The Back Garden

I know it's almost June, but only in the past couple of weeks has it been consistently warm enough (though not necessarily sunny) that I'm convinced that it's actually Springtime. We've had fits and starts of nice weather for a while, but now it really seems to be sticking. Yay for sunshine! To celebrate, I took a tour of the back garden a few days ago.

This may not look like much at this point, but with any luck, this planter will supply us with tomatoes and lettuce. The lettuces are coming in really well, actually, and are already noticably bigger than in the photo. I've planted another container with lettuce and several more with tomatoes. We eat a lot of them in the summer and I'm hoping to improve over last year, when I got not a single tomato. Everyone I've talked to says it was generally a bad year for gardening, so hopefully it wasn't my black thumb that did it.

Our next door neighbour/gardener Rocco did a lot of work in our garden last year. We're trying to keep it up to a degree - he did clear out a lot of weeds and overgrowth, which definitely needed doing, but he is much more of a garden disciplinarian than I am and left the flowerbeds a bit bare - and even wanted to get rid of more. He divides plants into two general categories: pretty flowers and rubbish. Needless to say, we had a lot of rubbish. He wanted to get rid of this little rose bush, but I vetoed the removal. Its flowers aren't very impressive, but I find them very sweet and tiny.

I bought these little carnations last year and am happy to say they're doing well. They are just under the rose bush so I can see both from the back door.

This camelia is so impressive - the bloom is larger than my outspread hand. Another bloom is just opening up and there are two more buds, so I'm looking forward to a lengthy show.

I don't know what these purple flowers are, but we've got several clumps of them. I've seen them in other gardens and in parks, so they must be good. Plus, they made it past Rocco's cull last year, so I guess they qualify as "pretty flowers".

We have a single hollyhock (I think). It gets ridiculously tall, like three or four feet, and lasts a long time. I imagine a bunch of them would be very impressive, but for now we're making do with just one. Don't want to overdo it.

Rocco gave us several beautiful purple lillies (or irises - I don't know the difference). They're all blooming very impressively against the wall of the shed. I can see them from the kitchen window.

This jasmine also grows against the shed and it is gorgeous. I brought a sprig in the other day and you could smell it as soon as you walked in the door. Lots of fat, lazy bees hanging around, but they aren't too aggressive so we're co-existing peacefully.

And this vine I just don't get. The bottom of it is brown and shriveled; we thought it was dead and almost pulled it out. Then it started growing leaves and produced these very large, sort of alien-looking buds, which opened into large, strange flowers. I don't know what they are, but I like them.

Spring Cleaning

We did most of our heavy-duty spring cleaning in March, in advance of my parents coming to visit. We are having some more houseguests (the DJs for Matthew's brother's wedding) next weekend, so that's a good excuse to do a few more things. Today Matthew painted our new conservatory door* and while, he had a brush in hand, also threw a lick of paint on the kitchen window sill. It is blindingly white and so pretty now!

I spent the day reading in preparation for starting a draft of my dissertation. I would much rather be painting, but had to confine my creative urges to making us an afternoon snack (toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches toasted on the George Foreman grill - yummy and easy to clean!) and changing my desktop wallpaper. I can't afford real Cath Kidston wallpaper, but these make a pretty good substitute...

*The conservatory door had to be replaced after we had an attempted break-in last November. The would-be burglars splintered the door frame but didn't get in. Then they climbed on top of the glass conservatory and kicked in the window to the flat upstairs, which has been empty for over a year, so they went away empty handed. That only made us feel mildly better, though, as it took three months for our insurance to sort out our door being replaced, during which time we got very, very cold!

A day by the sea

Monday was a bank holiday in the UK, but we celebrated in our own way - by staying at home on the day and then taking a day trip to Hastings on Tuesday. We'd had several days of nice weather in London and a day at the seaside sounded like fun. It was fun, but not in a warm, beach-y sort of way. In more of a blustery, slightly freezing, "if I'd forgotten for a moment how cruel the British summer can be, it's coming back to me now" sort of way...

We decided on fish and chips for lunch, which seems like a no-brainer, but a historical pub was very tempting. We pencilled it in for dinner, but didn't count on the fish being so unbelievably huge and greasy. It was good, but despite the labelling, it actually seemed quite UNhealthy.

Neither of us was able to finish and we'd ordered the regular portion - I can't imagine the large! I also had a pickled egg. I've never had one before but the concept has always intrigued me. The flavour was less complex than I'd imagined, essentially just "hard boiled egg" plus "pickle juice". I mean, I know that's what it is, but I thought it might taste like more. I have resolved to try a pickled quail's egg at the next opportunity (no, I don't run across them very often, so I have no idea when that will be). Maybe that will be the flavour haunting my imagination.

Of course, the natural thing to do after a very heavy, greasy meal is to climb a hill so steep that it has a funicular railroad running up it. We cut through a graveyard on the way up, which is now a lovely little park.

Apparently the graves are still there, but to make it more park-like the headstones are now just leaning neatly against the wall. This seemed weird to me, but it is a nice little park.

This is practically my only photo of Hastings Castle, which was built by William the Conqueror (he actually built the first fortifications even before the Battle of Hastings), that isn't full of French high school students. There was a group of them roaming the town and we ran into them just about every time we turned a corner. They weren't horrible, just adolescent. Very rambunctious, wearing silly clothes as badges of their youth culture, chasing each other around and shrieking as signs of affection, etc - in other words, teenagers.

Later we wandered around on the beach for a while. As you can see, it isn't the kind that makes you want to spread out your towel and soak up the sun, even if there had been sun for soaking.

Hastings is home to England's biggest beach-launched fishing fleet. That means that all these sort of sad looking little boats aren't abandoned, but at high tide are pushed into the water by tractors. We learned in a film at the castle's interpretive centre that Hastings's harbor silted up in the 13th century, so how they fished between that time and the invention of tractors, I don't know.

We don't know what these flags are for, other than whipping around violently in the wind and looking very spooky and pirate-y. On those counts, mission accomplished!

Despite all our tramping around, we never worked enough appetite for dinner, so we had a nice cream tea instead (big, hot homemade scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream and mugs of boiling hot tea), then walked along the promenade to St Leonards, the next town along the coast. I counted nine charity shops on one street, but it was late in the day, so we just called it a day and caught the next train home, where we still weren't hungry for dinner but did sleep very, very well indeed.

I am a good person

An insane thing just happened to me on the tube home from school today. I got on a carriage and noticed a transvestite/transgendered person standing near the door. Sitting just on the other side of the plexiglass divider, literally inches away, was a group of teenagers falling about the place. Specifically there was a girl shrieking with laughter, looking at the person (who, as I mentioned, was standing about 3 inches away) and then shrieking again, saying, "Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!" Technically, her friends were more laughing at her but they were still carrying on and making a scene that was obviously focused on this person. I was listening to my iPod, so it took me a couple of seconds to clock what was going on. When I did, I turned off my Fresh Air podcast, went over to the girl and very calmly and non-confrontationally said, "Are you okay? Because you're making a lot of noise. Do you have a problem or something?" She just sort of sputtered a bit, obviously surprised and embarassed to be called out. Her friend looked really pointedly at her and said, "No, we're okay. She's just being childish," to which I replied, "Yes, she is." I went back to where I'd been standing near the person and said, "I guess they don't let them out very often."

I was pretty upset the rest of my journey and started thinking that I should have been more forceful, so there would be mistaking my disapproval of their behaviour. So as I was getting off the train, I went over to the girl again and said, "You should be ashamed of yourself. You have been very offensive and very rude." She seemed surprised at that, too, and it made me feel a bit better. The best thing, though, was that walking along the platform, I heard two guys talking about it. One said, "I can't believe those kids." And the other said, "Yeah, I'm so glad that woman said something."

It's been about an hour now, but I'm still feeling quite emotional. I am so angry at those horrible kids for thinking that they have the right to make someone feel bad like that. I feel proud of myself for standing up and trying to stop them. I feel pleased that other people noticed my little show of heroics, but I'm disappointed that no one else said anything to the kids. Mostly, I hope that girl is ashamed and that she never forgets how it felt to be embarassed in public.

It's all been a bit much; I'm going to drink some juice and have a lie-down.

Advice

I saw this on the Free People blog, which I like because there is always lots of content. Most of the blogs I follow are done by women who have families and houses and if not jobs, then at least pretty busy Etsy shops, so they sometimes take time away from the computer to make dinner, do some crafts to post about, have family holidays, etc. Free People's blog is somebody's job, so there are always lots of fresh posts. Is this a slightly hypocritical stance from someone who aims to post about once a week and can't quite manage that? Hey - I'm not a professional.

Anyway, I noticed this list of "whimisical" instructions and realised that almost all of them also apply to doing urban design site appraisals. Interesting, huh?

And just 14 short months later...

...and I've got this far with the chair. Actually, there is a little bit of progress you can't see - I've also borrowed a staplegun from my friend Jane. The project is basically done. All I have to do now is use the original upholstery pieces as patterns for the new material, staple it on very neatly, figure out how to cover the back of the back panel, which doesn't have anything to staple to, find on the internet and order decorative tacks, then use said tacks to cover all the stapling.

I have a paper due on Thursday, but once that's done maybe I'll make a move on the chair. I really should, since I'd like to have it done in under two years and there are only 10 months left to go...

I also have some gardening projects lined up. At some point during the winter all my basil plants died. I was disgusted with them, and put them outside on the patio so I wouldn't have to look at them all brown and sticklike. This tough love approach actually worked with a clematis that's recently put out new leaves, but the basil just died, so I got a little new one at the grocery store yesterday, along with an assorted herb 6-pack and I need to repot them all. I've also got some begonia bulbs or seeds or pips or whatever they're called, and some tomato and parsnip seeds. Last year's tomato plants have pretty much all died, except one that has just recently produced two tomatoes (currently .5 in and .75 in diameter, respectively), which if they ever ripen will be the only fruit I got out of that crop. I'm going to try again this year and be very diligent about pinching shoots, fertilising, making sure the plants get enough sun, leaving them outside to be pollinated, and all that gardenerly stuff. I'm also going to use potting soil rather than dirt I dug up from the back yard, which I'm confident will make a big difference.

So far in the garden we've done some weeding and I planted some bulbs. I also decided to spruce up the three hanging planters on our garden wall since you can see them from the kitchen window and they were empty except for a dead geranium, some moss, and a handful of scraggly looking weeds. One of our challenges in gardening is that we have no idea what most of the plants are. Our neighbour Rocco, who is a retired gardner, seems to have only two categories of plants - "pretty flowers" or "rubbish". By his standards, most of the stuff in our garden is rubbish. So I took some things that I'm pretty sure are weeds but have pretty flowers on them at the moment and transplanted them into the planters. Pretty nice for weeds, huh?

Happy Easter

We've had a busy spring thus far, with lectures (but, alas, not assignments) ending in March and my parents visiting for 10 very busy days at the beginning of the month. After all that excitement, our Easter weekend has been very low-key. We celebrated by having hot cross buns this morning. They weren't one a penny (or even two a penny), but at 99p for four and half off the 2nd pack, they were still a pretty good deal.

That's a picture of our last one. Matthew is currently chowing down on it, toasted with butter (the bun, not Matthew).

Just because I wasn't writing doesn't mean I was doing stuff, so I plan to sprinkle catch-up photos throughout my upcoming posts. Today I've got a photo of our little Christmas tree. We spent Christmas at Matthew's brother's house this year. He and his partner live in London, only about a 25 minute bus ride away, but we made a 4 day mini-break of it. They are very good cooks and we ate and ate and ate. At one point on Boxing Day, I thought I was going to be physically ill from eating too much goose and cheese. I pulled through, though, and we had a wonderful time.

Since we were "going away" for Christmas, I didn't do much by way of decorating at home. I wasn't planning to have a tree at all, but eventually I just couldn't take it anymore and I got a little artificial tree at Argos for £7.49. It came with ornaments and lights and was insanely cheap, which I like, but the most intriguing thing is the weirdly 1980s theme: the tree is black and the ornaments are all day-glo neon colours. I don't understand it, but I really like it.

Of course, I match my gift-wrapping to the tree, even though we were taking them all to another house for exchanging. I found some very good paper - matte black at Habitat, dark purple with silver stars at Heals, and sequinned disco balls at John Lewis - and finally found a use for a silver jiffy envelope I've been saving for a couple of years. I was very pleased with the results.

The black tree was a lot of fun and got me thinking about some possible Christmas themes. I'm keeping my eyes open and if I can "source" the materials, it's looking like we might have a punk rock Christmas this year!