01.01. Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to my brand spanking new blog. And, hey, Happy New Year to you! Did you have any New Year resolutions? Nope? Neither did I, but I did promise myself to finally get started on a personal blog, something I have wanted to get myself for a long time; so her it is: MY BLOG. Awfully long, white empty space...but I suppose I will soon fill it up with all the exciting things that go on in my life... Not! Well, it’s not as if the Internet hasn’t been filled with rants from my corner already, I do have an 11 year old web-site which I regularly update with snippets of things that occupy my mind at the moment, especially on my garden section. But a whole blog, just for myself – well, that’s a new thing to me. I do hope this blog can eventually develop into a bit of a conversation with my visitors, so please leave a comment if
you feel the urge, as my cat is the one that takes the brunt of my verbal outbursts at the moment, and although he is a great listener – hardly ever interrupts, a conversationalist he ain’t.

OK, so what’s this blog going to be about? Mostly about things I do, so that means another forum to display the many things I create on my computer, but I also wanted a place to tell about the things I do when I am not placed behind my computer. Yes, I do sometimes move away from my PC, not very often I must admit, but occasionally I do. And sometimes it would be nice to discuss things I see on the TV (read: rant about things I see on the TV), and as we already have established that my cat is not exactly a chatterbox, maybe I could get a response to things here on my blog. You know; the awful weather, rocketing gas prices, the VAT increase in 4 days on top of sky high food prices, foxes still camping in my garden...what did I say? Yes, foxes still camping in my garden, they have been here since spring 2010, bloody nuisance, they have made a huge tunnel from my garden into next door, dug up half my garden every night for 3 weeks during the spring, until I declared war (more about that some other day), and their 2 cubs played daily on my back door doorstep. Cute? Hmmmm, on a safe distance, but I would rather have them in someone else’s garden than in mine! And even when it was so cold and the snow lay for days, they were still here. Here is one of them.

OK, ok so she is rather cute, but you should have seen what she did to my garden last summer, you wouldn’t think she was so cute then! I guess it will be more about foxes as the year progresses and my garden takes on a more liveable temperature. I must confess I haven’t been out there since early November, except for taking some photos now and then. Which, incidentally, turned up some surprising finds, after 5 weeks of freezing conditions and mostly full snow cover, I actually found 3 rosebushes in buds. They normally flower for the last time – before I do a thorough pruning – at this time of year, but I had never expected to find any proof of life at all in my garden after the weather we have had, well, except for the foxes, which I see every morning when I close my bedroom window. It’s like they look up at me to say “We’re still here, 1 point us, nil you.” OK, I promise, this will be the last time I mention the foxes today, back to the roses. Would you like to see them? Well, of course you do, don’t they look lovely? I took these photos on the 24th December, and amazingly there were many rosebuds on most of my rosebushes.

I am going to round up this first ever post here with a photo of my previously mentioned cat. He played a vital part in this year’s Christmas card collection. I always make my own cards, some of them can be found on my web-site (link on the left, under the ‘Blog Archive’).

I thought it would be nice to finish this post with one of the pictures I used for the Christmas cards 2010, even though Christmas is over and 2011 is more than 1 hour old. My cat is quite used to being photographed, but wearing the Santa hat was a bit of a stretch, even for him. I spent a week putting it on for just a few seconds and increasing the time he wore it until he no longer noticed the hat. Isn’t he adorable?

So that’s all folks, for now, but.... I’ll be back.