Wednesday 22nd October 08

I took our youngest to school and came back with four sacks of leaves.

A quiet day in the house mainly... more chores whilst Gill went to Art in Osbaldwick, proudly showing me a lovely 'negative' artwork when she got back. They'd been given a couple of chairs to draw, but had been told to draw everything but the chairs, so the gaps between were there but the chairs themselves were just silhouettes.

Before and after lunch I spent a good long time cutting back this year's fruited loganberry canes and tying in the ones which have grown this year and will fruit next year. This is a tricky job, gloves would make it completely impossible so I used bare hands and secateurs, but quite a few of the tiny prickles and spines found their way into my hands, so I spent a bit of time during the evening chopping them out like I do with splinters, using my very sharp penknife scissors.

Continued with the work I'm doing for Ali's project, which will convert into a 'Dexter' artwork. It's a list of words from my first 40 years, memory joggers. I need about a thousand, so only another 800 to go then!!!

I met up with Julia from Green Thumbs at 3.40 at Country Fresh, so she could buy and take away 20 pumpkins which the youngsters will make into creatures, rather than carve with sharp knives which we think wouldn't be a good idea from a safety point of view. I'm grateful to the guys at Country Fresh for the very reasonable deal on the pumpkins!

A cosy evening with Gill once the boys were in bed, which took time as the homework situation had caused a lot of anger.