Garden Arch in Situ

Donald finished putting together and erecting the garden arch/trellis yesterday. Doesn't it look fine? Imagine how lovely it will be this time next year with Clematis all over it. We'll try to plant a variety of Clematis plants so that they flower from May through October. The spray of white in the background is our Mock Orange bush which didn't get cut back last year and so went out of control this year. It is called Mock Orange because its scent is like orange blossoms and I can tell you the scent is heavenly.

Donald also put up the long-awaited bookshelves in the utility room and I have now placed all the cookbooks, gardening books, and books on fabric dyeing on them. The removal of the cookbooks from the small open shelving area in the kitchen not only means that now I have all my cookbooks together, but also that we can use those open shelves in the kitchen to display our earthenware serving pieces and pitchers (or as they say over here "jugs"). Naturally, all of this moving around has set off a chain reaction of the inevitable moving around of items from cupboard to cupboard and from kitchen to utility room. The time has come for the pantry to be loaded in earnest. It is the greatest luxury to be able to get some items down from their high perches where even though they were used infrequently, they could only be accessed with a stepstool. The fact is, that made me use them even less often.

I am happy to be able to spread other things out so they aren't quite so jumbled together. Our motley collection of plastic leftover containers springs instantly to mind. They were forever falling over onto one another and the lids were spilling off the shelves onto the floor at the slightest provocation. Now that they have plenty of space, they are behaving themselves.

Don is away playing golf with Gordon on this dull and dreary morning, which will provide a ray of sunshine for him as Gordon always has a ready laugh and they thoroughly enjoy one another's company. This afternoon there is a So and Sews meeting to discuss how to divide up the over £2,000 we raised on the show in St Fillans. Most of it will go to the town hall (which is the fundraising purpose of these events) but we need to keep out more seed money for the next show as the regional council will no longer be giving us grants for this event in future. In these busy times, we also will be deciding whether the next group-made raffle quilt will be hand-quilted by all of us as they always have been or be sent to Diane in Lochearnhead to quilt it for us on her long-arm machine.

This morning there came a knock on the door. When I went it was the window washer from Crieff--Mr. Payne (no, I'm not making this up). He's always done our windows on the outside going back to the days when we were renting at The Old Jail. When we moved to the Rowans, he found us there and would come by about once a month to clean all the windows for £9. Our windows certainly needed cleaning so I gave him and his daughter the go-ahead to do the job. I was curious as to how much it would cost what with windows in new areas and the addition of French doors. Care to hazard a guess? They charged us £12. Now the windows are clean and, as his daughter put it, "all gleamy." I told her our view hadn't improved so much since the day they took the scaffolding away.

I've updated my calendars (or as they say here "diaries") and done a load of wash, worked my acrostic puzzle and written the blog. I guess I really must go into the studio and deal with that problem quilt. Hang on, the kitchen floor needs sweeping and the dining table needs some attention too.