A BUSY DAY IN THE GARDEN

No, not this one.  Not sure where this one is.  Somewhere in England I think, or maybe Scotland.  I think Papa may have taken this photograph.

And not this one either.  This is the back garden of Auntie Emma's first house in Brisbane.

And not this one either!

Definitely this one!

After breakfast, I gave the house a big tidy, put away all the boxes of materials which were strewn all around the house, tidied my office, gave the place a dust, then a vacuum and finally a mop.  Then it was into the gardening clothes, my lovely hat on, tools in hand and into the garden to do some weeding.

I had done some weeding the other day, but hadn't finished, so today was the day for finishing.  I also decided that since I was in the garden, I would make sure all the major shrubs and trees had a good watering.  Because we had some rain the other day, Papa switched the water over to the tanks.  I took the clock timer into the garden with me and have been giving the big stuff ten minutes and the small stuff five minutes.  I don't think I'll get the whole garden done today, perhaps half - that is the watering.  I've finished all the weeding and have raked it up so that it's easy for Papa to put into the bin for me.

Today I'm going to cook dinner and I'm going to make that ragu/pasta dish I made the first night you arrived here at Christmas.  Do you remember it?  It has lots of mushrooms in it and is just yummy.

Did I tell you our television isn't working very well?  It's fine with the normal channels but whenever we use anything that involves the internet such as Netflix it keeps cutting out.  The TV man came out yesterday and replaced something in the TV but before he left it was still cutting out.  He suggested we let the TV upgrade itself and see how things were in the evening.  Well in the evening things were just fine and we were cheering at the prospect of having full access to the internet again.  But no!  This morning it was doing it's cutting out thing again.

Don the TV man came after breakfast and has taken it to the workshop.  He says his internet connection is fine there and he will put on a couple of movies on our TV.  If it doesn't cut out, then the problem lies with our internet connection.  The only problem there though is that we have already been on to Telstra and they say that our connection is just hunky dory.  It will be a problem if he comes back with the TV this afternoon and says it's all OK down at his workshop.

Oops!  The bell has rung!  I'll away and moves the hoses.

Back again!

Papa picked me up a book at the library yesterday.

As you can see, it's called THE STORY OF A NEW NAME and is written by an Italian woman called Elena Ferrante.  Only, that isn't really the author's name.  The person who has written the book wants to remain anonymous so the world is having a whale of a time trying to discover who the author actually is.  Personally, I think if she wants to remain anonymous that people should let her.

She has written a number of novels.  This particular one I have here is the second novel in a series.  I finished the first one called MY BRILLIANT FRIEND a couple of weeks ago.  It was just wonderful tracing the story of two girls growing up after World War 2 in a very poor part of Italy.  Both girls are very intelligent but one of them who is extremely bright finds it difficult to keep up with her studies because of pressures from her family and finally leaves school and marrying very young.  This second book, I imagine chronicles the next stage of their lives.  The next in the series is called THOSE WHO STAY AND THOSE WHO LEAVE and the final one is called THE FORGOTTEN CHILD.   The writer has been described as "...One of the great novelists of our time..."  Perhaps Mummy would like to read the books when she has time.

Well I shall away.  Tomorrow I'm heading to Robyn's from my monthly Friday quilting group.

Love Nannyxxxx