Monday, April 20

Phew, that was hard work!

We've had some gorgeous weather this past few days. It's been beautiful. It's amazing how the sun picks your mood up and makes you want to do things.

Mark had Thursday and Friday off this week as well as the weekend! Yikes. on Friday we went and bought a few plants for the garden and a load of seeds. All were duly planted. In the summer we will have tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, loads of herbs, lettuce and peas. I've only ever grown tomatoes before and they were from small tomato plants, so we'll see what comes up and what doesn't. We also planted sunflower seeds last week and they've all popped up already!

On Saturday I decided that it was time to whip the jungle into shape. The jungle is the back of the garden where Isabelle's swing is. It sort of became Mark's dumping ground for anything that he didn't know where to put and refused to have in his garage. It took me an hour and a half to strim it!! Then I had to hack back the trifid, also known as a Virginia Creeper. It takes over evrything, including my lovely fuchsia bush! So, that all tidied, I weeded the patio and then set about the lawn at the front. It's only a small bit of grass but it was the first mow for it this year and it had got quite long. My stomach muscles are complaining this morning, so that must be from the strimming and mowing. Lets firm those abs up!! LOL

There were loads of insects about and I'm managing to convince Isabelle that they are not all out to kill her! There were several bees hovering around so out came my camera. It took me an hour to get one half decent shot of this flippin' bee in flight!!

Sunday was another gorgeous day and I was sick of being around the house so I suggested to Mark that we go for a walk. Talk about wishing I hadn't! Good grief. I wanted to go down by the river in Chester. I thought it would be nice for Isabelle to feed the ducks, and then we could walk in the park, see the squirrels and it would give me chance to get my camera out, which I've not really done in a while, other than the garden! Mark works in Chester and said he didn't want to go there. He couldn't come up with any other suggestions! Grrrrr. After a rather heated discussion on where we could go, we ended up going down by the river afterall! Men!

We had a lovely afternoon and we hired a rowing boat and went out on the River Dee. Amazingly, none of us fell in. Isabelle enjoyed it too. I got a couple of shots from the boat. This one being my favourite.

A couple of Mark and Isabelle on the rowing boat. I have no idea why Mark always frowns LOL


Isabelle before we got on the boat.

Then we went for a walk in the gardens. Isabelle had a whale of a time chasing pigeons. The pigeons are just so stupid, they just don't seem to fly off, they must enjoy being chased LOL.

This is one of the flower displays in the gardens

As we went back to the car, I spotted a disused garage/warehouse building. It was open (no doors on it) and you could see graffiti all over the walls, so of course, I had to go in. As daft as it might sound, these two shots are my favourite from the afternoon. I think we may be taking Mark's bikes in there for a photoshoot in the future. It was so bright and colourful. There really are some talented kids about. What I did think was nice was that one of the kids had left a message to another of the artists saying, hey dude, don't paint over my tabs, and the other guy had said, no problem. Seems there is a bit of respect between young artists.