It's definitely summer again, because my arms are itching like crazy. This happens to me every year, and I have gone back and forth about the cause, vacillating between sun exposure and insects. I'm now back on the insect hypothesis. I seem to develop this problem when it's blackberry season and I'm reaching into the bushes to pick berries, so I think some kind of little no-see-um is biting me. Once again I suspect insidious flower bugs, aka minute pirate bugs, though I haven't seen any of the bugs themselves.
What's funny is, the area where I'm being bitten (I think) is also the area where Bailey killed Ratthew the other day:
She is now fixated on this part of the garden and is running into those bushes every few minutes to make sure there's not another Ratthew lurking there. And we've noticed that she is also itchy! I wonder if those pirate bugs are biting her?!
Even when she's lying on her bed, her eyes are locked on the Ratthew zone.
Dave departed yesterday morning for the USA, and texted me later that he arrived just fine. He thoughtfully scheduled a grocery delivery for me yesterday afternoon that I somehow missed. I'm not sure what happened, because I was home -- I was in the garden but I still should have heard the doorbell (and Bailey definitely would have heard it). I wonder if the guy came early when I was running errands.
Our water shortage is becoming increasingly dire. The other day, when France and Spain were burning, I said to Dave, "It's only a matter of time before we get similar fires here." And sure enough, a 200-acre fire sprang up on the Suffolk coast. The Environment Agency says we are in an "exceptionally serious" drought and Wales apparently had its driest July since record-keeping began, 200 years ago. Southern England has had one percent of its expected July rainfall.
Even scarier is that this may be the new normal. We've had an officially declared summer drought in three of the past five years. I've been watching an apocalyptic BBC show called "The Rapture" which takes place during a heatwave, and it's all shot in a sort of yellow-orange tone with the foliage looking dried out, and frankly it's all hitting a little close to home for me!
We are respecting the hosepipe ban -- though I did use the hose to wash the dog yesterday. Is dog-washing allowed? I have no idea. I could do it in the bathtub but why let that water go down the drain when it could benefit the garden?
A certain neighbor is running her sprinkler as usual and her lawn is as fresh as a green carpet.
Speaking of the garden, I keep finding these things when I dig, and I've never known what they are.
I knew it wasn't very old, though, because it has a recycling symbol on it.
I took these pictures and searched Google, and turns out it's a plastic lawn-mower blade for a brand of mower called a Flymo. I think this was the plastic mower that came with the flat, and that I got rid of (with the landlord's permission) several years ago. We never used it. The blade seems so small, doesn't it? The cutting radius must have been incredibly narrow, unless there were multiple spinning blades.
Coming from Florida, I find the idea of a plastic lawn mower hilarious. A Flymo would positively explode mowing a lawn there. But I guess here in England, with our wimpy northern grass, it can do the trick under certain circumstances.
I'll stick with our metal one. And as I said, I've found several of these plastic blades lying around out there, so even on our lawn they're apparently not super-durable.
Never owned a flymo but I know they were like a hovercraft so were just swung from side to side rather than pushed up and down a lawn.
ReplyDeleteThe fire over on the Suffolk coast is going to be difficult to get under control with the wind constantly changing direction because of close proximity of the sea. It will have to be stopped - somehow - because the Sizewell Nuclear Power Station is on the coast just a few miles south .