Olympics

OK, so I really hadn't been looking forward to the Olympics. I'm not that keen on sport - being short-sighted, not very fast and a bit of a swot I was always one of the last to be picked for school teams. I revolutionised things by the time I got to sixth form by wearing my glasses to play games, at which point I realised I'd been seeing two balls instead of one whizzing towards me for the last however many years. Fortunately sixth form was much more sensible and we could go and do something more interesting than team games *shudder*, such as aerobics, or my preferred option - badminton. Otherwise known as spending Wednesday afternoons at the boys' school. Some enterprising people got letters from their parents that said they were going home to spend the afternoon cycling. Yeah right. And I seem to recall someone else going off to the golf course every Wednesday! Anyway, I like walking and I used to do loads of horse riding, but team sport leaves me cold.

The Olympics promised to cause chaos with my commute. I was expecting to have a 7 mile walk every day, such as the gloom and doom being put across about the way the London transport infrastructure was going to cope. I mean, they had a point, the trains are already at capacity at rush hour.

In the long build up pink signs were plastered over all of the stations:

As well as outdoors, to encourage people to walk between venues.

And Olympic lanes appeared on the road, reserved for use by Olympic traffic only. This was particularly annoying on the A30 between M25/J13 and Egham (the rowing and canoeing athletes were staying at Royal Holloway) as it reduced a busy dual carriageway to one lane.

And yet, it was great. As soon as the opening ceremony started everything got better. OK, I loved the opening ceremony. It was totally and utterly bonkers, but very British and managed to include loads of things that are great about this country. I don't often get patriotic (we avoided the Queen's jubilee by going out for the day!). Some of my colleagues danced in the opening ceremony (the call for volunteers went out at work last year and I was quite tempted, but my dancing is at about the same level as my sporting ability) and their descriptions of being involved in it are amazing. I'm not convinced about Paul McCartney's inclusion though. That was the one weird bit.

And I've had a whale of a time commuting. I've been working earlier every day, which means I've been home at 4.30 every afternoon. The trains have been an entertaining mixture of Very Serious Looking Commuters Wearing Pinstripe Suits and families off early to get into an Olympic venue. And me wearing my walking boots in case of the 7 mile walk. Which I never had to do, as my tube line was blissfully quiet - I even had a carriage to myself a few times. I acquired a second breakfast habit as soon as I got to work (oops). Even the early start wasn't too bad, and I was most amused to discover that there is life before the Today programme, namely Farming Today. I was very  disappointed that there wasn't more about sheep all week though, and far too many reports about barley, and a particularly dull morning all about a wood chip processing plant at Goole...

I've been knitting furiously away as I avoided going to lots of things in the evening for two weeks, as I knew I'd have to go to bed early in order to get up at 5.15, this created more time in the evening to do stuff! So I have two finished projects for my next post!

And on to the closing ceremony. Which promises to be less bonkers than the opening ceremony.

Garden at the beginning of August 2012

Thanks to Olympic commuting (more in another post) I am getting home from work in plenty of time to take pictures of the garden at the moment.

We've had so much rain the lawn is still extremely green and everything is looking lush (a bit too lush in some cases!).

 I've been having a sunflower growing competition via Facebook with a friend's little girl. Mine wasn't making much headway until the sun finally came out and gave us a week or so of hot weather, when it put on a spurt and shot past my head!

I'm impressed with this Eryngium, otherwise known as Sea Holly. It's the first time I've grown one, and it was on a list of plants/flowers-that-insects-love. It started out as a very small plant but has grown huge with exciting spiky flower things.

The Japanese Anenome we got last year is flowering a lot. It is so much bigger than it was last year.

The Crocosmia seems to have gone totally mad with all the wet weather and has spread all over the place. It is very pretty though!

 And the Echinacea we put in last year were too small to flower then, but they have flowered this year, and with loads of buds still to come! They're also proving very popular with the insects.

Bridlington

Meet my Goddaughter! Isn't she cute? She has the grooviest hair I have ever seen. Better make sure my Godmotherly knitting is up to scratch as her Mum is a knitter too...

A few weeks ago the OH and I travelled up to Bridlington for the weekend for her baptism. It was a fun weekend, not only catching up with several old friends but we were at the seaside too, so it was like having a mini-break. Complete with B and B landlady from a comedy sketch.

It was a trifle windy, but I still felt it was important to have ice cream at the beach. I did manage to eat it before it blew away.

Although it looks like seagulls may be more of a problem than the wind.

See, it does look like proper seaside. There is sand, and blue sky and some sun.

And DONKEYS!

This was going to be a much longer post with a knitting update as well, but as it's a month since we went to Bridlington I thought I'd better get on with posting this!
So how about a couple of harbour shots to finish off?

And sunset over Bridlington.

Garden at the beginning of July 2012

Where did June go? Time seems to be going past faster and faster.
The garden is still looking lush thanks to the monumental amounts of rain we've had. Remember back in February when it looked like it was never going to rain ever again?!

The large green triffid thing in the raised bed in last month's pictures turned out to be a weed, so it was removed (and filled the garden waste bin!). So, we now have an empty space waiting to be filled with a New Plant. What a shame, we'll have to go to the garden centre (again).

We'd wanted to have a topiary box ball type thing in this tub, to smarten it up a bit and to avoid having to keep replanting the tub, but the ones we'd seen on sale were £25-£30 (ouch). Then I spotted the "Hedging" section in the garden centre, where a pack of 10 tiny box plants were considerably cheaper than third the price of one huge one, or a slightly bigger one could be bought individually for £3.99. So this is it, planted in the tub and then trimmed into a vaguely ball type shape.It can't be that difficult to make a topiary ball, can it? It's not like I want to try something ambitious, like a topiary sheep. Now there's an idea...

Everything is growing and flowering like mad now. This is one of the sempervivums, which now looks like something off Doctor Who.

 

And a few firsts of the year. The first flower on the clematis (this was a special offer one bought last year).

 The first sweet pea (from some free seeds that came with a magazine).

 First flowers on the hydrangeas. Believe it or not, this hydrangea is called "Bluebird", but because of our soil type they come out  pink!

 And the first flower on a fuchsia. The fuchsias aren't as big this year, I think it must be the lack of sunshine (can't be lack of water!!).

These are two new fuchsias, which the OH bought me. Last year I bought a Fuchsia Mojo Boogie along with some other plants with my garden gift vouchers given to me when I left the last job. And the builder then stood on it whilst here doing some work last October. And I wasn't At All Impressed. Anyway, the OH found them again at the garden centre and got me two! I've put them in tubs (so I can move them somewhere else should the builder come anywhere near ever again), along with another one I grew from a cutting last year.

I've just finished reading "An ear to the ground: understanding your garden" by Ken Thompson, which I'd highly recommend. It's a fun read, explaining some of the science behind gardening, and why things happen the way they do.