Summer?!

After more than a week of rain, fog, more rain, fog, rain interspersed with fog, prolonged outbreaks of foggy rain, and temperatures that barely scraped into double figures, today summer sent us reeling with shockingly blue skies, remorseless sunshine and temperatures that joyrided into the low twenties. Us poor Hokkaidoians (Hokkaidoites? Hokkaidoers?), with our default setting always switched to winter, didn't know what the hell hit us. The heat, the glare, the pale flesh wantonly exposed by yours truly as I threw satorial caution to the hot winds and donned a t-shirt and shorts, thereby single handedly lowering real estate values in the neighbourhood by a good "Jaysus, would ya look at d'arse on dat fella" twenty percent.

It was also a day for surfing.

But, I didn't go as I was too busy gardening. Yes, gardening. Hallo tweeby, middle-age, how are you my green-fingered friend?

Spring, for all you processed food eating types out there, is when it is all at for the digging and the planting and the watering and the warning Cian not to put any more water on the lettuce, ah for feck's sake, look at them, they might as well be seaweed you've poured so much feckin water in there now. Go off and annoy your mother, there's a good boy.

With the weather we've been having, we're behind the seasonal clock this year, so today was all "vegetables go!" as we endeavoured to catch up or, in Cian's case, drown the lettuce. Even in our sliver of a vegetable garden (roughly the size of your typical dinner table), we managed to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, soy beans, basil, egg plant, peppers, rice, yes rice (in a paddy no less), and very wet lettuce; along with the usual fruit suspects: strawberries (if the feckin ants leave them alone), raspberries, blackberries, black currents and mulberries (if Cian leaves them alone).

Do not fear, dear reader, I will, of course, keep you updated on how our garden goes.