Roundup 15/07/2007
Sun, 15 July, 2007 – 3:47 pm
It's the middle of July, so where's the sunshine?! It's been a pretty interesting week this week. On Monday my parents returned home, which was great. Seems their holiday was a bit up and down. They went on the Rocky Mountaineer train journey followed by a cruise around the Southern part of Alaska. Seems like the train journey was fantastic but the Cruise came well below par. Shame, as they've been planning and looking forward to this holiday for well over a year. Anyway, also on Monday something truely bizarre happened. Dave and I popped out to pick up a few bits for dinner and he grabbed some beer. Going through the checkout I handed my credit card over to pay, and the cashier (a woman in her 40s to 50s) ask if I was 18!! My astonished reply was that I was 30. Seconds later she asked if I had any I.D. on me! Suffice to say I didn't, I had a credit card (don't you have to be 18 to get credit?!), and my car keys. She put it through but I have to admit I felt a little embarrassed. Someone saying you look a few years younger than you are is fine, but someone questioning your age is another issue altogether. Besides the fact that I honestly don't look 17!
I've spent the week keeping on top of my main work and spending time with my Mum. She's learning how to do a bit more with web sites and WordPress so that she can help me out with work. She's now retired so a little bit of work here and there is fine for her and it'll remove the hassle for me, leaving me free to get on with the more nitty gritty parts. She's been having fun writing her own blog for her trip in Canada and using the Photo Gallery I coded up for her, plus getting used to FTP (bless her!).
We left there on Friday and travelled back home. Have to admit, it was one of the worst journeys I've ever had. The traffic was an absolute nightmare. We hit traffic on the M40, and more queuing to get onto the M42 north and for the whole length of the M42. Then we got onto the toll road which was clear except that the torrential rain hit and it was quite hard to see at times. We got to the end of the toll road only to meet standstill traffic on the M6. We then spent about 1.5 hours on the M6 to go from junction 12 to junction 16. We managed 15 miles in an hour, and by this point my legs were aching with the constant stopping and starting. We finally got off the M6 and then hit even more traffic on the 'A' road back up to Chester (staying on the M6 wasn't an option either as there were long delays reported between junctions 17 and 18). After a while I decided to turn off and just drive away from the traffic, trying to get over to the A41 which is the road we actually live off, further north. For a while we were driving which was great, even when we got to the A41 it wasn't too bad, until we were about 30 minutes from home and again, stand still traffic. It was stopping and starting and so we could only assume there were roadworks somewhere, but after about 10-15 minutes in this I was beginning to get too tired to be behind the wheel so we saw a pub and stopped for dinner and plenty of caffeine for me! By now we'd been in the car for 4.5 hours, the journey usually taking just 3-3.5 hours. After a nice steak dinner (not a bad pub to be honest) we set off with much less traffic around, and found ourselves just south of Chester so it took us just over 15 minutes to get home. We left my parents at 1.30pm and got home at 8pm, after 5 hours in the car. Not a fun journey that's for sure. Then the rain came down hard again, right when we were unloading the car! Unfortunately we can't park outside our house, as it's on the main road and there's a hedge in the way, so we have to park about 20m away, so you can imagine the mood we were in by the end of it all!
Saturday morning I surveyed my garden. Foot long grass in places (Paul what were you doing these past 3 weeks?! 
), one of my Tomato plants seems to be dying, my Sunflowers have been growing well, and the rest looked okay, besides the influx of weeds. Most of my chilli plants were okay but a few had dried out so I'm currently trying to replenish their moisture and get them back to normal again. I've now pulled up all of our Garlic, so that's out under the gazebo drying. Most of the shallots had gone rotten from staying in the ground with all this rain that came unfortunately. I managed to get a couple of okay 'clumps', but at least I've learnt for next year. Yesterday the weather was actually quite good after some early rain. I managed to get the strimmer out onto the grass and cut it down to a more manageable length for the lawn mower. I spent most of the day tidying up, cutting back the hedge and tree at the back, to allow more light into the ground. There's still plenty to do however it's raining today so I'm limited in what I can get done (hence why I'm typing this now!). The main job will be to get the place weeded and then get the chilli plants into the ground and pray for some sunshine! Anyone know when it's due this year?
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