the one with the highs and the lows

Another week­end has come and gone and I can hardly believe it!  This week­end we’ve done zero work on the inside of the house.  I have been spend­ing hours and hours out­side try­ing to get rid of all the black­berry bram­bles that are chock­ing the life blood out of our back gar­den.  Black­berry bram­bles have black­ber­ries– yum! Only prob­lem is they’re essen­tially a weed so they had to go.  Squidge was not happy about this at all as she looooves black­ber­ries.  Actu­ally she loves any fruit she can pick and eat on the spot– kind of like my Mom.  Any­way back to the gar­den, I’m also try­ing to get rid of all the bracken ferns.  It’s a process of chop­ping back, dig­ging around and pulling up.  I have to do this again in the spring, I know I haven’t got­ten them all out so I need to get them when they start to grow again.  It’s a big PITA but it has to be done.  The gar­den is also full of roses and I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out what to do with them.  After doing tons of online research I think I sussed it out.  Well as long as I got the rose vari­ety cor­rect!  I think I have rose bushes (not ram­blers or climbers) so I need to prune in the spring.  I’m keep­ing my fin­gers crossed that I got it right.  I’d hate to get it wrong and they get some hor­ri­ble wast­ing dis­ease!  So my gar­den looks like a waste­land at the moment AND I just real­ized tomor­row morn­ing is gar­den waste col­lec­tion! All the cut­tings are in a big pile and not in the bin so guess it’ll have to go next time!

I wanted to post a cou­ple of pho­tos from our week­end– the high and low of it all.

The high first– a pink gui­tar for Squidge.  This is actu­ally a very very very belated Christ­mas present.  Wal and I said we were get­ting her one for Christ­mas last year and I kept for­get­ting to go and buy it.  On Sat­ur­day the stars must have aligned and I actu­ally remem­bered.  Squidge was BEYOND excited and even went to bed with it.

The low part of the week­end was our trip to Tat­ton Park.  We had to pay for park­ing even though it’s a National Trust prop­erty (we’re mem­bers) and then the park closed 1 hour after we got there– new win­ter hours!  It would have been nice if the per­son at the gate had shared that lit­tle bit of info.  We prob­a­bly wouldn’t have gone in.  By the time we parked, put the tires back on the bikes (really must buy a bike rack for the car), read the map and cycled ooooh about 15 min­utes it was time to head back to the car so we could be out before they closed the gates.  Oh and Squidge moaned the entire time we were cycling.  It was so not fun and not what I  was hop­ing for.  There were too many cars around and it was too hilly for Squidge.  I’m now look­ing for a park w/ proper cycle paths were we don’t have to worry about Squidge get­ting run over by a car.

So there you have it the highs and lows of our week­end.  What did you guys do this week­end??  Some­thing fun I hope!