Sun and lots of rain

 My goodness it's rained a lot this winter. Everybody I know is struggling at the moment, it has been one rainy day after another. Now if you live in some parts of the country this is probably normal, but where I live we tend not to get huge amounts of rain..... well normally anyway.

Sadly we've had so much rain that the new plants I planted in the patio when it was finished last year have all got waterlogged and died. So that's an expense I'll need to go through again, but I'm definitely going to wait until late Spring.

On a bright note, because it had been raining so much I had been driving to a local recreation ground with the dog, rather than doing my normal walk through the woods. The wood gets so muddy and slippery when it rains a lot you end up doing the walk at 1 mile an hour and come back with so much mud you trash the house.

On Friday there was a break in the rain and guess what.... the sun came out. Not wanting to miss a walk in the sun I decided walk through the wood again and in the few days I had been away spring had started to 'sprung'. To be fair, the snowdrops, daffodils and crocus in the picture are literally the only signs of spring that I saw, but I'll definitely take that as a good sign.

Then on Saturday it was raining again, I took the dog for a walk first thing - it was raining so hard I even put a raincoat on the dog. The second we got back the sun came out for the rest of the day. Then it rained again and then on Sunday after I'd taken the dog out for a walk in the rain - the sun came out again.

I think maybe I am a rain god, like the one in the Douglas Adams book - those raindrops love me and want to water me to show how much they care.

In other news, Tuesday was pancake day, husband went to the football so son and I had a lovely evening making pancakes together. It was loads of fun.

As it was February half term last week I kept with tradition and took the Wednesday off work and took son to the Greyhound racing. Yes I know it's bad to do that, but we both enjoy it and it's actually a very cheap day out. Entry is free and food and drink is cheap, so I bought us some drinks (non alcoholic), some lunch and spent £12 putting a bet each for us on 6 races (£1 to win). The whole thing came to the grand total of £30 - not bad.

As per usual I won nothing and as per usual son actually did quite well. Winning himself £8.10 in total. Though he kept his winnings so I didn't actually walk out feeling like a winner!

After the dogs we whizzed to Waitrose to pick up something nice for supper - it was valentines day after all. Valentines isn't celebrated hugely by us - we've been together for 28 years now. But we do buy cards and at least sit down and have a nice meal together. Though son joins us - it always feels a bit mean to leave him out.

Dog wasn't too happy about us having the meal as she WAS left out. I swear she thinks she should be sitting at the table too.

Weekend was an unusually quiet one. As it's getting to the end of the winter I wanted to do a clothes clear out. There are things in my wardrobe that have literally not come out since before COVID and I decided it was time for them to go. In the end I filled 8 bin bags with clothes and threw out two ancient wax jackets (inexpensive) that were no longer waterproof and looked like hell.

I was hoping that because I was doing it early I'd be able to find lots of empty 'clothes and shoes' collection points and headed out in the car. If you try at the end of a season everybody else has the same idea and the collection points are full to the brim. I did manage to get 6 bags into one of them, but then ended up driving around for about 40 minutes to try to find space in a collection point for the final 2 bags.

I do think those collection points are good actually, I know that with some of the stuff I got rid of (some of it very smart Jigsaw) I should try and sell them online, but I never get around to it. At least hopefully they will make some good money for a charity - I suspect they have people that sell stuff on ebay on their behalf.

You'd think after disposing of 8 bin bags of clothes I'd have lots of space, but when I sorted out the washing later there was still no room to put anything. I'm bemused how everything was put away last week. Where did it go?

Anyway, that's me I have a long week ahead with many meetings (doom).