang is than any true self-control: after all I had Peter with me and the man was expecting some floor space for his purchases. The ridiculous arrogance of some people’s husbands. Really.¤ By the time I’d got to the reject rhodo I’d already kind of filled up my cart with pots. Empty ones I mean. I have a jones for plant pots that’s very nearly as serious as for books, roses, or chocolate.¤¤ Nearly. And of course I have a tiny garden with all the plumbing in Hampshire running under it, and another slightly less tiny garden where there is a growing rank of camellias, necessarily in pots in this part of Hampshire, against the hedge.
But my excuse for the garden centre run—Peter wanted some of those hole-filler plants—is that I wanted to load up on soil improver and rotted farmyard crap for all those newly-cleared flowerbeds at Third House that are about to have roses in them. I picked up six monster bags of two different kinds of caviar and foie gras for plants, and I could barely get the cart to move: it only had a single pair of wheels, which meant I had to lever the front end off the ground before it would roll. I’m tallish, but there’s not a lot of me in a circumferential direction, and the cart weighed a good deal more than I do. I teetered out into the car park with my bell ringing muscles struggling against terminal gravity, and managed to get the cart to Wolfgang where Peter was peacefully loading plants into the back seat, before gravity won.
At this point the nice gentleman the next car over came rushing up and said, Would you like a hand with those?
I—briefly—wondered how he thought I’d got the wretched things into the cart in the first place, but one of the advantages of getting old is that you can slack off on the having-to-prove-stuff. That would be terrific, I said, and then lounged against Wolfgang’s flank (watching his axle and rear bumper sag lower and lower) and let the nice man get on with it. I had assumed that we were going to heave them in together, two hands per end—which is what Peter and I did when we got them to Third House—but he went all hairy-fisted he-man and did it all by himself. Maybe he rings bells. If I ever see him in a pub I’ll buy him a pint.
And hellhounds ate all of their dinner. All this and a perfect touch of Stedman.
* * *
* And in spite of someone else going wrong. The Kent, I admit, was less divine, but at least it happened.
** Tricky philosophical questions be damned, I am very lucky to have put myself out of reach of wild-blueberry pie before the menopause wars. There are enough things I am not out of reach of. Chocolate. Chocolate. Lemon curd. Chocolate. Kendal Mint Cake, which Americans are mostly spared. Lardy cake, which Americans are also mostly spared.^ Chocolate. I could go on. I could go on a very long time.
^ I believe I have said in these virtual pages before that I would kill for the ability to eat a piece of lardy cake without gaining five pounds overnight.
*** Oisin is on holiday for two more Fridays. Of course I should be getting on with any number of musical prodigies to cause consternation and dismay on his return^ but what I am doing is transposing Beethoven’s arrangement of The Miller of Dee down about a fifth, because what’s the point of having all those notes below middle C if you never get to sing them?^^ And while I’m at it I’m messing around with the accompaniment because I’m like that.
And I went past the church while the wedding that cancelled its bells at the last minute was going on and there were not one but two shiny Daimler-type vehicles festooned in white ribbons sitting out front. No wonder they couldn’t afford bells.
^ Okay, the broom and dustpan are a nice percussive touch, but tell me again what you want the crocodile for?
^^ I’ve had exactly two voice lessons and I’m already rebelling.
† An actual carried out plan in my life. Golly. I’ll be balancing my chequebook next.^
^ No.
†† They’re just like bookstores. Aaaaaugh.
††† . . . humming a tune . . .
‡ Several. Well, quite a few. Sort of the rose-buying equivalent of when I usually get to bed. Mmmph.
‡‡ Now there’s grammar for you.
‡‡‡ And in my experience they usually do.
§ And yes, I also automatically buy copies of favourite books found in charity shops and car boot sales to make sure they go to a good home. There’s always someone to give a favourite book to.
§§ And a tray of pansies. Trays of pansies don’t count.
§§§ All those roses are kind of on my mind. I also have kind of a lot of bulbs coming. And a few other little green growing things. Mere bagatelles really. But you wouldn’t believe how much SPACE there is at Third House since I turned Atlas loose on clearing all the rubbish out of the flowerbeds!
¤ Peter is a star. I still haven’t found my PIN number and I’m running out of cash. Peter paid for my stuff on his card.
¤¤ I have a new measurement for pots however. If it’s standing one-brick’s-height^ up from the ground, is it too tall for the hellhounds to pee on the plant in it?
^ I mostly can’t be frelled with plant pot feet. Bricks are so much less, ahem, fusspot.
