I am back inside recovering from a session in the garden and two loads of laundry. In Australia one always hangs one's laundry outside on the ubiquitous Hills Hoist. Today was sunny and altho I had to scrape frost off the windscreen when I went to the doctor at 7.30, it is now about 55F and lightly breezy. If I manage to get up early enough, I can see my dr in 20 minutes, it seems, since I cannot make an appointment and otherwise have to wait. So two loads of sheets, jeans etc.went on the line. I decided to get off my bum and do some of the garden work I had been putting off so I dumped a bag of cow manure on the 2 new plum trees, then put half a bale of lucerne (alfalfa) on their patch. I then removed the tomato stakes from one of the other patches, dug up the weeds, collected two more butternut pumpkins and dumped a bag of cow manure on that patch. I finished cutting off the dead asparagus fronds and dumped a bag of cow manure on their patch and put the other half of the bale of lucerne on it. By this time my back was sore, the laundry was dry and I called it a day. I had the drip hose running on the asparagus bed while I was doing all of this. It doesn't move; I garden around it. I was going to draw a picture of the garden but discovered that Della has no drawing software on her (yet) so that will have to wait.

An update on the reading matter. "A Black Sheep" being a scholarly editionis is printed on very high-quality clay coated paper and weighs a ton so when I got about a third of the way through I could no longer hold it comfortably in bed so I had to put it aside. "Gould's Book of Fish" just didn't grab me despite its rave reviews. It is a style I would call "picaresque" and that style does not appeal to me. It came in the house as a used book and so it may exit. Instead I am finishing "Maximum City" by Suketa Mehta about Bombay (or Mumbai). I got stuck in the chapter about the sex life of Bombay and put it down but I have now skipped that chapter and am reading about "Bollywood". I really would like to see more of this genre but the only thing I've seen is the no-doubt watered down "Bride & Prejudice" which I greatly enjoyed. Maximum city is written by an ex-pat Indian who returns to Bombay and tried to describe it as both an insider and as someone who knows the rest of the world and can therefore be more balanced. I have enjoyed it so far, although it is more autobiographical than what I was expecting, which was more straight non-fiction. I picked from the bookcase "Flash" by L.E. Modesitt, which is a futuristic thriller and so far quite enjoyable in a action-themed way. As I look at the bookcase, the shelves are actually bowed with the weight of books unread.

Hope my muscles don't pay too hard a price for my hauling around bags of cow manure. I should probably lie down for an hour before the news comes on.