Carrots and washing lines

It's been some time since I posted anything but, as I'm in a bloggy frame of mind right now, I thought I'd stick a few sentences down on life around here at present so...

Back in about March the Daily Mail (sorry about that) provided a free packet of carrot seeds in each paper one Saturday.  Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth I decided to plant them somewhere within "the grounds".  Now it has to be said that there aren't too many places to plant anything at our place.  Most of the "gardens" are laid to flags, surrounded by trees,or filled with perennial shrubs.  So it's hard to find anywhere with sufficient space and light to grow veg.  Notwithstanding this I put the seeds down anyway - in the half-shade of our front hedge.  This is nothing like a perfect spot to grow carrots and, I have to say, that I probably didn't help them much by basically giving them very little attention at all.  Anyway, the seeds have been in the ground for about 6 months and some plants have grown so I thought I'd lift a couple to see how they've got on.

We live in a town surrounded by countryside and it's not hard to find carrots growing.  The plants in the fields look bushy and very green above ground and mine, basically, didn't.  But I lifted some anyway and this is what I got.

"Bonsai" carrot action

Now I know many of us still cleave to the spirit of "size doesn't really matter" but in the realm of carrots (oo-er missus) I think we are probably wrong.  AJ was making soup at the time but she refused to sully the pan with my specimens on the basis that they "would be a waste of time".  I couldn't argue.

Now is the time when long-suffering house-holding men like me get sent up into attics to drag down dusty boxes full of trees and decorations, including those infernal lights.  More recently, of course, this so-called festive decoration has included stuff to exhibit outside the house as well as inside and our house is no different to what is increasingly becoming the norm.  Thankfully for our neighbours our outdoor decorations are limited to the back garden (or yard as I call it).  We started with some white(ish) icicle things and last year supplemented these with some blue lights.  Now there was a little issue with the blue lights because AJ thought she'd bought more icicle type things but actually these came as a simple line.  

Today I was fortunately presented with a gap in the current gales and/or torrential rain which offered the perfect opportunity to put the outdoor lights up.  These had already been tested and "fixed".  Fixed in this case means reducing the number of train elements which show no glowing lights at all by testing bulbs and replacing duds with working bulbs from another part of the chain - simply put I minimise the duds sections.  It seemed a relatively simple task this year and has provided us with a 90%+ light-up  rate (for now at least).  I was also asked to take down the washing line as, it being winter, no washing gets hung up.  It was whilst I was taking down the line (a blue plastic one) that I hit on a notion - why not replace the blue washing line with a line of blue lights.  Excellent idea.  This was made to appear like an even better idea when I found that the line of lights is about twice the length of the washing line so they were easy to string up.  Halfway through the exercise AJ came out wondering what the heck I was doing.  She then saw the "artistic merit" of the exercise and is currently humouring me.  I think it looks pretty cool....

Electric washing line