Sunday catch-up

I am really enjoying the longer days and the slightly warmer weather. I used sun cream for the first time this year, when volunteering. I also dried two loads of laundry outside. Here’s to more of the same.

I finally finished writing my final lecture for a new course that is now almost over…. It was a race against time but I did it I felt very relieved. Until I noticed I had a tutorial scheduled for Wednesday coming on a topic that I had never covered before. This will be live teaching and I can finish preparing the questions for discussion up to the time the tutorial kicks of at 7 pm. Lots of marking to do, too. 

I am sharing a few photos of our volunteering site, the top three photos. We spent the past few weeks lifting the crown of the woodland edge, clearing invasive snowberry bushes and building dead hedges from the cut wood. We also planted hundreds of hedge plants (bare rooted). The brown patch on the first photo was covered with snowberry, which has invaded the large meadow area. You can see some plastic tubes around a few of the hedge plants. We only use these sparsely and primarily to indicate where they are so that the city council (who paid for the work) won’t mow them down (which happened before). There are many more plants that you can’t see. Some of the hedges we planted last year and two years ago are starting to look really good now, although still small. We used some of the cut wood and smaller twigs and leaf litter to refill the various hibernacula in the area, ready for invertebrates and small vertebrates. They are always teeming with life later in the year. I am now regularly joined by one of my teenagers, which fills me with joy. 

I recently applied for a course, for which I needed to find my PhD certificate. I eventually found it in a box full of random memorabilia, including photos and kids drawings and other bits and pieces. I don’t know how the certificate ended in that box and why it is not in the folder with all my other certificates and assorted essential information such as tax stuff. Life is full of small mysteries. Anyway, the messiness of the box irked me and I spent quite some time sorting through the contents, whenever I had a spare minute or two. I am delighted to say that now, a week later,  all those random photos and drawings are in plastic folders, labelled clearly. Each child  has a folder with their artwork and mother’s day cards and tooth fairy letters (no teeth). I found two short essays, one by Sam and one by Annie, each with the title “why I fight with Annie/Sammy”. I have no recollection of how these came about. I also have folders with random photos for different eras in my life, those that didn’t make it into photo albums. We also have a big pile of school photos, ordered but never displayed (we prefer less staged photos for our small gallery of family photos).

Back to nature. Today I ventured out for a walk in the nearby woods, with a hand trowel, gardening gloves and plastic bags in my backpack. By now, the vast snowdrop slopes next to the river finished flowering for the year but are still over ground, which is the best time to transplant some clumps to a new home. I felt a bit weird digging up several small clumps along the long stretch where there are so many that the slope is completely white in late winter. I was careful to only take small clumps and spaced widely. I was sad to see that most of the previously widespread wild garlic has been replaced by the very invasive wild leeks. At this rate, there won’t be any wild garlic left next year. Back home, I planted the snowdrops in my front garden, spreading them out. I tried over the years to plant bulbs but never with any success. The ones we have around the pear tree and the no longer existing plum tree originated in a neighbours garden, kindly donated to me about 7 years ago. They took well to the new home and have been naturalising ever since but ever so slowly. Too slowly for my liking, hence the helping hand. 

I am only working three days next week, travelling to London on Thursday to visit The Stitch Festival, and hopefully to see a Romeo & Juliet at the Royal Opera, if any tickets are returned last minute. I am travelling back on Saturday evening because Avanti West Coast is on strike on Sundays and a bus replacement or travelling the long way via the East Coast and Edinburgh doesn’t appeal. My second trip this month! I have to use up the 5 carried-over annual leave days from last year before the end of March otherwise I’ll loose them. 

And that’s it all for now. Thanks for visiting 😊