who da boo boo? intransegent weed, and wicker woes

we just had a little VISITORRRRRR!!!!!!!! this is charlie, poppet’s bestest friend.

he’s an 11 month old english bull terrier/pit mix. and WHAT a lovely boy. he’s a bit bigger and more boisterous than poppet, but she’s been a mummy, so she keeps him in line. they are actually hilarious together, though. this morning i was doing some weeding and the pair of them started digging in tandem. funny little clockwork brains they’ve got.

now that he’s gone we have retired to the bed and poppet is snoring her head off. she had the best time and now she’s exhausted.

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today’s weeding was just superficial stuff, stopping the mare’s tail from strangling plants. it’s a lovely ferny thing, which belongs on a riverside, but with only a tiny garden, i don’t want a monoculture so i just keep pulling it up when it wanders over from it’s designated spot.

yesterday’s project was this evil object. it took a LOT of work to wheedle up, and i am not even sure i got all of it.

on my birthday i was outside with my friend nic who has gardened for a long time, and he said that i’d have to dig it out. this might be the work of moments in an ordinary garden, but the bloody thing’s got the longest tap root, and after a couple of inches of topsoil it’s london clay and riverside pebbles all the way down. i was literally ferreting around in there with my fingers like a surgeon whose lost his scissors in someone’s innards. regular soil behaves itself if you water it a bit. it softens and yields up roots, but this clay  is sludgy and the pebbles seem to be all locked together.

i don’t even know why people bother with computer games when there’s weeds to be tackled.

die, FOE!

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i very desperately want this

it works like this

and is effectively the same shape as my meditation cushion, so i can see that it’s a good design. i actuall feel a little ill from the wanting, looking at it. sadly for me, though, the designer’s site doesn’t even have prices. so i guess it’s POA. this means ‘Price On Application’, though a friend once translated it thus: ‘Piss Off Anyway’, which might be nearer the mark.