Wet morning

Woke up to the sound of rain on our tin roof, which is a lovely thing to do but why does the garden look so abandoned!

I have had a great week in the garden, weeding, shifting things and most of all planning but the end result on a wet morning looks positively miserable apart from the lovely late roses and the jonquils popping up. I love the late roses, a tinge of brown on the petals and a bit 'blown'...and the buds, well, fabulous!!

There has been a little friend in our garden for several years, a blackbird with one feather sticking straight out from his wing, very identifiable! He has hopped around the back garden, scratching to his heart's content making an awful mess on the path. We put up with the scratching, always listening for his glorious song, a real little character. Then two weeks ago when my husband cleared the path, it stayed like that for days. We were very sad and thought he was no more, perhaps one of the dogs had chased him to a bad end. BUT NO! My husband has spied him, and our path, and life, is back to 'normal'.

Yesterday I went to Melbourne to see a watercolour exhibition in the converted gas works in Albert Park,  a suburb of Melbourne. The artist has only been painting for  a little over two years, a bicycle enthusiast who is retired. He even has a pennyfarthing he regularly rides in a little town close to us. His wife is a member of our book club but I hadn't met him before. When two other friends suggested we go I was delighted and we had such a great day.

In many of the paintings there were bikes and so many of the scenes were local ones with the bikes added. The old VW in the snow was exactly the same one as I had years ago, I wonder whether this one could possibly be mine! I really loved 'A Quiet Morning', a yacht drifting in some calm water but they were all good and I loved the quirkiness of so many of them. He had them reasonably priced and had sold nearly all of them, maybe fifty or so, a great effort!

I think this is to be the order of the rest of the day AFTERI have earned my keep and have completed some chores!