Of Spring bedding, spring cleaning and kaleidoscopes

It's not been the best of weekends, and hopefully things are not going to get worse.

I have been spending a lot of time "tidying up". Normally, this would involve shoving stuff into what little space remains in the nearest available cupboard, but I am dreading the prospect that, come the moment when we open the doors of N-o-T  to prospective buyers, they may be killed as they try to investigate the storage space, only to be buried under an avalanche of things I was trying to hide. 

This has meant that I have been forced to tidy up not only the things I want to hide away, but also the places I want to hide them away IN. 

The whole house selling process is driving me loopy, and it's not just the tidying. 

I have never been good at dealing with winter, and this year it started early and seems to be dragging on. As a consequence, I leave the gardening to TH, who doesn't feel the cold. I took up a position adjacent to the log burner in October, and I intend to stay there until mid-April, if the long range weather forecast is even partially accurate. 

Well, that was the original plan, anyway. 

It seems only a couple of years since I was able to leave my summer bedding plants in their hanging baskets, and that they would happily survive the entire winter, bursting forth again in late spring and saving me a fortune in the process. I'd managed to hang on to many a geranium using this method until recently. However, the last few winters have been far too severe, and it's only been my refusal to garden in single-figure temperatures that has left the hanging baskets hanging around with a few decrepit twigs poking out. 

Needless to say, my attention was drawn to the fact that this was doing little to enhance the appearance of the house and, with the imminent arrival of a photographer, instructed (I suspect, given what the agent said) to ensure that everything is done to "sell" the virtues of our garden, I had to do something.

So. Saturday saw TH and me at the garden centre, in a blizzard of sleety rain, buying spring bedding plants, and Sunday saw me in similar conditions trying to replant the hanging baskets and pots to make the house look a bit less as though we had abandoned it.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I managed on Friday to break the screen on my laptop. I heard what I thought was TH shouting from the kitchen, so I leapt to my feet, which were tangled in the power cable, and the laptop crashed to the floor, where the screen, which only moments before was showing my e-mail inbox, had developed the appearance of a kaleidoscope. 

This means I am reduced once again to the iPad, and last time I tried to update my blog on my iPad I was locked out of Blogger for three months...

You may or may not read this, and, if you do, it may be my last blog post for a while. I'm hoping not, but who knows?