Lots of small narrow fields.

Pałac Kultury

Colleagues

St John’s Cathedra

Princess and unicorn

Pegasus

Park Saski

Pierogi for lunch. Hand-crocheted tablecloth.

Chopin crossing


The whole company flew to Warsaw for a weekend trip to celebrate a great year. (Our fiscal year runs May to April.) This is a view of Warsaw from the top of the Pałac Kultury, a grandiose Stalinist edifice from 1955, still Poland’s tallest building.

Interesting fact: Warsaw is still struggling with untangling ownership claims for land expropriated by the Soviet Union. Much of the land in central Warsaw is still disputed. So an undisputed plot is often surrounded by disputed ones – hence, a flattish city with a surprising number of skyscrapers scattered around, with pretty small footprints.


Adrian playing with Geomag. He tends to build these really tall, thin, spindly things, and then be really angry when they collapse under their own weight.


We went out in the garden after dinner.

I found so many slugs that I lost count, several of them in flagrante delicto eating my hostas and day lilies. Obviously my reactive approach is not sufficient; it is time to switch to a proactive approach and remove the conditions that allow them to thrive and multiply. The scrappy area in front of the earth cellar is where the slugs have their safe haven and operating base: it’s slightly shady, and there are lots of hiding places for them among the rocks and nettles. I will clear all that out until the slugs have no place to hide.

Adrian meanwhile played on the swing, talked to the neighbour boy, and watered the slope.


I’ve sewed fiddly dino toes this evening.


Ingrid’s bed curtains, messy bed, and favourite cuddly panda.


And the colourful dinosaurs I’ve drawing and cutting.


Adrian drawing a dinosaur.

We finally hung up Ingrid’s bed curtains last weekend. (It only took three months…) Now Adrian naturally wants a bed curtain, too. Today I started working on his.

Ingrid’s has stars and a full moon. Adrian wants dinosaurs on his. This morning we prepared a first draft of the design together: he told me what he wanted and I drew it. The curtain will have a red Tyrannosaurus, a yellow Stegosaurus, a purple Pterosaurus and a pink Diplodocus. Oh, and a volcano. With lava.


The slug season has begun. There are already dozens of those little devils in and around our garden. They ate most of the new growth of a hosta plant before I noticed them.

Ingrid and I go on regular slug hunts. The hunting is best in the evening or morning, after rain. The best hunting ground is the wasteland between the street and the root cellar, and onwards along the edge of the road. It looks like the ones that reached the hostas also started their invasion from that direction. I guess some of them wintered somewhere in that area, and now laid a batch of eggs.

I pay her a bounty: 1 krona per slug found, and another krona if she also disposes of it. One night she found 16 slugs and earned almost as much as a week’s pocket money in about a quarter of an hour.

They are easy to spot in low grass and on plants, but not so easy on bare soil. And they are especially not easy to spot when there is dead plant material on that soil. A wet old piece of wood, a curled-up dead leaf, a piece of pine bark mulch: there are surprisingly many finger-length brown objects in a garden.