BBQ

Tottered off to the BBQ last night.  It being my first chance to meet the Treasure Hunting crowd I felt I ought to go.   The food was excellent - no burgers!   And the garden was lovely, with a kind of walled (by greenery) vegetable garden hidden away at the end - very neat and productive.   The whole garden was charming and rambling with lots of interesting things.  One of which should appear when Captain B has time to do his photos.

He is a wounded Captain himself today - with a very bad knee.

I drove us back, as I don't drink more than a glass of wine per evening these days.

We have had a very quiet day today - a bit of shopping a bit of housework and a bit of study and that was it.  Plus I have had time to answer some interesting questions about the Bible from an internet acquaintance.  One thing he has asked me is, if Noah's flood was a real event, where did all the water come from?

So I have been able to show him what was taught to me - that Genesis tells us exactly where the water came from.  And the Christian Greek Scriptures confirm that account - at 2 Peter 3:5,6

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Zimmering Along

The arthritis struck severely overnight. I wasn't able to get to the meeting this morning, but am hoping to be able hobble off to the Treasure Hunter BBQ this evening.

I did manage an hour on the doors yesterday morning with June and the group. We didn't find many in - but we did some return visits.

Its a miserable thing this arthritis.  And it is making me so tired. Everything, even getting out of bed, becomes such an effort. Maybe I will finally be able to get the emergency injection during my hospital visit this week.

I am wondering if its time for a poem...

I wrote this many years ago about my mother as she began her descent into the arthritis that finally killed her.  All her muscles wasted away, as her bones eroded. And of course, the heart is a muscle, so, in the end, it wasted away too.  We were in Saudi Arabia when it happened.  My sister rang me, very worried, to say that they were just rushing mummy to hospital.  Then we sat and waited for the final call, which came about half an hour later.

Some time before, we had found dry rot in our old terrace house, which perhaps accounts for the rather jumbled metaphor. So, not a brilliant poem but one that I did think about today.

I think about my parents most days, but not always of them old and sick of course.

IN THIS OLD HOUSE

 by me

In this old house all is still within

And nothing moves inside us

Except the thing that eats the bones

Can they isolate the virus?

She pulls the skirting board away

To show a heart stopping display of white

So we’ll call the specialists to her home

As the deadly stuff eats up her bones

But if Rentokil will not suffice

Her bones will lock in blocks of ice

The value of her house will tumble in a trice.

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Rewell Wood

We went to Rewell Wood this afternoon.  It was overcast, but no rain.   Only one butterfly seen - The Captain's Log has the pictures.

In one of the clearings the ground was starred with horseshoe vetch so I asked Col to take a picture for my blog.

June rang to remind me that we are working together tomorrow.  Will it be raining?  If so, I have a big backlog of return visits to do.

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A glimpse of winter, courtesy of Thomas Hardy

I was just re-reading "Tess of the D'Urbervilles".  What a cheerful fellow Thomas Hardy isn't.  But he recreates the rural life so vividly.  And here is a glimpse of Winter.

"When she (Tess of the D's) lit her lamp to get up in the morning, she found that the snow had blown through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when she moved about.  Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to see anything."

Well we have had a tiny bit of rain here - which thankfully has not poured down our (non-existent) chimney - but not nearly enough.  Our green is brown already. So we are hoping for rain this weekend, as promised.

What have I been doing apart from reading?   Not a lot, owing to my arthritic state.  Shopping, cooking... a little bit of housework.  My studying of course. I  got to the meeting last night.  The teaching is so wonderful - what sort of state would I be in now without it?

Ronald asked me if I could give him a lift back home, which I did.

I talked to Anne of The Cape and have followed up with an email.   I hope to be out on the field service with June tomorrow.

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Back to the field

Out on the service with Audrey this morning.  We did her shopping first and then went to the Hall.  I was feeling SO tired but Mick gave us a lovely talk to energise us.  We were allocated a funny little close - one of those apparently designed to drive the local Posties into a nervous breakdown - with the numbers all over the place.  We hope we managed to get to all the doors.  Then we drove and drove in circles looking for what we thought was a little close, but was more like a private drive with only three houses in it.

Came back to find that Captain Butterfly had fled the coop.  He didn't get back till late afternoon, with a load of wonderful photos that should make it to his blog tomorrow.

I studied and made mushroom soup and rhubarb crumble with custard to welcome the Wanderer home.  Am hoping for a day off tomorrow, apart from housework.  And perhaps a follow up by email on a Creation brochure.

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Bea gone

We drove Bea to the station this morning - and went to Tesco's for a shop. The house feels quite empty without her.  Col took us both to Kitthurst Hill yesterday, but we were allowed to stay in the car and read once we had visited the butterfly meadow.  Bea read Barbara Pym and was laughing away in the back of the car.  I was doing my studying - we are in the middle of a close examination of Acts, to see what we can learn from those early Christians - from their faith and their courage and their constancy in the preaching work.

I was wondering once again if maybe we will all find our way to the spot on Kitthurst Hill where the carpark was a million years from now.  Will it all have returned to forest?  Or what will it be like?  Will we remember these visits there now - or even want to?

Well, i just hope that the three of us are there, in the restored earthly Paradise, to find out.

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Billing and Cooing

Very upsetting goings on on our balcony.  A couple of pigeons have taken to courting in the nest like rim of our downpipe.  We kept hearing this billing and cooing, the murmuring of sweet nothings, the rustlings of boxes of chocolates being unwrapped, knees being knelt on, and rings being exchanged.

We looked out, and there they were, cuddled up on our downpipe, cooing and bobbing at each other.   We meanly chased them off.  

But both for their sakes and for ours.  While we don't want pigeons nesting on our balcony, we also know what they apparently don't, that the next rain will wash the nest out.

Unless of course they know something we don't and there ain't going to be no rain!

Then they started to turn up with bits of building material so we had to blockade the pipe.

It makes me feel such a bully.  They look so downcast.   He obviously thought he was making this beautiful home for her and now we have spoilt it all.  It makes me worry that there aren't enough nesting sites around here.

What a mess we, the human race, are in.  We just can't manage this beautiful and complex planet.

Which is why we are to pray for God's Kingdom to come.

All pigeons will have perfect nesting sites then, and nothing and nobody will be interrupting their happy courtship.

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