Shutting up.shop

 It's very much a case of shutting up shop on Summer at the moment, down on the beach the Lifeguard Station is very much closed up (although if you look carefully there is one mad person down by the sea in a one piece). 

It always amazes me how people think that just because the sun is out it's beach weather. I'm not talking about the wild swimmers, they have sensible things like wetsuits on (though you'd still never catch me doing it). In fact on my way back from the beach there were 2 families heading down to the beach for the day with a picnic.

It was about 7 degrees and there was an arctic wind!!!!! I commended them for their bravery, one of the mum's explained it was the wrong end of the month and the kids had been up since 05:00. Now that I get!!!

Once back from the beach I set about the garden, as you know son was our gardener over the summer and he did a pretty good job, but there were a few patches he hadn't done because they were 'hard'. I knew that if I left these much longer winter would set in and hard would become impossible. So I spent a few hours grubbing around under pushes breaking off bind weed and cutting back bits of bamboo, which are still appearing years after we had the bamboo bush removed (curse the previous owners for buying spreading bamboo!).

I then spent most of the rest of Saturday in the kitchen, making a roast (we haven't had one in ages) and peeling the mega ton of apples I've foraged (a mix of from the wild, from our back garden and picking up bags of apples people have left outside houses with 'please take me' signs). It's been quite the year for apples.

In fact apples are pretty much the only thing that did well this year, the rest of my garden has died a miserable death.

I have to say doing the roast made me realise what a huge hurdle I'd done cooking for so many every Saturday for so long. It had just become part of my routine, doing a big cook again after a break made me realise just how much hard work it was. OK if you enjoy cooking, but I hate cooking - so really just a huge, time consuming chore. I'm not sure husband enjoyed the mega pan tidy up afterwards very much either. Something that used to be a regular Sunday chore for him.

Only other thing of note was that son and I had our first driving lesson argument last week. I was very restrained and didn't join in, so actually it was a driving lesson son shouting at me event. I was very proud of myself because usually I'm not restrained and would have bitten back. In the end I told son to pull over, he did, I then told him to get out. Whilst we were only about 200m from home, he refused to walk back so we then switched positions and did a circuit in silence (I'd seen some bags of apples outside somebodies house).

Work is... work. It was a sucky week, but I've had worse.