Here is #2 daughter (in an unrecognisable photograph) picking strawberries with roses and herbs looking on.
Here is an impressionistic toy camera shot of the roses. I like a garden to be all wild jungle or at least cottage-garden looking. It is supposed to look as though everything is growing there natural and wild, although obviously it isn’t. There is no place in which these particular plants would all grow together — and of course the trellis is a dead giveaway.
Here is Nadia, a sweet cat whom the Princess gave to us last night. My husband spent the entire evening training the dogs to tolerate her. Fiona
, the smart one, has learned the lesson completely, but poor Toby is still working on it. He is trying very hard. My husband put the cat in his lap and had Toby sit at his feet, and said calming things to them until Nadia would look Toby in the face and Toby would sit quietly. We all chorused “Good dog!” and praised him, and indeed, he looked as though he was calmly making friends with the cat.
In reality, however, he was a quivering mass of dog nerves, filled with a desire to play with the new toy — that is, Nadia. My husband also says that he is very jealous. We are hoping that he will be able to adjust and that everyone will be happy together.
The other new denizen of chez Fibermom is a pedal steel guitar. #1 son developed a sudden and inexplicable desire to play one. We’re hoping for good things there, too. He already plays guitar and bass, so in some ways it was a logical next step.
Ishmael, in the section I have just read, has argued that pre-agricultural societies were more affluent than we are, because they had a great deal of leisure and plenty of food. They did not, I think, have pedal steel guitars.
You mean that isn’t a wild trellis? š
Nadia is adorable. I hope she and Toby get along. I love the way all your pets have people names! My gerbils have people names, but the cats and the dog do not.
Steel guitar! My mother started playing one of those when she was 14 years old (she even had to play it on radio once ..) After I’d learned mandolin I got interested in Mum’s steel guitar as well but I never got past playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ on it. It was one of the things on my list to do one day, learn to play the steel – but, also one of those things I never got around to. Hope your son takes it further than I did.
2 dogs and one cat, not bad – can beat you by one dog however, plus a neighbour’s cat who spends more time over here than she does at her own home. I think she’s waiting for our old cat to cast off her mortal coils so that she, the neighbour’s cat, can take over permanently. Of course it is quite likely that Titch (the old cat) has recruited Tuppence (the younger cat) as her replacement as I think that the cat species as a whole abhors a cat vacuum – at least one cat for every human household is the species’ motto.