2.07.2022 Bit of a shock!

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Saturday 2nd July 56F. Sunny already at 5.30 but quite windy. Should be a pleasantly warm, sunny day. Up at 5.00m.

 6.25 60F. Breakfast over. Shopping needs to be done. A walk first. 

 7.15 63F. Back from my walk. Twirly for morning coffee. Sunshine and shadows, light and shade crossed the fields. Almost no traffic. 

 8.20 Morning coffee over. Time to go shopping. It is getting even windier from the SW. The opposite of what I need.

9.45 66F. Returned from shopping on the trike. Windy from the SW with sunny intervals. My right knee was slightly sore at intervals. Still going well. Had a nap afterwards.

 My county council visitor is coming on Monday. I have just realised that nothing has changed indoors since she was last here. Which was weeks ago. It is still a mess! I am struggling to care enough to do anything about it.

 12.45 72F and breezy. Paused for lunch. I have started splitting the chestnut rounds/slices. Hot and hard work swinging a splitting maul at my full power. So I stopped after processing two 20"/50cm slices. 

These rounds were almost impossible for me to lift. They seem to be saturated with water. Making them almost slimy to the touch. Most of time they didn't split. When they did, the chunk would go flying right across the garden! I had to keep touring round collecting all the bits.

 Then I moved onto more tidying of the greenhouse. Boxes and boxes of used plastic plant pots under an old, folding table. Literally hundreds more pots to dispose of. All going to the recycling yard as plastic waste. The ceramic pots and under saucers can go to the charity container. I already have 3/4 of a trailer full of cardboard, polystyrene, old wood, old drawers, bits of old furniture, old plastic buckets and metal. I shall be going to the yard after lunch.

 14.30 Just returned from the recycling yard. Two people saw I was getting rid of plant pots and asked if they could have some. Of course they could!

 A lady took two boxes of ceramic pots. While a gentleman had a box of middle sized plastic pots. It felt good that somebody else would use my wife's gardening stuff. Rather than it just be dumped into an anonymous container. Which is what happened to all the rest. 

16.00 I became bored, depressed and kept dozing off at the computer. So I had another nap. The trees are thrashing about in the wind. One very tall, fastigiate, red oak is moving over 6' at the top. My hands and back are aching from swinging the sledge hammer/splitting maul. 

16.45 70F Afternoon tea and a toasted roll. Being a sensible chap I had gone straight back out and split three more rounds. This time I wore grippy, rubber palmed, industrial gloves. To reduce the load on my hands. 

 The trick is to work around the circumference of a round. Flaking pieces off where there is least resistance.  Then the flakes have to be split into usable chunks.

 Trying to split a round, away from the edge, is hopeless. The edge of the heavy axe head barely dents the surface. Once a complete ring has been split away from the outside, I moved steadily inwards. Still working parallel with the reduced circumference. 

 The core of one of them proved beyond my powers to split it. I am using a 75cm Ø round, on edge, as my anvil. Trying to split logs is an exercise in futility without massive resistance. I must have split thousands of logs in the 40 years since I bought the Oregon splitting maul. The massive head has become rather rusty from being left outside recently.

 I took more pictures of my wife's garden while I was out there. Though the light was completely wrong. The bees love the Marsh thistles. There were lots of bees hovering around the mauve flowers on their towering stems. 

 My wife had planted a row of them near the house. They have been absolutely tremendous! Really statuesque, at well over 2m high. The entire plants were almost black when they first appeared. Though have faded to green now.

 I shall be having salad for dinner tonight. With poached eggs, as usual. It seems hours away. Why do I make dinner for 8 o'clock? It makes no sense. 

 18.30. I decided to <cough> kill some time putting up the last board in the front hall. They all had to come down to let the electrician get at the space above the ceiling and airing cupboard. 

 I started to push the last board into the middle. When the light fitting slipped off the end of the flex. I got a hell of shock! It was lucky I was standing on an aluminium stepladder. One with rubber feet. I have replaced the light fitting with a ceiling, strain relief hook and small E14 socket. Now I just need another lamp shade. 

 Another job done. I'd been putting it off because my inner ear doesn't like me tilting my head back. To look upwards. I can get very dizzy. Gravel in the semicircular canals, I think. I was paralysed for a whole day a year or so ago. I couldn't move a muscle without feeling as if I was going to vomit. 

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