Thursday 22 June 2023
I ordered a “Strimmer”, which I now realise is actually a brand name (Black & Decker’s string trimmer, Strimmer), so really I planned to order a grass trimmer. But I think I may have been so hung up on trying to work out what a non-Strimmer Strimmer should be called that I alighted on “trimmer” and ignored the “hedge” prefix. Chris was poised to strim – trim – grass but discovered we appear to have a hedge trimmer attachment, a chain saw attachment, a battery and no charger and no grass trimmer. One of my chores today is to ring the company I ordered it from and see how best to remedy it. Most likely, I suspect we’ll end up having to order the grass trimmer element (assuming our multi-tool thingummybob can also be used for a grass trimmer attachment) and a charger. I’m annoyed. With myself for seemingly ordering inappropriately, but also that things like that don’t at least come with a battery and charger (I realised you needed to order the battery separately but, at the price the battery was, I assumed it came with a charger) and that it was an online shop. Had there been the amount of garden centres there used to be, I would have gone to a shop and bought it and got it right and the battery would have been charged and grassy areas would have been neatly trimmed by now.
In the past couple of weeks, hence the impetus to buy a grass trimmer, everything seems to have grown and bloomed. Lovely to see a mass of yellow irises along the river bank and feel like it’s properly summery.
The water situation is ongoing. Our outdoor tank was down to 51cm yesterday, which wasn’t as big a drop as the previous day, thankfully. We have concluded that it’s the washing machine (which we only used once on Monday) that is the biggest drain. We did run a full dishwasher last night so I expect the water drop will be back to its new “usual” of about 3cm.
I went out to water a strawberry plant this morning at around 06:30. One of the not-ripe-enough-for-human-enjoyment strawberries had been picked and partially eaten. I have a feeling we’re not going to eat any of the strawberries from that plant. Similarly, not necessarily determining where the blame lies, I walked into the kitchen, looked out the window and there, oblivious to my presence until I made a slight noise, was a young hare happily munching its way through our lawn.
One of our three wildlife cameras appears not to be recording so that’s been indoors awaiting official inspection for a few weeks. Another one I had managed to turn off instead of on, so a blank card. The third did capture a bit, but mainly the long grass that had shot up and was waving in front of the sensor and setting it off all the time. On that camera, however, there were quite a few distant deer shots and one leaping hare in the distance. They are currently all off so we’ve probably missed a full parade of animals and exotic birds.
This evening, when I will be doused in Deet, I am going to get the chimenea going for our steak salad dinner. The main reason I want it going is because we have friends coming round for dinner tomorrow night and I want to cook the tandoori-ish lamb over charcoal or wood (it depends slightly on tonight’s experiment which I use). The chimenea has been in storage for years and we haven’t used it for a really long time. We used to use it a lot and we always said how great it would be to live somewhere where we could keep it out and actually use it. So far, it’s been out but not used. It’s always been hit and miss if we get the fire/heat right and it has always made dinner timings extremely approximate.