A lot of our friends have 2-gig weekends. Many have 3-gig weekends. And when there’s a bank holiday, they have 4- or 5-gig weekends, some with 2 gigs in one day. Monkey Dust try to stick to 1 or 2 gigs a month, so a 2-gig weekend is a rarity. The weekend just gone was a 2-gig weekend. A birthday party on Friday and a public gig at a new venue on Saturday.
Both gigs went very well, especially Saturday’s when the lads were delighted to see a delegation of fans who had come all the way from the Ring o Bells pub in Queensbury. That’s the other side of Bradford and it’s a Very Long drive, yet there were 8 of them and they came to support the band on a debut gig at a new venue. How cool is that? What a lovely gesture.
But a 2-gig weekend wiped out the rest of the weekend for us, pretty much. The Friday gig was 10 minutes up the road, so we were at least able to have something to eat before we went. The Saturday gig was 20 minutes up the road, but we took our tea with us as we’d been busy on Saturday doing the weekly shopping.
On Saturday morning, when we eventually got up, I had to go back to bed and lie down in a dark room with a mask over my eyes, as I started to get the beginnings of a migraine. Fortunately, I caught it and I was able to get up again after half an hour.
We only had Sunday to do something around the home. We chose to spend some of it in the garden and some of it in the kitchen. In the garden I gathered windfall apples and pears and then picked some good ones from the tree, while the poet picked blackberries and then cut back a load of brambles to clear a pathway to our garden gate. He got the chipper out so that everything would fit in the wheelie bin, ready to go out for the bin collection today.
Rotherham council have suspended garden waste collections until September while they deal with staff shortages, even though residents actually pay for this service. Fortunately, Doncaster council, as far as I know, is still collecting garden waste, and they don’t charge extra. But just in case they decide to go down the same suspension route, as several councils are currently struggling over their waste collection service, we wanted to make sure we had a full bin this time for them to collect. And so we do.
There is still a lot of work in the garden to do to get it up to scratch. But if we do a bit each week, we should get there.
I also scrubbed out all of the drinkers and the baths and put nice clean water out for our wildlife, with a copper coin in 3 of them to try and keep them clean. We did that before but either the jackdaws or the magpies stole them. And I put out fresh food.
In the kitchen, the poet baked 2 loaves of bread while I made an apple and blackberry crumble made with apples and blackberries from the garden. I’d put 250g of blackberries in with about 400g of apples and 1tbsp sugar to stew lightly, but the blackberries dissolved. So I pinched another 150g to add to the mix without stewing them, to keep them whole. Then he asked me to help him make some peanut butter cookies. All I had to do was advise, guide and watch, although I did grease the baking trays and do the oven part.
It was all very delicious. I was supposed to be making an apple and blackberry traybake as well, but we’d got up late and I ran out of both time and enthusiasm. I might make those one evening this week instead, as we don’t want to be chucking out any of the fruit.
We have at least 5 hedgehogs who visit our garden, as well as the birds and the mice. They seem to come in shifts and we put extra mealworms out for them of an evening. We know there are at least 5 because that’s how many we had at once one time. But usually they come in ones or twos.
The one that’s usually first to the garden is very small, and s/he climbs on top of the food and munches on it peacefully. It moves to one of the drinkers for a long, leisurely slurp, and then it either goes back to the food or does a tour of the patio.
On Sunday night, this hedgehog was limping and when it had finished eating, it couldn’t get down the step back onto the grass. We went out to have a look and the poet removed a large tick from it while I put the gardening gloves on and gently lifted it onto the lawn. It rolled up into a tight ball for as long as the security light stayed on, but was gone in a flash as soon as the light went off.
It may have caught its foot in something, or it may have trodden on a thorn, or it may have pulled a muscle. Fortunately, a hedgehog is something we can pick up if necessary and keep safe until we can get it seen by a specialist or until it recovers. But we’ll just keep an eye on it for now.
Over the past few days, we’ve had a bedraggled looking collared dove in the garden. The poet thought it was dying, but it flew off well enough and it does keep coming back. Yesterday morning, while I was writing this, I noticed it was struggling to eat and had a lot of feathers all mussed up on the side of its face. Closer inspection revealed a bit of a lump. It found some food it could eat easily, and it flew off and back again a few times. Every so often it scratched at this lump, hence the mass of feathers, but I don’t know if it’s because of a fight or if it’s something more sinister. We’ll keep an eye on this one too.
We now have 3 birds missing their tail feathers: an adult blackbird, a young starling, and a young blackbird. While we feel very honoured to have so many birds and animals that feel safe enough in our garden when they’re injured, I do wish we didn’t have so many injuries. If we can do anything about it we will, but so often we might not even be able to catch them. Especially the birds.
We also have a sparrowhawk quite close by and there was a pile of fluffy feathers in the middle of one of the lawns. And while I know this is nature, it also makes me a bit sad that we’ve lost one of our babies.
So, Monday morning and it was publication day for the book I was working on last week. By the start of the day there were only about 4 book sellers that hadn’t processed it, including Amazon. I think D2D and all the other sellers did very well to get it out in such a short time frame. It was on Google Play Books early in the end, but at least it was there too.
I started the day relaxing with my dirty cuppa and getting ready for the day ahead. Over this cuppa, I shared the publication day news to Instagram and I updated my Books2Read page so that the new publication was at the top. I also went in and added the Google Play Books link.
When my flylady hour started, I began by putting a washload through, with the intention of hanging it on the line when it was done. By the time it was done, it was raining, so I put it through an extra spin and decided to hang it up indoors instead and put through what I could in the tumble dryer.
Because I’ve been doing this for…3 weeks (?), Monday’s rooms didn’t actually need much doing to them. Plus, with a baking session at the weekend, the kitchen had already been cleared up several times. So I opened all the curtains and blinds, made sure the birds still had plenty of food, did a quick put-things-away, pushed the vacuum around (the conservatory and the kitchen), and emptied the dishwasher.
I made another dirty cuppa and headed to my desk, where I started today’s blog post and did this week’s diary. Then I started work on next week’s publication, Mavis Braithwaite Strikes Again, Wordsworth Short #40. This week’s publishing job didn’t take as long as last week’s publishing job as (a) it was only one story, and (b) this story appeared in Words Worth Reading only a few weeks ago. All I had to do was move it down from ‘Words Worth Reading Stories’ in the Scrivener binder to ‘Wordsworth Shorts’, top and tail it with my master front and back matter, and send it off.
Next job was to collate all the artwork for Wordsworth Shorts 31 – 40, as I’ll be preparing Ten Short Stories: Wordsworth Shorts 31 – 40 soon. I created new covers for all of those stories in Affinity, and made a couple of graphics in Canva for on the blog. And I got the artwork and cover ready for #41, Killer Queen, which will also be coming out soon.
The collared dove with the bump on its neck came back a few times and I was soon able to see that there was a wound on its face. Its crop also looked a bit gorged. It may be struggling to digest its food if it has a bad injury or wound, like an ulcer or an abscess.
Last job of the day, and for the rest of the day, was a client edit.
I’m glad the birds and animals feel safe in your yard. I hope they are all okay, poor things.
Busy weekend, and you still got a lot done in the garden. I’m looking forward to baking bread again, once it cools down. The storebought is getting worse and worse, and the baker I like isn’t always at the farmers’ market.
Our next challenge is sourdough, but we have to find natural yeast first to get a starter going. There are a couple of pre-packed pre-sliced loaves that we like from the supermarket, but we also try to get artisan bread too, which is always delicious.
Ooooh, that sounds good.