Working Saturdays - but not Sundays

Looking up towards Tupton from the farm

I am inclined to agree with Freyja that working five days a week and having two off doesn't really lend itself to getting lots and lots of non-work things accomplished during the course of the week.  The weekends seem to go so fast.  And it is, of course, nice to have a bit of time just to blob about a bit. This is even more the case when you factor in hospital and home visiting on weekday evenings.  And it becomes even more the case if you are working on Saturdays, even if only in the afternoons.

It does make you value Sundays even more, though!

So on this Sunday we decided to make the most of the sunshine and the fact that I wasn't working and try to get lots of useful things done.

I was up fairly early - but I usually am on winter Sundays.  I talk to Stella and Tony on Skype at 6:30 on Sunday evenings, Melbourne time.  This is 7:30 on Sunday morning in Tupton, from November to the end of March.  So yesterday I was online at 7:30 and rang as usual.  Tony came on, accompanied by quite a lot of saxophone music.  In fact, all I could hear was saxophone music.  I could see his mouth opening and closing.  He was obviously talking. But I couldn't hear him.  So I hung up and tried again.  Exactly the same thing happened.  I hung up.  And turned off everything on my computer, apart from Skype.  Tony did the same at the other end.  He rang me.  Nope.  All I could hear was music.  We hug up again, and I Skyped their home phone.  No saxophone music.  So it probably wasn't at my end!

After I had spoken to him on the phone, and while I was talking to Stella, he Skyped Simon's computer.  nope.  Still saxophone music.  He investigated further.  And found that somehow his microphone had turned itself from broadcasting his voice to broadcasting Surf FM.  Hence the music.  But I'd love to know how it did that.  I can't see how to make my microphone do anything other than broadcast me!!

And then we launched ourselves in to a busy and quite productive day.

We had a seriously delicious home made fruit bread for breakfast.

We hopped out to the Chatsworth and Dunstan Hall garden centres and acquired a few useful things and a nicely established morello cherry tree.

We went for a lovely walk around the nature reserve, along the baby Rother, round past the wetlands and home through the farm (It's a public right of way; we weren't randomly stomping over Farmer David and Farmer Jayne's field).

We went up to the allotment and The Undergardener planted the shrubs we bought last weekend.

We had roast (18 month old) lamb for dinner, followed by stewed rhubarb.

And we have now reached slightly more days on the wagon for 2011 than we managed for the whole of 2010.  Which is slightly embarrassing given that we had intended 2010 to be largely alcohol free, and had no such ambition for 2011.  But (i) it is Lent and we would normally be alcohol free in Lent anyway and (ii) we are saving up to go to Japan in August and need the wine money for air fares, so there is purpose to our alcoholic frugality this year!!

Look what we found on our way around the wetlands walk

This one was close enough to stroke!  

 These are new cattle from last year.  These don't have any horns and last year's had HUGE, BIG horns

Looking across the wetlands towards the railway line.

More of the wetlands