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Spring, squiggly lines and chafe-chafer-Chafee.

What a difference a day makes - 24 little hours.


Friday was a day of Spring. Yesterday wasn't. Today isn't great either. All of which illustrates how rubbish I am with numbers - Friday plus yesterday plus today being a little more than 24 little hours.  While I try to calculate how many hours it actually was, here's a picture of a daffodil. In the sun. On Friday afternoon. 55 little hours ago.




Just the day before - approximately 32 (!) hours earlier - the frost had been so danged heavy on those daffodil heads; it looked like they were praying.





Friday's springing of Spring heralded the day to test the new trickle charger. The positive crocodile clip had fallen off the old one and the expression on the face of the motor-spares salesman when I suggested I could attach a new one - before he pointed out the lack of protective sleeves to keep fingers off the metal of the clips and the total lack of a safety fuse to prevent accidental electrocution - convinced me to scrap the vintage model that has, with variable degrees of success, been charging the garden tractor battery for several years. 
Yay! The replacement trickle charger worked. It was new. Naturally, it worked. Rather better than my texting - I told someone I had put the tractor on 'tickle chafe' which sounded like a form of extreme tickle torture - maybe something a certain bombastic straw-headed American would be interested in? As chief chafer rather than chafee. 
His chafee would be female, or Hispanic or Muslim, probably. Which is a little ironic as chafee, or Chafee, as in Zechariah Chafee (look him up) was a Harvard Law professor and fiercly eloquent proponent of freedom of religion and freedom of expression who would have been unlikely to condone the said straw-headed American's proposal to restrict the human rights of Mexicans by erecting a border wall or hostile folly, and of Muslims by prohibiting their immigration into the USA. 

How did I get from charging, to Chafee, to having a mini-rant? 
A massive feat of procrastithinking, perhaps?

Apologies, but I will take you back to the USA for a very brief mo ... if I may ... (can I write mo? I say it rather too often. Not sure I've written it before, though) ... it looks like the Birdie S that visited another American presidential hopeful is sitting on the cutting-deck lever in the shadow picture below. If you haven't been following the happenings across the pond you'll have no idea what I am going on about. With many months of electoral shenanigans ahead, my reaction to your ignorance is 'How sensible! Lucky you. Don't be tempted to look. Unless you want a lesson in how to be sneering and downright nasty about your rivals. The in-out-shake-it-all-about EU issues are far more engaging. So far. And so far are less likely to make your skin crawl.'

So, spot (what looks like) the Birdie -




Anyhow - the trickle charger worked and I set about cutting squiggly stripes. Squiggly - yes. That makes me obviously not male, then. Men cut straight. They mark where they turn. They cut into the same line again in order to make future lines straight. They worry about edges which must never be left tufty. And as for drifts of daffodils - the sooner they can be cut down the better. And the sooner they can enjoy pointing out, several times a week, how leaving the grass to grow round the daffodils results in unsightly bleached patches that annually fail to green-up fast enough. And, as for the gifts left on the grass by Four-legged-friend and Bertie Baggins - or of course any other man's other dogs because I am not of course talking about anyone in particular, am I - they are entirely avoidable: if the dogs could be persuaded to leave their gifts in the one place, every time they go out, even in the dark, even when it is raining, even when storm Katie is howling nearby, then there would be no problem in clearing the gifts. Not that anyone other than the dogs' actual owner, the one to blame for introducing dogs to the family in the first place, would ever clear the gifts. 
I squiggle. On and on; I squiggle.

Breathe - slowly; mini-rant dissipating.

My squiggly lines ...




Four-legged-friend helped by showing me which bits of grass to squiggle around next. 

Could I call it doodle-cutting, perhaps? Or procrasticutting in squiggly lines and circles? Or garden-job-planning-while-mentally-listing-the-recipe-for-dinner-and-trying-to-remember-where-I-hid-the-birthday-present-I-need-to-wrap-for-tomorrow-multitascutting?




Bertie Baggins was not at all helpful - he lay in the sun. With an uncanny knack of choosing the precise spot I wanted to cut next.




Later Four-legged-friend joined him.




And anchored him to the ground. I had to cut a two-dog-sized squiggle round them.


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