before the holiday

By the time we get away on holiday I'll need one.  I have washed all the paintwork in the hall, and sorted out the mess in the laundry which I'd been meaning to do for ages.  Going through the random collection of stuff that had accumulated on the shelf above the washing machine, I found that we possessed two sink plungers, three partly used bottles of auto screen wash, two bird seed feeders (one large, one small), and three sponges, while a very dusty container on the floor turned out to be premium car soap.  That must belong to the Systems Administrator, since my car is never washed with anything more luxurious than a splash of Ecover washing up liquid.  But I did find an electronic soil testing kit inside a shoebox, which must be mine.  I haven't yet worked out any way of calibrating it to see if it actually works, though if it told me that dilute vinegar or lemon juice were alkali that would be proof that it didn't.

I picked up a tartan wool scarf that the SA used to wear for sailing, thinking it might do for walking and wood cutting in the winter if I washed it, and found it riddled with holes, and the rectangular casings of some stage of the life cycle of some kind of wool eating insect.  That's bad.  That's very bad.  I put the remains of the scarf in a bin bag, and put the bag straight outside, and scrubbed the shelf with copious amounts of disinfectant, hoping that whatever it was had liked the scarf so much that it hadn't bothered colonising elsewhere.

This evening the beekeepers are supposed to be coming round for a committee meeting, though the Secretary hasn't sent the agenda out.  I got a phone call from the Membership Secretary at around teatime, asking whether there was a meeting tonight, and I had to tell her that my recollection was that we'd fixed on this evening at the last meeting, and certainly I'd told them they couldn't come next week because we'd be on holiday, but I hadn't actually received an agenda.  She hasn't rung back since to say that it's off, so presumably whoever else she spoke to also expected it to be tonight.  At least hosting it just before we go away means that we had to clean the sitting room anyway, but I didn't have time to make any cake and they'll have to make do with chocolate biscuits from Budgens.

Meanwhile it is an extraordinarily beautiful evening, with that rich, early autumn light.  I feel sorry for the chickens, because they would like to come out for a run and the SA would be willing to supervise them, but we can't have them milling around the drive just as cars start arriving for the committee meeting.  They aren't used to traffic, and we don't want them scattering and hiding in the undergrowth for hours, let alone getting run over.  As it is we have to be increasingly careful when starting our cars that the short indignant tabby isn't sitting underneath, because she's as deaf as a post.