I really should mow the lawn, I guess. I don’t mind the way it looks, but it’s not very inviting to walk on like this.

But I can mostly manage to make myself do two or maybe three chores per day on weekends (apart from the basics like making sure everyone is fed) and nothing at all on weekdays, and the lawn has not made it into the top three, so I guess that’s not happening yet.

Working from home and spending so much time in the bedroom/office/gym, I am seeing the front garden from a new angle. I am used to seeing it when I walk past it or through it or to it. Now I’m also seeing it from above every day, especially when I open the window to cool down the room. It’s a bit of an unconventional angle for admiring a garden, but this part of it looks really good from above. There are the curves of the flowerbed and the path, and the bushes right next to the wall beneath me giving it depth.

Guess who actually got some things done today! I planted the currants and bought a peony and planted it. It looks limp now but I’m counting on it regaining its strength.

I like traditional, old-style plants like lilacs and bleeding hearts and peonies. Not their fancy, refined varieties either, but the simplest, commonest ones.

Both hydrangea bushes have actually survived the winter. Both have some dead branches, and dead buds on the live branches, but enough green leaves coming out to look hopeful.

Non-stop rain literally all day.

When we redid the kitchen, we put in a tiled backsplash along two sides of it. Somehow we didn’t realize that the wall next to the dishwasher and the espresso machine would also need tiling. That was a mistake, because both those machines cause splashes on the wall occasionally, and scrubbing coffee stains from a painted wall is a bloody pain. So we’re now rectifying that mistake and tiling that wall.

The guy doing it uses string to space the tiles, rather than any kind of plastic spacers, which I find interesting. I’d have thought that string would get compressed but he obviously knows what he is doing.

I still firmly believe that you can never have too many photos of cherry blossoms.

Socks wear out, and that seems normal and obvious. Dishcloths and linen kitchen towels also get rubbed a lot, until they get holes.

Sofas and carpets and rugs generally don’t. Sofas are all artificial fibres these days, so they’re almost eternal. Wool rugs somehow also seem nearly impervious to wear; I wonder how that works.

But this cotton rag rug is apparently not eternal. Ten (?) years of footsteps have worn the fringes down to nubs. The body of the carpet is perhaps a bit flatter and slightly thinner than it used to be, but not visibly worn. I wonder how many years it will last.

I really have no energy or desire to do anything that I don’t have to, apart from reading. Everything feels like a chore, and actual chores I avoid even thinking about.

So I take baby steps to get things done. I want to plant more flowering currants. It took me weeks to gather the energy to find a place that sells them, and order a few. Then it took me two days before I picked up the parcel, and that was enough for that day. Today I unpacked them. And that was enough for today. Now they’re watered and in half-shade so they should stay alive until I get to the point of actually getting them in the ground.