Sun and Wind.

We had quite a pretty sunset last night. 

It has been sunny again today with the wind picking up in the afternoon creating whitecaps all across the bay.

When I sit out in the garden in the mornings, apart from letting my mind wander into nothingness I'm often thinking about the garden. Which is the most urgent job that I should do next and more recently how to create a garden that can cope with the increasingly hot and dry summers. Apart from two brief showers we have had no rain for 36 days and it shows. The plants in the shingle garden are all fine while those in planters or the raised beds have gone over quickly and have needed watering just to keep them alive. Now I'm wondering if I should change the raised bed plantings to more drought resistant plants. I can also see that one side of the garden is drier than the other so some plants will be moved when we start getting rain again.

And of course there is always the problem of keeping the garden looking good all year round. The bigger grasses such as the stipa and the pheasant grass are great in the winter but they're getting quite big and starting to overpower the smaller plants. Oh well, more things to ponder.

Peter took the car for new front tyres in the morning. They forgot to replace the cable ties on one of the hub caps and now it is sitting in a hedge somewhere between here and town. He also called in at the garage and had the rattling exhaust pipe secured and the clutch adjusted to make it easier on the gears.

My main job today was to give the bedroom carpet a clean. I tried some foam carpet cleaner but it didn't have the magic result I was hoping for. I'm not sure if the result was much better than hoovering twice would have been. In the end I scrubbed over the grubby areas with a damp cloth and now have the windows open to dry the carpet.

For the rest of the time I've been having a tidy up in the back garden. At one point I thought I would start putting mortar between the big (street sized) paving slabs to stop the weeds that I keep having to prise out but by the time I'd put things away and weeded the cracks it was too hot to do more.

I've now got an hour to sit outside before it will be time for disco aerobics. 

Something has bitten me multiple times on one leg. 9 times up the back of the calf and another 3 times on the front. They are small bites so I'm wondering if it was an ant. Luckily only some of them itch.