Wonderful weekend

Although this looks as though we're looking across the sea, we're just looking across Lake Ellesmere from Fisherman's Point to Mt Herbert (in the middle with all the snow).

The weather this weekend was so settled and beautiful (no wind - hooray) that we achieved
lots around home and decided to go down to the sea by Lake Ellesmere to see the supposed 5m swell. Banks Peninsula looked fantastic with snow on all the high points and the lake was incredibly full and blue. Often its a bit murky as its a very shallow lake. I don't think the ocean swell was 5m because that's huge but it was breaking over the shingle bank and into the lake which was impressive.

It was lovely being out and about because so often I feel as though all we do in a weekend is household duties: washing, housework, house maintenance, car maintenance, gardening etc. Some of those things, gardening for example, I do enjoy but at this time of the year there's such limited time to get everything done before its dark or too cold that one starts to feel as though all one does is slave in the weekend.

Part of my problem is that I. always works really hard in the weekend, particularly on the cars, that if I'm relaxing having a quiet read, I feel quite guilty about not doing more. Not that I. suggests I should do more, its a self-imposed guilt which is one of the most guilty guilts you can get because you can't really have a rational discussion about it with yourself!

Don't get me wrong, I did take Sunday morning off to do a little (successful) shoe shopping and then have coffee with a friend so it certainly wasn't slaving away all weekend but I would have to say that sometimes home ownership is not all its cracked up to be. Part of the problem is, of course, that we bought a run down house and then didn't do any maintenance for a number of years and are now paying the price of trying to fit all those years of work into one year.

We did repair the barge board over the laundry to stop the starlings getting in and nesting this year and it looks great. Last year the starlings started nesting so early that they managed to raise two broods, virtually without a break so we never had a nest free opportunity to block the area off and I'm way too soft hearted to kill baby birds. Somebody suggested we could have pushed the cat into the gap but a. eeewwww and b. cats don't eat starlings anyway!