A Busy Day

Alasdair had a very busy day yesterday. He started in the morning at William's birthday party. Things needed to be dug:

Then in the afternoon a little bit of swinging was in order, all, of course, while looking super cool:

Then it was time to jump into the pool:

And of course, put all that swimming training to good use:

And of course, there's always time to beat Daddy up:

Turned Out Nice Again

80f/26c. Clear blue skies, though we may get a thunderstorm or two later. As long as the weather's nice though, the gang's making the most of it.

The dude lounged around for a bit:

But then decided it would be a good day to break out the boat:

Waterboy

Alasdair goes swimming with Nikki every Thursday morning. I haven't been able to attend, but we got him in the pool at home over the weekend. It's mildly astonishing how comfortable this kid is in the water. Nikki says 'blow bubbles' puts his head all the way under and zooms him towards me and he comes up blinking and smiling.

 

Happy Birthday to Me

Yesterday was my birthday. Thanks to those who remembered. Don't worry about it to those who didn't. It gives me a perfectly good excuse to forget yours.

I had a great day. We were having a new bay window fitted from 10 until about 3, so I got out of bed to let the blokes in and then grabbed the paper and a couple of mugs of tea, leaving them to get on with it, while I headed back to bed to open my pressies. I got a TomTom 920 from Nikki as well as a couple of other pressies that were actually surprises, since I haven't been hinting about them for 2 months.

When Nikki and I emerged a few hours later the windows were mostly done, and after a couple of phones calls to and from the family and a delicious lunch of cheese, I pottered about with cleaning the pool filter for 3 hours. Nothing better than an afternoon in the sunshine, lifting huge, incredibly heavy, soaking wet, cartridges coated in algae to make me feel like I'd earned the delicious birthday lasagna Nikki had cooked for me. A couple of nice glasses of wine and a healthy bowl of three kinds of fantastic sorbet finished off my day wonderfully.

Landscaping

When Bruno asked us to host his leaving party in our back garden we knew we'd have to do a little bit of landscaping to accommodate his high standards. Unfortunately it rained for most of the day of his party and everyone, except four idiots who were playing volleyball in the pool, spent most of the party inside. Anyway, here's the new improved pool area:

The Oleanders in front of the pool equipment should grow in, also Nikki has planted a bunch of winter veg to the left of them, so it won't look as bare in a few months. The biggest difference is that we took down the trellis, which looked kind of ugly anyway.

Round the side of the house we had a big overgrown mess that was impossible to mow and turned into a mudbath every time it rained. Thankfully, that's no longer a problem.