Yesterday my pond was boiling!

Thought I'd try an attention grabbing headline!

It wasn't actually boiling and it wasn't actually yesterday.

But on Sunday there were literally 10s of frogs doing 'what frogs do' at this time of year (I'm really not sure what they do); all at the same time in our pond. Their combined action was creating tidal waves!

The half a dozen or so cats that congregate in our garden sat mesmerized for hours watching the spectacle. I'm very glad to say that no frog (as far as I could tell) was injured during the show (by a cat I mean). I wanted to take a picture of it, but when we got close they all stopped and when we turned our back they started again. Like something from the 'blue lagoon' I would imagine.

Frogs are great because they eat slugs - except ours don't. We have many many frogs that live in the garden and frankly none of them earn their keep. So...here's hoping for the coming year!

Spelling!

Why does my spelling and grammer go out the window whn I blog. See! Look at when. :-/

Wow!

How incredible is this! All these people brought togther for all sorts of different reasons, helping, supporting, encouraging, listening and caring about each other -I'm just having a WOW! moment.


Thanks to everyone - sincerely; without YOU this would NOT be hapening.

Right - off to get something to cook with! Pancackes tonight, I'm a wee bit behind on the week and feel I can't give something up before I've over-indulged!

Believe in the power of one!

Someone special said this to me today - what an empowering idea.

Propolis

Propolis is a red sticky substance collected by bees from the bark of trees. Bees use it to stick their hives together. It's called propolis because the beekeeper has to crack it before she can check the hive and I believe comes from the word pro (as in before) and polis (as in metropolis - city_) so before the city. Propolis (along with many other bee products) has anti-bacterial qualities. It used to be used, along with honey to clean burns and cuts. Apparently, you can buy honey soaked bandages, but I'd rather have it on toast - the honey I mean, not the bandage.

Anyway...just felt like mentioning this.

Let it snow!

I love snow. I make a point of going out in the snow and walking miles. I did it today.

Snow always brings back such fond memories. When I was a child we lived opposite our Junior school playing fields which had a hill on it. My best friend and I used to spend hours sliding down the snowy hill. We would make the perfect sledge run and use thick plastic bags to slide down. You couldn't even stand at the top of the hill because we'd made it sheer ice. And it snowed every year - I'm sure it did. We would come in frozen and soaking wet. I remember that gloves were always in short supply so we would wear socks on our hands. And we would make huge snow balls - I mean 4 or 5 feet - my brother would sometimes help, because they became too heavy to move.

If we got kicked off the playing fields (why on earth is was such an issue I could never understand!) we'd sledge down the middle of the road. One would act as look out for cars and shout a warning if one came. Because you were heading head first down the road, the noise made it difficult to hear and I remember turning to see two headlights no more than two feet from my heals - can't imagine how we were allowed to do this. But no-one ever got hurt.

It was utter bliss and all I could think about as I made my 6 or so mile round trip from home to work, through Stoke and back home again today in the snow. Loads of kids were going sledging, but perfect sledging has to be done when it gets dark, so the orange glow of the street lights reflects on the snow.

Brilliant.

Is 'outage' a real word.

I suppose outage is a real word if someone uses it and other people grap it and use it too. That's how stuff and ideas come into being isn't it? It infiltrates your world and before you know it, you can't imagine what it was like without it. I'm rambling a bit here.

What I wanted to say was, what a beautiful day it's been. It could have been May rather than February. I was busy all day (in between playing my guitar) - the back door was open and the sun poured through. I bobbed about in the back garden, mending fence panels, doing other stuff (sure I did more than just that) - but anyway what a brilliant day. I felt utterly content all day.

Ps. I checked outage - it seems it is a real word, although Microsoft word couldn't furnish me with a definition - mmm...