I love blogging!

Someone once said that that everybody has a book within them. Not so sure about that but I certainly love blogging.
I started blogging in early June and now 3 months along the line I think about bogging practically every day. Its something I have even thought about giving my day job up for which is totally irrational. What started off as an exercise to see if I have the patience to write anything at all has rapidly turned into an obsession. My first month I went a little over board and published a blog every other day. Since then I have tried to temper my zealousness and get into a rhythm of writing around 10 a month which is I feel is sustainable.
Conservative estimates say that there are around 200 million blogs in existence. Some are just word blogs, some are just pictures and some are video blogs or vlogs as they are known. Everybody has their own motivation for writing a blog, some people want to earn money from their blogs by hosting adverts and some people just do it for pleasure. Some people like to write about one particular topic whilst others, like me, tend to ramble on about whatever takes their fancy. There are no hard and fast rules. Readership is another subjective topic. How many people read my blog is an irrelevance to me, yet I do know others who see it as a sign of their popularity. For me it is purely therapeutic and a form of relaxation that maybe one day I will be able to make some money from. Think I have a long way to go on that front!

I would urge any of you with a hobby to start writing a blog. If you love cooking why not write down all your favourite recipes and take a picture of the final result? If you like gardening write about the new flowers and weeds that have popped up in the last week. The possibilities are endless but more importantly it is a great way to catalogue a part of your life. Think what a marvelous legacy this would be for your Grandkids to look at when you are gone! Its really easy to get started and you do not have to be a computer genius. Just go to www.blogger.com and follow the instructions.
My mum wrote her first book in her 60's and it was something that kept her occupied the rest of her life and by the time she died she had written and published 4 books. I would love to know if she would have taken to blogging in the same way as I have.

I still hate gardening!

Finally got my garden tractor back yesterday.As you may remember it died on me 2 weeks ago for no apparent reason.The good news is that it is now fixed,the bad news is that I am officially a complete idiot! The reason it stopped working was that I had put diesel into the engine instead of petrol! I'd like to say that this is so not like me but sadly not In my professional life I am known to be pretty effective and even though I say so myself am extremely capable. This isn't the case in my personal life however in fact I would go so far as to say that I am a disaster on the domestic goddess front.  I digress though. The worse thing about the whole diesel/petrol debacle though is the fact that the canister I use for the tractor has also been used on another motor vehicle - my beloved Vespa. In my small pea size brain I am hoping that the two separated in the canister and that I only managed to pour the petrol into the engine. I realize that this cannot possibly be the case and am just waiting for the bike to konk out on me as I try to drive the bike home from the office !

For now I will have to settle for the fact that grass cutting duties can begin again in earnest. Am particularly excited because it will give me a chance to try out my latest addition to the useless garden equipment that I have bought. Yep, the lure of the garden centre was too much and an innocent trip to buy tractor oil resulted in the purchase of a rather large composter. Now am not really sure what a composter is but apparently it will revolutionize my life,said the nice man and I will never have to buy mulch again. Sold! Now, what the hell is mulch!

I hate gardening!

A very wise older friend of mine once told me that he had never in his 60 odd years ever bought any gardening equipment and had always had a gardener take care of things as it worked out cheaper in the long run. Boy, I wished I had listened to him!
Gardening is a full time and very expensive hobby and just when you think you have got it figured out another thing pops out ( literally ) from the bushes to surprise you.
I have had gardeners over the years but the good, reliable and business savvy ones seem to be rarer than Dodo poop! Why do they seem to think it is OK to cut my grass once a season and that for the rest of the year it will take care of itself. They of all people should know it doesn't work like this. Last year I had an excellent one who came at least twice,got me all excited about doing some big Japanese feature at the back of the garden and put in an irrigation system and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Did he win the Euro lottery and doesn't need to earn any more money ? I think not !
As a result of all this I now have the following equipment littering the periphery of my house:

1)Diesel lawn mower that I cannot start because the pull thingy is just too hard.
2)Garden tractor that replaced the above which is currently lying idle after conking out after doing half of my garden last week. Do not even get me started on the fact that Mountfield promise a 7 year guarantee yet the service guys are so rude and unhelpful that am sure noone goes back to them.
3) Hedge trimmer still in it's box because I have not got a ladder tall enough to get even close to what I want to trim.
4) Strimmer for cutting borders and the places that have turned into jungle when no.s 1 and 2 go on the blink.
5) variety of medieval torture instruments that are supposed to make life easier but have no idea how!

If you have a teenage child that doesn't yet know what they want to do for a living suggest that they become a landscape gardener because there is a serious lack of them in the world and with a bit of business knowledge they could become richer than God quite quickly. Just send them round to my house first though