Raking (Kind Of)

Before I even get started on today's post, I think I can solve a minor mystery. Remember the house in Whitstable with all the Christmas lights? We wondered when I posted that video whether they put them up every year or just leave them all in place. Well, I looked at Google Street View and found an image of the house in April -- and although the basic framework of posts and arches is there, all the holiday constructions (the wooden trees, the reindeer) and of course all the lights are gone. So I guess that answers the question. They take most of it down and store it somewhere over the summer.

Aren't you glad you know that?

Now, on to yesterday. Not that there's much to tell. I spent some time out in the garden, taking some pictures and doing very minor tasks. That's our hebe bush above, one of the few bright spots at this time of year.

I deliberately have not raked the leaves this year, because I want them to break down into the soil. But this path was so heavily leafed-over that I thought the grass might suffer, so I raked them up here and piled them in the very back of the garden to compost.

We already have daffodils coming up and even budding! After I took this photo I put stakes around them to keep the dog from trampling them, an annual challenge. I wonder what it would be like to have a garden without a bamboo stockade around every plant?

Totoro still guards the garden in this bleak season, when it's so gray and damp that he grows a coating of green.

While I was doing all this, Mr. Russia was up on the terrace blowing with that blower thing. I asked him what he was doing. He said he's trying to create a slope so that water will drain off the terrace, and he's resurfacing it in portions -- which explains why it's taking so bloody long. The blowing is to dry the terrace membrane, if I understand correctly. It seems a futile exercise given how damp everything is right now, but Mr. Russia said he was inside and "feeling bored" so he thought he'd work on it. I think that's the real key to much of the Russians' behavior -- boredom.

On Saturday night Dave and I watched "The Apprentice," the movie about Trump's ascendancy. We liked it. Both Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn did an excellent job. It's not a documentary but I found it all entirely believable, especially the degree to which Trump was Cohn's apprentice -- and if there was ever a noxious human being, it was Roy Cohn. There is no morality, was his essential message. The only thing that matters is winning. All of Trump's litigiousness, his denial of reality and objective truth, his refusal to admit any defeat is rooted in Cohn's outlook. We rented the movie on Amazon and it's not cheap but we figure we'd have paid more than that to see it in a theater, so what the heck.