under the weather and back out again

I woke up this morning and the headache that had been persistently there since I woke with it on Tuesday, sometimes thumping and sometimes just hovering in the background, had gone.  The humidity level was half what it had been the previous night, and as the headache arrived overnight with Tuesday's storm so it vanished as the foul weather finally blew through.  Suddenly all things were possible, and so I vacuumed up the little piles of dirt that had fallen from my gardening trousers on to the bedroom carpet on Monday evening, and made ice cream out of the cream that had been sitting in the fridge since I bought it on Saturday.

A friend who suffered from proper, disabling migraines in her youth grew out of them in her later years.  I never used to get headaches, unless I had done something to deserve them like drink too much, but in recent years have grown into them.  I fear they are part and parcel of the age that I'm at.  Faced with the choice between HRT and occasional headaches I'll take the headaches.  And faced with the choice between cancelling my plans or plugging on despite the headache I would rather plug on.  Better to be a reliable than an unreliable friend until you are really decrepit and need people's indulgence.  Otherwise in an ideal world I would not have taken my headache to a talk about compost or an art lecture in a crowded and slightly stuffy church or to London on the train.

The plants from Lincolnshire had suffered slightly on account of the headache, since while the Systems Administrator had checked the greenhouse and cold frames yesterday afternoon and given things that looked dry a splash, I had only made a rather perfunctory tour when I got home, telling myself that it had been a very humid day and things would keep until the morning.  In the meantime the cut leaved Argyranthemum and a Symphytum sitting down on the greenhouse floor had got dry, and were wilting pitifully by the time I found them today.  They have recovered now that they've had a good soaking, and been moved on into bigger pots, the daisy for display and the Symphytum to grow on until I'm ready to plant it up by the wood.

I moved this year's new dahlias into terracotta pots ready for display.  After managing to kill a couple of last year's new dahlias by over watering them so that they rotted I am being more cautious about the pace at which I move them on into full sized big pots, so this year's introductions are all in intermediate sized pots and won't come out of them until they are bursting with roots.  I potted the Convolvulus sabatius and the Salvia 'Love and Wishes' that arrived with the plants from Lincolnshire, and began potting the Tithonia and Zinnia grown from seed.  Then I ran out of pots, and once I'd watered the pots in the back garden I'd run out of time.  The trouble with feeling under the weather (almost literally in this case) for a few days is that you spend the next several days scurrying around like a demented thing trying to catch up with yourself.