Cleaning Up the Kingdom

These hazel leaves are jammed into a joint in the fence right outside our kitchen window -- a reminder of the tree work done on Friday. The tree trimmers hauled all the branches down the side return and some of the bits got caught in the fence.

I woke up this morning thinking it was 7 a.m. -- but no, it was 6 a.m., because today we're moving off British Summer Time and back to Greenwich Mean Time. These pesky clock changes! This one wasn't on my radar at all until another blogger mentioned that Europe was changing this weekend -- or at least some parts of Europe -- and that's when I realized we were too. And then I promptly forgot until just now.

Speaking of blogs, I backed mine up yesterday. Google has changed the way it's done. It used to be that we could download a backup directly from our blog dashboard, and it would come as an XML file. But now we have to request the data from Google -- they prepare it and put it in a ZIP file, or in my case two ZIP files because I post so much, and they e-mail you when it's ready for you to download. Kind of a pain and I have no idea how I'd reconstitute the blog from these files should it ever be deleted. But at least I have something.

It would probably be healthier to just say c'est la vie if the servers crash or the blog vanishes through some other technical mishap. All things are temporary, right? But I like feeling that extra bit of security.

The Thanksgiving cactuses -- which are actually more like Halloween cactuses, in our case -- are about to burst into bloom. As you can see, I'm getting flowers on all four of them -- my two pink ones, my white one from blog reader Frances and my salmon-colored one. I fit them all onto a single tabletop for this picture, but they're packed a little too tightly to be happy there in the long term.

I spent yesterday morning picking up debris in the garden. As you can imagine, there's a lot of it. I filled four yard waste bags, and the council will only pick up three at a time, so I can't do any more until after Tuesday when they're collected.

The process was complicated by Bailey, who likes pulling sticks out of the bag right after I've put them in. Thanks for the help, dog.

Here she is keeping an eye on her kingdom. (Or queendom?)

Speaking of kingdoms, Dave and I are about to start the last season of "Game of Thrones." I feel like we've been watching it forever. We mistakenly thought last night's episode was the last, and when we were about halfway through I said, "There's an awful lot of unresolved stuff going on here!" That's when we realized there's still one more season to go. We also just finished the latest of Ryan Murphy's "Monster" series on Netflix, about Lizzie Borden (and weirdly, also Aileen Wuornos). It was an imaginative re-telling of those crimes but I'm wondering how much is based on fact.