A New Arrival.

Early morning was warm with a strong south-westerly wind blowing. It stayed dry and hot right through until I was driving home from Lidl's when I noticed the first few drops of rain on the windscreen. The rain politely held off until I had got home and taken the shopping out of the car. However Peter and his fellow rowers got very wet out at sea.

Since getting home we've had some very heavy showers, with a few dry spells in-between. No sign of the thunderstorms though.

Sitting outside this morning I spotted a black duck swimming on the sea. My book tells me it's a common scoter which feeds on mussels and other crustaceans. 

And here we have Ginger and her foal. He was born at 8.30 this morning not long before this photo was taken. There was much excitement at the stables but Ginger and the foal were in a closed off stable not to be disturbed by hordes of people. We were unofficially allowed to peek around the corner on the far side. I resisted at first but then had a quiet look after the ride when the foal was about 3 hours old. Aah!

Much to my surprise I was riding Cadno for the lesson. He's such a gentleman, really well schooled and easy to ride. For some reason I had problems keeping the ball of my right foot on the stirrup, almost losing it a couple of times, which would have been embarrassing. I do ride long so my first step was to shorten up the leathers by a hole which didn't make a lot of difference. 

I suspected that I might be putting too much weight on the left leg and tried to correct that. Katie suggested I might also be gripping with my right knee so I shall work on that. My right knee is the one with arthritis so maybe disco aerobics was causing it to tense up. Oh well, there's no more riding for me for a few weeks until my toe heals up.

I did a quick shop at Morrisons, bought a tray of petunias from Charlie's reduced section and carried on into town.

Then amongst various bits and pieces I got at the charity shops I found a pot of blue glass blobs. Exactly the right colour to finish off the blue spiral which had been looking not quite right. I'd added in the remaining green blobs and had already decided that they didn't work. The 170 new blobs are just the right shade of blue, some frosted, some shiny and the rest clear. 

During a dry spell I took the shingle off the large bowl planter and put the petunias in around the carex. Next year the carex will be on its own but I thought it would be fun to have a bit of colour this year.