< / weekend trip>

Back from the yearly weekend trip with the inlaws, and in time for the club-management meeting tonight.

I read. I wrote. I splurged all sorts of crazy ideas onto white pages, sadly all for the trilogy that comes after the first trilogy and the hexalogy. How's that for being prepared?

For once I did not take my camera along, seeing as how I'm still wading through French castles and architectural details, and I still have tons of fun pics from previous trips to Ardennes. So I'll leave you with two little snaps of around the village of Herbeumont from a few years back:

Beautiful pine and moss, though we didn't see a lot of that this year

I love the light in those forests...

Dramatic skies, because I like them, and we had quite a bit of that this year. Luckily it was just not too wet or windy to have a couple of nice long walks in the wilderness.

Jungle fever

Too little sleep because the damned birds are too noisy at 5 a.m.
Now, birds are always noisy in the morning. First light, they all do their interpretation of "Good Morning Vietnam"  in their racial twitterese.
Loud, happy, chirpy twitterese.
Then they decide they're hungry and go hunt for worms and stuff and quieten down.
That's how things should be. But nowadays they are so damned chirping noisy, for so long, that I'm wide-awake come 5:30.
And I think it's my own fault too. You see, last autumn should have been Serious Pruning time. Not just a little snip here and there, but the real tree-killing work that's needed once every two or three year. But silly me, I managed to sprain my thumb real bad with fencing (a sports injury bearing the frivolous name of "ski thumb"), and so no snipping and sawing and hacking that season. This means my garden, a long overgrown tunnel of 4,5m wide and about 65m long, becomes the safe haven for all sorts of noisy birds, who feel safe from the three clawed hunters and thus make some noise.
I was going to tackle the overgrowth in spring, but I don't really know what happened to spring. Came and went, and now I'm here with jungle fever.
So today, since it was dry enough, and much much cooler than the last couple of weeks, I got out the axe and the saw and got to work. One third of the trees and bushes I needed to tackle are done. I'll continue Saturday if the weather keeps up, so my poor blistered fingers and still sensitive thumb can rest some. Also, tomorrow we've got visitors, which means I'll have another kind of cleaning to do.
I only hope that I managed to keep free of phototoxic juice, but I'll guess I know for sure tomorrow...

Nothing says summer like

food poisoning! Soup left outside the fridge for a day might turn bad. I've never ever ever had a problem with this, but statistics/Murphy (strike-through what doesn't fit your world view) caught up with me. Alas this was also after convincing bad-eating-habit-hubby that he too needs his vitamins and home-made soup.
Murphy's double whammy. It's gonna take some time to live that down.

Anyways, now the stomach has been tamed, I've been doing the good job of straightening out the Barynn calender so I can finally and definitely know which moon is up when. Shouldn't be too hard you think, but then of course there's this idiot part of my brain that thought up a Barynn day of 20 hours which means you either have to make a conversion to stupid 24h Earth days, or figure out the algorithm for each body's rising and setting, to come to a set of tables from which you can read what bodies (sun and 3 moons) are up in the sky at a given time. I went with the latter, but I'm thinking I might recheck the results with a conversion table.