Fighting entropy

I should be in bed as I was nearly asleep several times today, but wide awake now :(.

Err… what’s been happening? I took some time off and my Mum and Dad came down so that we could attack the fence at the bottom of the garden. Because our garden is higher than the land beyond, the soil is trying to flow downhill through the fence. The previous fence was buckled and in need of cuprinol, so when M+D asked what I’d like for my birthday I asked for help with the fence. We now have bright orange new wooden fence panels (not my choice of colour, but pre-treated by B&Q means less work for me). They now rest on new foot-high gravel boards, which should stop the buckling problem. Where the fence goes round the back of the workshop we have just put up chicken wire to mark our boundary as the workshop wall is a proper wall but about a foot inside the boundary.

This involved ripping out the old fence panels with a claw hammer 🙂 , chopping them up with a circular saw 🙂 , and wrestling several established brambles to the tip 🙁 . The gate still needs doing, but the rest is groovy. While Dad and I were being manly, Katy was attacking the clutter and Mum kindly weeded. I think the children did something or other … 😉 .

The downstairs of the house is now sorted largely due to Katy’s heroism, but we just need to fight untidiness fires mostly started by the children. (Constant vigilance!) The upstairs now has all the beds in the correct rooms, but only one of the chests of drawers. K was hiding a mother lode of clutter and junk under his bed, so dismantling it, moving it to another room and then mantling it exposed another job. Getting to the last boxes we moved with is a bit like being on the sea shore after a storm at sea – loads of random things wash up, mostly junk, but occasional treasures. Some treasures have been put back in new boxes of just treasure to sort at some point, as they now take up less room due to less junk.

Yesterday I took the youngest three out to Ely Museum, which is excellent. Small, friendly, enough hands-on stuff, covering woolly mammoths up to world war 2 (so it beats the Festival of History, then 😉 ). Well worth going again, particulary as the children were free.