It's a glorious day outside today, what with all the rain we've been having yet again, one should be filled with gladness, rather than that rather cynical sense of doom that this delightful mock March day will soon be underneath a few centimetres of snow or, at the very least, the carpet of green shoots appearing in my front garden will be shocked to death or burnt brown through a late cold snap.
However, rather than dwelling in this frame, we have taken advantage of the warmth and sunshine to get outside and do some desperate tidying and sorting out after a good long walk over the fields with the dog this morning.
The chooks have been recipients of their annual rake over ;-) We rake the top layer of muck off their run area and then re-lay it with fresh bark and wood chippings from a local horse yard. We've also decided to lift some of their run off the ground because they've been living in a quagmire since the rain began and I feel desperately sorry for them. We have put a couple of pallets in to give them an island higher than the swamp and the other is for them to have their waterer on so that it doesn't continually get crap kicked into it.
Mr Beehive has been smashing up various parts of the patio and back path still on the search for where various drains go. We 'think' we've finally found the majority of outlets, many of which were just hidden over with a patio slab and sand. This could well have been partially to blame to our flood in 2012.
We're currently awaiting the return of our planning permission to see whether or not we get the go ahead for knocking down our old garage/barn before it falls down and rebuilding a new garage/studio/annexe. Hopefully, if we do, we should start on this over the summer. It will give us a spare bedroom alongside a studio area that Mr Beehive could use when he works from home and where I will take my sewing. We might have to evict the drum kit there too!
Other new things this year will are the fact I'm now back playing my clarinet again on a regular basis. I'm currently playing with a local wind ensemble. Interestingly I was asked to play through a lady I met on a beekeeping course, who I'm hoping will mentor me when we get our bees...which are still on the horizon. We now have our hives, but they need painting and assembling. They will go right in the far corner of this picture:
I think we'll either need another one of these sunny days for this...or a new garage that isn't going to leak all over newly painted hives!
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