world enough, and time

[freckles_and_doubt]

smoczek is an enabler: in tandem with her, I spend more money on cool things than I would if left to my own devices. (Although, to be fair, I probably have the same effect on her). We egged each other on buying plants for our respective gardens yesterday (more clivia, herbs and vegetables, things that look cute and grow in shade, and a pot for strawberries), and then further egged each other on buying weirdly random stuff at the Milnerton market this morning. (A sheep! a sort of metal cage sheep with floppy legs and a decorative metal beard and butt-piece, through which you're supposed to grow topiary. She's going to grow catnip through it, and rely on the cats to keep it shorn.) I bought more random bric-a-brac owls, in sharp defiance of my own policy, and plead in mitigation that they were round and cute and I was egged on. Also, a large glass mixing bowl, assorted adaptors, really cheap pecan nuts, and a small blue shiny lizard in brooch form. I love the market, it's so random, and so vastly diverse. The Evil Landlord, for example, bought a wrought iron umbrella stand, for which we have no umbrella. maxbarners bought an elderly light metre in German, presumably for measuring German light. Oh, and I found a little 40s-style set of miniature cookie cutters packed neatly into a tin - wolverine_nun, was it you who was looking for little cookie cutters a few months back, for purposes of small children? Because if so, these are for you. There's one shaped like a bone.

Then we went and had lunch at Caveau, and drank rosé, which I will forever associate with summer lunches owing to the French habit, observed on holiday in the Gers, of drinking it by the gallon out of plastic bottles straight from the local vinyards. Then I came home and played Bioshock 2 for four hours straight, after which I went and laboured mightily in the back courtyard, which now has two functional planters out of four, planted with random vegetables in the faint hope of squeezing one crop out before winter hits. This procedure was fraught with interest as the builders, in moving the planters around, have shifted the soil from one to the other, thereby mixing it all up with the drainage stones from the bottom (and, I have to say, all the cat crap the cats have been lovingly depositing on the top). I don't like builders. I may have mentioned this before. But I now have tomatoes and beans and spring onions and lettuce and a few parsley plants for the hell of it, plus all the sorrel in the shady corner with the mint. And dirt under my fingernails.

I am very tired, slightly sun- and wind-burned, faintly cross-eyed from Bioshock and Fringe, grubby, damp and happy. It's been a lovely couple of days. I approve of these long weekend thingies, and contemplate with tolerable equanimity the return to work given that the next three weeks are four days long owing to the sudden descent of Easter. But now I'm going to bed. G'night.