It's official, Spring has arrived!
Well actually, rampant frogs have arrived and are laying down clouds of frogspawn in the pond. Every time I open the porch door, there's a splashing flurry of legs as the frog scoots away, all embarrassed at being caught in the act.
It's not looking as if it's going to be a particularly floral Spring, it has to be said. Youngest daughter was at best, disparaging, about the one-and-a-half miniature daffodils that finally managed to make it into the daylight, and the mass of celandines which cheered up the front garden last year are conspicuous by their absence. Even the ever-blooming rose seems to have stopped.
The magnolia tree is starting to bud with a degree of enthusiasm, but whether said buds are going to be leaves or flowers, remains to be seen. After last year, and the somewhat harsh cropping it received at the hands of the mad axe-man, Steve (under the guise of pruning it), I will be very surprised to see vast numbers of flowers, although it wouldn't take very many to beat the seven it displayed after the 'trim'.
Rather splendidly, the Christmas cactus I had as a gift two years ago, is positively vibrant, with new leaves exploding onto the scene, and a second flowering. Until now, it's never even hinted at a desire to spread, and the whole thing has taken me completely by surprise. I have absolutely no idea why it should have happened since the only change is that it now lives in the bathroom, but I'm not complaining.
Being ill is really beginning to tick me off.
Not that I've ever enjoyed it, quite the opposite, I dislike intensely the curtailment of my freedom, my inability to do what I want to do, etc., but now I have to put up with things that used to work fine, not working at all, or deteriorating before my eyes.
My sight is a prime example. For decades now, I've had perfect vision, I could see anything and everything without straining, I could happily switch between short and long distances at will, and I never needed to fret about seeing things in dim light. Suddenly, that's not the case. I now wear spectacles pretty much all the time.
This in itself wouldn't be a major problem, if I was really able to see properly with them, but I'm still struggling. I have a pair of 'varifocals' (I think), that are allegedly meant to cover all eventualities, but I can't drive in them as the weird foggy bits turn my head to mush. So, I also have a pair I drive in - they work fine, except for reversing into parking spaces, where I find that I'm better off not wearing any glasses at all.
Craft work is a nightmare - if the light isn't perfect (which it almost never is), I can't see the bitty things I want to use, and I wouldn't like to confess the number of times I've dropped beads recently, so my multifunction glasses are meant to sort that problem out. Once again though, they fail, the blurry edges make my head ache, even though I've been running them in for eight months.
Then there's the 'reading' glasses that I ought to wear, but I lost.... In reality, I put them down somewhere, and I can't see where I left them!
