A glorious Sunday

Although it didn't get off to a very early start as I slept in until 11am, I seem to have got a lot of things done today. The YFG was at a friend's house for a sleepover - I dropped her off there yesterday at about 3pm and she was returned tonight at 7pm so it was quite a long visit. However, it was just at the other end of the village, and the friend's mother promised to bring her home at any time if she wanted to be brought!

The sleep in was the result of a busy week and a lot of interrupted nights as the FH has a bad chesty cough at the moment and is having problems sleeping. Between his coughing and his TV watching in the night, I am getting woken up a lot. I slept the majority of last night in the YFG's vacant bed, so I did get a good start on the night!

As a consequence of the extra sleep, we missed church this morning. I got up and made a cup of tea and was able to sit in the back garden in my pajamas to drink it in the sunshine. After getting dressed, I organised the lunch and then fetched the lawnmower and cut the front lawn. The chickens were happy to recieve the clippings in to the run to scratch about with and generally peck at. After lunch, I loaded up the dishwasher and moved the lawnmower to the back garden. Cutting the back lawn was much harder work as the grass was longer! It made many more trips to empty the grass collecting basket, and took me about an hour. Another pleasant hour was spent in the sun, digging over one of the raised beds, with some of the chickens happily foraging for the worms which I was bringing to the surface with every turn of the spade. The chickens are not meant to be ranging around the garden but some of the lighter pure breed chickens are able to fly out! A few of them are always out and about in the garden, and whilst it is pleasant to have them keeping you company right now, they will do untold damage to the seeds when I get to sowing time. We must work out exactly how they are getting out and put a stop to it very soon!

The chickens are laying between 8 and 13 eggs each day now, so I have to wash and date the eggs each day so that I make sure that they are sold or used in the correct order. They are of a variety of sizes and colours and make for an interesting collection in an egg box - so much nicer than the average supermarket box of eggs as I can explain to the people buying the eggs that a Barnvelder laid that darker one, a Dutch bantam laid that tiny one and that lighter coloured egg is probably from one of the white hens.

This evening I have ironed my way through quite a heap of laundry whilst watching half of Africa on the TV. First we saw "Wild at Heart" on ITV although we had to miss the last 15 minutes so that we could turn over to BBC1 to see the brand new series made from the books of Alexander McCall Smith - The No1 Ladies Detective Agency - perfectly set in Botswana. I have read the first 6 of the books and love them, and having seen the film which was made from the first book last year, I have been looking forward to this series ever since I heard it was being made - and it has not disappointed me! It was lovely and I am already looking forward to the next episode. We'll have to catch the end of "Wild At Heart" on the itvplayer.