Another sunny day

Today’s picture shows a clump of phlox in the garden at their best in the strong sunshine.

Strong sunshine was not in short supply today.   It was there in the morning and it was there in the afternoon and it was still there in the evening.  We are making the most of it because the rain is forecast to come back on Monday.  Meanwhile, it is wonderful to be able to sit out in the garden, walk around in a tee shirt and cycle without having to put three layers on.

Dropscone arrived after breakfast in his shorts and we went round the morning run the wrong way again.  I am finding this suits me quite well and we  managed to creep our average speed up over the last eight miles of the circuit even though it is gently uphill.  Dropscone is still politely waiting for me as we go round but the half minute we cut off last week’s time meant that we sneaked over the magic 15 mph barrier.   We celebrated with an excellent batch of Dropscone’s Demerara sugar flavoured girdle scones.

As he left, Dropscone commented on a handsome dove on one of our wires.

He told me that he wasn’t so happy about the wood pigeon that starts cooing outside his bedroom window at five o’clock every morning.

The dove was joined on the wire by what looked very like the same young swallow as we saw yesterday.

I took a walk round the garden before going for my shower.

An alstroemeria with additional bee

Annoyingly, the best of all the sunflowers keeps its face firmly turned away from the sun. Our neighbour is getting the benefit from it, not us.

There were a lot of white butterflies crossing the garden.  They are very restless and hardly stopped for a second.  I chased them all day but this was the only shot that I got.

They must tot up quite a distance in their fluttering travels.

Mrs Tootlepedal loves tall grasses and she is quite pleased by this combination which she planted out for the first time this year.

Colour provided by orange hawkweed and cosmos

Mrs Tootlepedal had been to work in the morning and when she came back we had a sit down and stare at the Olympics while we ate our ad hoc lunch and then we set to work in taking even more things out of the kitchen in preparations for Monday’s visit by the joiners.  It is amazing how much stuff there is in our kitchen.

Crockery on the back stairs, pots, plates and pans on the sitting room floor and dry goods on the hall table.

…and that’s just part of it.

In between shifting things, I stared out of the window.

Siskins surround a chaffinch in an aerial ballet.

Our son Anthony suggested that we should put at least one of the units that is being replaced in the kitchen into the garage.  They were all made and installed by Mrs Tootlepedal with her own fair hand thirty years ago and he thought it would be a pity to throw away such durable work.  We were struck by this and agreed to keep one piece.  This meant a whole lot of reorganising in the garage but it has led to the decision to throw away a lot of stuff that had been lurking unused for many years in dark corners there so the work was well worthwhile.   Not to mention the fact that it will give Mrs Tootlepedal another chance to visit the council dump.

We took breaks from shifting things to sit in the garden from time to time (did I mention that it was a sunny day?) and this gave me a chance to look at some flowers.

A paler blue delphinium survived the rain but as you can see, it has been beaten down a bit.

The hostas have positively enjoyed the cooler, wetter weather and flowered very well.

We had to stop shifting things when the plasterer came to skim the ceiling and while he was working, I mowed the middle lawn and went off for a short walk.  I strolled through the park and along Easton’s walk.  Then I turned back and went up the road to the Stubholm.  I came from the shadows…

The road from the Murtholm

…into the sunlit uplands…

The road to the Stubholm

…from where I got an excellent view of the town and hills beyond.

As I came back down through the park, I admired the rich hostas there, around the war memorial.

When I got home, the plasterer had finished his work and was looking at it with satisfaction.

We looked at it with satisfaction too.

That is another stage in the kitchen refurbishment completed.  There will be a pause over the weekend before hostilities resume.

In the evening, we went to visit Mike and Alison and Alison and I, apart from one intractable bar, had a very nice evening tootling away.

Today’s flying bird is a pale siskin, probably a juvenile.

Note: The happiness engineer from WordPress has pointed out how to get my images to enlarge when you click on them.  That should happen now.  I don’t know why it stopped.