good, rain later

The morning started so promisingly.  It was dry and not windy, and I woke up usefully early and was instantly alert and ready to leap out of bed and start the day.  I recently clicked on a link in one of the news websites to a sleep habits survey run by a German university, and saw as I scrolled down the page that I couldn't possibly fill it in, because it made no allowance for seasonality.  In the depths of winter, as sunrise creeps towards eight o'clock, my natural waking time shifts forward, to eight or later.  By the time I've showered, breakfasted, fed the cats, let the hens out and opened the rabbit gate, and tidied whatever mess we left in the kitchen the night before, it can be half past nine.  That's nearly a quarter of the daylight already gone.  During the longest days of summer I often wake by half past six.

This morning I was ready to hit Waitrose by half past eight, and out in the garden by ten thirty after buying enough groceries to keep us going without having to shop again for a week.  The sun shone, the air was calm, the forecast was for seven days without rain.  I was going to get things done now, for sure.  By lunchtime I'd spread another five bags of mushroom compost on the ditch bed and I was on a roll.

I asked the Systems Administrator whether it was likely to rain over lunch as a matter of form.  The forecast had definitely not said rain.  The SA said he did not know but would look at the rain radar, and reappeared in the kitchen a couple of minutes later saying that it was highly likely to rain in the next half hour, so I had to go back down to the bottom of the garden to retrieve my tablet, which was plumbed into my garden radio so that I could listen to the film review programme podcast while muck spreading.

It started raining about ten minutes later, not just a few drops (though they wouldn't have done the tablet any good) but proper hard squalls against the windows.  I went back out after lunch, sans tablet, and put up with the odd rain flurries for the rest of the afternoon until it got so gloomy that by quarter to four I couldn't see what I was doing.

Addendum  I caught another mouse in the greenhouse in the electric zapper.  I knew there'd been one, because several stems of a perennial wallflower that blew off the staging got eaten, and then the tops some geranium seedlings I'd potted up were gnawed to shiny stumps.  When I was watering in there a couple of days ago something scuttled across the floor among the pots of overwintering tender perennials, moving too fast to be a bird.  I put one of the traps down on the floor, trying to choose a dry spot where it wouldn't be dripped on when it rained, since the roof along the ridge line is not so waterproof as it was.  Another mouse done gone.  I have nothing personal against mice, but there are lots of other places they could live besides in my greenhouse, and lots of other things they could eat besides my pots of geraniums and the wallflower I bought at the Great Dixter plant fair.