Sunny.

After a hazy start the day has been lovely and sunny with tonight's pink sky indicating another good day tomorrow.

This morning when I looked at the porch door I painted yesterday I could see that each door would need at least two coats of the satin finish paint. So after all the usual household jobs I painted all three of the doors. Being water based paint it only needed 6 hours to dry and as it was so warm today I took a chance on 5 hours and gave the remaining two doors another coat in the evening. Hopefully that should be it.

While waiting for the paint to dry I did the mowing. I had only just started on the central grass when I came upon this toad. At first I simply guided it to the long grass (the bits people leave for the council to cut once in a while) but then I began to worry about the toad's prospects. Apart from the front gardens all being somewhat devoid of places for wildlife there is also the prolific use of slug pellets. Should the toad or a hedgehog, eat slugs poisoned by the pellets it would suffer a painful and slow death. Once I'd done my section of mowing I got a bucket and found the toad after some searching in the long grass. Into the bucket went the toad and off I went to find somewhere more suitable. I hadn't been to the dead end of the next road before having been told that the farmer had closed the gate to people going down to Manning's Pit. However I thought I would release the toad into the field anyway. When I got there the gate was padlocked and had barbed wire wrapped around it to stop people opening or climbing over the gate but there was a bit of space between the gate and the hedge. A well trodden footpath and a couple of dogwalkers coming towards me made me feel confident about shimmying around the gate into the field where I let the toad go in some long grass.

This is the field only five minutes from the house. The dog walkers confirmed that this was the way down to Manning's Pit and I can't wait to find some time to take a walk down that way.