to Drought or Not to Drought

So much talk this spring about the lack of water and the drought we are going to be having and a hosepipe ban. some of this needs translation for the poor former colonists who don't speak the Queen's English anymore. Hosepipe is what they call a garden hose. simple enough. Spring is apparently the time between March and June when it is lighter and brighter outside but still could freeze or snow or hail, and has several times on us. Not at all like spring in Houston - our last address - where spring meant you saw all your flowers bloom briefly before the heat killed them.

Supposedly, we have heard, you get a mailed notice if you are under a hosepipe ban because of lack of water. Then unless you get an exemption, you can't water your grass, wash your car, fill your birdbath or any such thing with your hose. You can do all of that if you carry the water out of your house in a bucket. Also we have been told that neighbors are particularly good at ratting you out and telling on you if they see you with the hose in your hand. Exceptions are if you have a pond with live fish. Then you are allowed to use the hose to keep it full so your fish don't die. We do have a fish pond and while our fish died over the winter, we have since restocked it. It has still been so cold thought that we haven't seen the fish since we released them into the pond.

Now to the meat of the drought - we're thinking it's not much of one if at all. For the past two weeks, it has rained pretty much every day and almost all day long. We spent several days emptying out a bucket from the overflow of our water butt and also from a drip in our gutter. Then we got smart and went and purchased another water butt. Now this butt is also full. Our garden is so saturated that it is swampy in the low areas. I squish when I walk across the grass/moss. I expect to find ducks out there any day splashing about in the puddles. Also, we visited Ham House which is a historical manor and located on the Thames. The Thames was out of its banks and well across several walkways in the area.

This being our first year in England, not sure how much of this is normal and how much is just luck (good or bad) that it didn't rain much for January and February but started raining in late March and hasn't stopped really. I'm hoping that there isn't a drought and that we will not get an official notice not to use our hosepipe but should that happen, I have my water butts before I start hauling water out of the house. I'm good to go.

My Backyard-Back Garden Polo field

     I know little to nothing about polo other than it's played on a large field, on  large horses, and a small ball or something is hit with a stick.  Not having royals in the U.S. riding about playing polo and being in the news, the best I have is watching "Pretty Woman" where it seems that the break is used to go onto the field and stomp the divots back into the ground.   "Divots" seems to be a polo or a golf term, a piece of dirt and grass dug up by the golfer or the horses hooves.

     My backyard or back garden as is the term to be used in England, has many divots but I've yet to see a golfer in my garden or a horse playing polo.  My divots come from the squirrels.  I have been in the habit for many years of feeding anything that wanders through my garden.  This includes but is not limited to: squirrels, birds, mice, groundhogs, badgers, foxes, deer, cats, dogs, moles, voles, shrews, etc. etc.  In the U.S., it was usually cats and dogs and birds and opossums, skunks and raccoons.  Here in the U.K., so far it has been deer (who ate my tulips so they aren't getting any more), cats, birds, a couple of small mice, squirrels, and I am hoping and hoping to get badgers and foxes and hedgehogs but haven't had any luck with the last three yet.  I've been told that the badgers and foxes will really dig up my garden but couldn't prove it by me yet.  What's causing my garden to look like a polo pitch (field?) are the squirrels.  They are busy burying the peanuts I've put out and then busy wandering around looking for the peanuts they have buried.  I don't think they have much luck because every morning, I find a lot of new divots in the garden but no peanuts.  I watch them through the back window and they run from spot to spot and furiously paw in the ground to get a small hole and NOPE, no peanut in there so they run a foot or so and try again.  I know they are looking for the peanuts previously buried because they've eaten all the new ones put out every morning.

     So each morning as I go out to put out new peanuts and meal-worms or whatever I am doling out that day, I am busy stomping divots back into the ground.  I feel very posh doing the divot stamp.  Julia Roberts did it quite earnestly and lovely in "Pretty Woman".  I am wondering though, where is my handsome young polo player to take my shoes and clean the mud off of them??  I'm sure my hubby would do it but he's already gone to work.  Maybe I'm in the wrong neighborhood for polo players.  Maybe I should be looking for the fox and hound riders.  Maybe I should quite feeding peanuts to the squirrels.  nah.  ain't gonna happen.  too much fun watching them scamper and stomping divots.  guess I'll have to clean my own shoes.

Quicken 2007 bites the dust OR What happens to my mornings

     Mornings are spent updating the blogs, the finances, the emails, etc.  Usually it doesn't take very long unless it's a time for reconciliations or I've done a really big shopping day or all my friends have decided to email me en-mass.

     Scottish Power recently decided we weren't giving them enough money, monthly, to cover our vast expenditure of gas usage, meaning it sure as heck been cold here lately!  I like being warm so that means turning up the boiler to heat the radiators to heat the cavernous house that I love renting.  It should have been a quick little "open and change the amount" fix to my scheduled transactions on Quicken.  I open them once or twice a month to enter the regular monthly expenditures such as rent, utilities, mortgage, insurance, etc.  This morning it was not to be.

      First try, open scheduled transactions, nothing happens.  After a minute, I hit a couple of mouse clicks and the whole Quicken crashes.  Grrr, Argh, as Josh Whedon would say, and one of my favorite sayings when working with computers - which my husband fondly reminds me that "computers are our friends!".  Second try, same thing, crashes Quicken.  Reboot the whole system.  Third try, open Quicken, open scheduled transactions, nothing happens, wait longer, hit the mouse, crash Quicken!!!!  GRRRR  ARGH.  Now I call out for help, "Honey!"  Ok, it wasn't much of a call as he was sitting right next to me at his computer but he did come up and walk over to see what was happening.

       "Have you ..." "Yes, or course, you always tell me to do that.  I've done it!"  He proceeds to check the magical computer things that he knows to check and that he always shows me but never works for me.  Reboot again.  Open Quicken, open scheduled transactions, Quicken crashes.  In all, we must have gone through the same scenario a dozen times but now we are including his magical checks of the system and processes and such but nothing is working.    We are now also including looking up for old backups and there are about a million and a half backups on my computer and I haven't a clue what any of them are or if they are any good now or not.  In a massive fit of pique, I delete all backups that don't have a year end date of them and start labeling with something that makes sense to me, not Quicken!   I do manage to open a fairly recent backup and print out my scheduled transaction list so that I have it in case I need to re-enter it.

      Hubby is looking on his computer and he finds something new to try.  We go to the file and have it validate the quicken that we are using.  It says it found 20 errors in the scheduled transactions.  All Right.  Getting somewhere.  Well, NO.  it found them but I think that's all it did.  found them and validated them and knows they are there but didn't fix them or delete them or anything.  Back to where we started.  Open Quicken, Open Scheduled Transactions,  Try to do anything, Crash Quicken.  slumped shoulders, heavy sigh, head in hands, curses out the ying yang, Grrr, Argh times 1000.

      The other day, on our banking website, I noticed it said that it would not be supporting Quicken 2009 after a certain date.  I looked and saw that my Quicken was 2007.  Wow, I really haven't been keeping up with the new ones.  Not that I ever needed anything like 2009 because I don't tend to download anything from the internet onto my Quicken but instead just put in my own figures, trusting them more than some high school graduate entering figures as she/he tries to stay awake at the bank where they have a minimum paying job.  But it occurred to both of us that maybe it was time to upgrade to a new Quicken.  Not only will the banks stop supporting it but it has been our experience that the manufacture tends to stop supporting products after 3-5 years too (depending on the product) and anything that has now gone wrong with our Quicken is probably wrong to stay and won't fix itself.  AND it is now past lunch and what should have taken me 5 minutes has now taken me several hours and still isn't working.

     Onto Intuit and look at the new Quickens and there's one for 2012!  Glorious.  I can download it too and only pay - grr argh.  But we bit the bullet and bought it and now, happy to say, I have updated my scheduled transaction to take into account my lavish use of power and to keep Scottish Power happy. This is what happens to my mornings sometimes!

Bad Golfer Theory

Living with a golf course out our back garden is lovely.  We have a great view of the first hole.  It's dark at night so no lights shining in our bedroom windows and it's a grand view without houses interrupting it.  The added advantage being there are always some small groups of people moving about and golfing and they are quite interesting to watch.  We don't play golf but we have learned a lot by just watching the golfers.

Throughout the late autumn and winter, there is always someone on the course during the day.  In the rain, in the sleet, in the cold and in the frost, there are golfers.  The only days when the golf course has been empty has been when it was covered by snow and once the snow was off the fairways, the golfers returned.

When we moved into our rental home, we found several golf balls in the garden.  Usually we were finding one golf ball about every 2 weeks.  Once the weather got really cold, we stopped finding golf balls even though we could still see the golfers moving through the course and "aiming" towards the house.  As we are not golfers, as previously stated, we don't understand the passion or desire or interest that drives golfers to go out and walk around on a cold or wet day.  But we have come up with a theory, the Bad Golfers Theory.  This is solely based on the number of golf balls we find in our garden.

The theory goes like this: Only good golfers are willing to spend the time and money in inclement weather therefore bad golfers are more likely to be "fair weather golfers".  Hence, we will only find golf balls in our garden when the bad golfers are on the course.  In other words, only the bad golfers slice, hook, throw, drive, putt, or whatever, badly enough to have a golf ball end up in our garden.  And since we found no golf balls throughout the winter and into the spring, no bad golfers are on the course during that time because they don't like the sport well enough to wander around in the cold and wet.  

This week, as always, there have been plenty of golfers on the course and the days have been fairly nice and lovely.  I found three golf balls this week!

Deer and Tulips

The English people I know love their gardens, for the most part.  They take a lot of time and expense to lavish care on the gardens (we just know them as "yards").  Most gardens are quite lovely too once it gets warm enough to start the trees growing again and the flowers blooming.  That's one reason I think they like the gardens so much, because the growing season is short and when a garden finally blooms, it's glorious!

I definitely have a nice enough rental house with a very nice garden that I also want to lavish some time and effort on it.  It is a learning curve though.  Last autumn, I hit the nurseries and found the daffodils and tulip bulbs for sale along with some flowering bulbs I'd never heard of before.  SO I got a small bunch of daffodil and tulip bulbs and got them into the ground before winter.  

By spring, of course I had forgotten what I planted and where!  After all, at best, I am a half hearted part time dark green to black thumb person.  But come January, all the nurseries, garden stores, discount plant places and such start bombarding you with incredible offers for bulbs, hanging baskets, trees, fruit trees, shrubs, grass, pots and greenhouses and everything imaginable for the garden.  Generally speaking - I want it all in my garden!  I want a riot of color!  I want fruit, I want nice smells, I want butterflies and nice bees!  (OH, mushroom logs too!) so I start getting some bulbs and fruit trees (dwarf ones of course, my garden isn't THAT big)  

By February and March, many people have large swatches of daffodils growing and other early bulbs.  Not me.  I managed to put mine in a secluded spot so they don't come up until late March.  At least they came up.  And as dirt and rocks and pots and plants and bulbs and trees are delivered, I start putting it in the garden.  However, even as I am busy puttering around and planting my dwarf fruit trees in containers, here comes a freeze!  My gardener (the rental house comes with a gardener who is supposed to take care of the lawn and leaves in fall and weeds and such) tells me that we could get freezing nights well into MAY!  I must pay attention to the weather and when it is going to be especially cold at night, I must bring in my dwarf trees that are small enough to sit in the conservatory and cover the rest of the vulnerable plants outside with this gauzy stuff that is supposed to protect it from frosts and makes the other dwarf trees in bigger pots look like triangular sails (and the pots do tend to move around on the deck if the wind is strong enough).  And some of my bulbs, I can't even plant until May because they don't like the cold at all.  wow.  what a difference from living in Houston where everything had to be planted by January and was dead by March from the heat!

Now back to the title of my article.  Right after I had planted my daffodils and tulips, I was talking to my next door neighbor who informed me that she never plants tulips because the deer eat them.  Yes, she was absolutely right!  As I am busy planting some anemones and freesias and other bulbs yesterday, I noticed my tulips.  I have some nice leaves and some nice stems nicely nipped off close to the ground!  NOT A SINGLE TULIP LEFT!  I feed the squirrels and birds and hopefully the badger someday and hedgehogs but didn't really want to feed the deer all of my tulips.  Next year, more daffodils, zero tulips.