Sunny.

At last, a whole day at home. It was also our 39th wedding anniversary. Peter gave me this unusual blue-ish orchid this morning. I'm pretty sure the colour is due to dye but at least it fits in with my blue & yellow kitchen.  There were also some chocolates and I declared today a non-diet day! As Peter was at work all day we shall have a special meal tomorrow to celebrate.

It has been mostly very quiet here in our valley as our neighbour had the steep hill section of the road re-surfaced and after the contractors left there were no vehicles at all until late afternoon. 

Looking the other way from the same spot you can see that my neighbour has been mowing his grass and I got most of our grass cut in the afternoon too. I cut the lawns in the reverse order to the way I usually do them so that I could catch the sun and I left out the tiny patch of grass by the scree garden because it doesn't get any sun now and was soaking wet. 

I got on with a number of other jobs before my mowing session, as soon as Peter left for work in the morning I put the sheets in the washing machine so that they could hang out to dry (sort of) in the sun that has shone all day. It was nice and windy in the morning but it soon died down so it wasn't a perfect drying day but the ironing finished them off nicely. Because I have been at work for the last few days I had enough apples to cook up another big saucepan of stewed apples. I also hoovered upstairs which I don't do every day and had a bit of a blitz in our bedroom. Eventually I was able to get out to dig up some spare plants which had done well in the propagating plot and created an instant garden up in the scree garden. Some of them were a bit big too move but it doesn't really matter. I just want that bed to look like a garden rather than an overgrown weedy corner.

A bonus to cutting the grass is that the mower removed all the fallen leaves making everything look super tidy. In between all these jobs I took a couple of breaks and watched episode 1 of the new season of Downton Abbey. I've got the series on record but missed the first episode so I caught up on the ITV i-player.