Chores or Pleasure?

I've been enjoying my garden immensely, and have focused on it intently, while Dale attends to the nitty gritty of fixing toilet flushing mechanisms, and figuring out what's tripping the electrical circuit occasionally. He also used the very convenient scaffolding in place to mount our Starlink antenna on the roof.

Photo: D. Schultz

 Oh well! I also clean toilets and wash underwear sometimes, so it's not all leisure activities! And I'm picking up all sorts of things left in the yard that I regard as litter. I really am having a hard time understanding someone curating such a beautiful showy garden, and yet leaving remnants of their gardening chores lying around. I've found styrofoam, plant pots, chipped tiles, and plastic bags for topsoil left behind among the plantings. Who does that? 

Benjamin's Buttons and Clematis are putting on quite a show. 

Our new dishwasher has now been installed, which I really appreciate ... though I fear I don't have enough dishes to run it before needing the next lot of clean kitchenware. It's so quiet, and doesn't chip dishes like I might in my granite-like sink.

A rainbow appeared after this moody cloud came down the valley - quite dramatic light plays going on!

Eye Catching Details

 

Our Town

 This is High street in Llanfyllin, historically a market town in the county of Powys, mid-Wales, with a population just under 1,600. We live behind the row of houses on High street, roughly in the general location of the red dot in relation to the town.

This is our central square or market place, with a wind sculpture created and donated by a local artist, Stan Jankowski

The town centre is a mix of old Victorian and medieval buildings, all listed (no changes to outside façade permitted)

Another side street, where the sidewalk has been annexed by desperate gardeners. It's not 'you own what you mow' but similar. Maybe it's referred to as 'you own what you sow'?

Our "postie" (post man or woman, aka mail carrier) came and introduced himself to us on his rounds earlier this week. He said to let him know if we're expecting a delivery but won't be home, or if we need him to drop things off elsewhere.

We currently have a lot of noise and dust being generated as the installers begin the process of providing us with solar panels, batteries and outlets for our 'green' upgrade. We expect they'll be busy for about a week.

 Scaffolding around the house

Pub at Last

We finally made it to the pub (The Old New Inn) during opening hours - woohoo. There was only one other person there, and after a little while, he came over, sat down and introduced himself, saying it doesn't cost anything to be nice. The lovely old gentleman, wearing a collar and tie, told us he assembles and paints figures of knights, and loves going on cruises. He was quite taken with the Knights Templar, and thought Dale would make a good knight (little does he know!).

Fish and chips for me for dinner, steak and ale pie for Dale. Fair fare. My ale was from the local Branat valley we passed through on our scenic uplands trip recently. The pub is small and kind of tatty, but it means no airs and graces, right?

Our kitchen sink has been leaking, so we walked to the local hardware store for parts, but we didn't have any success in getting the washers we needed. I did succeed in knocking over some counter displays after some bull-in-a-china-shop manoeuvres, though.

We stopped in at the town butcher, too. There were no prices displayed, so we had to ask the price of each item we pointed to, asking for the British name of each cut. The young attendant was incredibly patient and helpful.

The setting sun cast lovely roof shadows for us on our walk home

Eryri Sights

We had a most stupendous trip to the bank at the beginning of the week, since part of the route took us through parts of Snowdonia National Park. The scenery is spectacular Welsh moorland for miles.

This is the view down the Tanat valley

Once over the summit, we pulled off onto a layby to send a text, and encountered a stranded motorist with a very severely ripped tyre. She was driving a rental car, and hadn't been able to swerve away from debris in the road because of oncoming traffic. Dale donned his suit of armor like any Welsh knight would, and helped get her back on the road.

Our bank is in the town of Bala, which sits on the shore of Wales' largest natural lake, Lake Tegid (or Llyn Tegid). We didn't have time to explore all the trails around it, but hope to return to cover some of the 3.7 mile long shore.

And then it was back up over Wales' second highest public road mountain pass through Eryri (Snowdonia National Park) to see new sights on the way home. A narrow little track was all we had to go on, making me think we'd end up at a farmyard, and not get back home. Motorcyclists seemed to enjoy the narrow twists and turns that accompany the breathtaking drops into the valley below. It sure made for an interesting drive.

The peat uplands stretch for miles,

and, of course, there are sheep and lambs everywhere.

Our route took us back home via Lake Vrynwy,

 which presented us with a great display of woodland bluebells. What a magnificent sight.

Ahhhh, another amazing day in Wales!

Sundries

Our lovely neighbors invited us over for dinner on Sunday - they went 'all out' and cooked 4 different curries with all sorts of accompaniments. And a lot of fun and laughter was served up too! They are so down-to-earth and real. Not only that, but ... wait for it ... they 'get' Dale's humor.

We decided to bring an old potting bench from the garden into our conservatory so we can eat out there and enjoy the view. It looks pretty rustic and unfinished, but is sturdy and will serve the purpose until our furniture arrives. Actually, I rather like it.

As it turns out, our container didn't make it onto the ship that sailed around May 7. It's still sitting in the dock at NJ ( the tracker Dale attached to it helped us figure this out). The scheduled journey of our container, once loaded onto the ship, will be as follows: After leaving NJ/NY it will head to Virginia and South Carolina before making for Southampton in England. After that, it'll be sent to Liverpool, and finally put on a big truck, and then our goods will be shuttled to our house via Luton van (box truck). In the meantime, I'm gardening when I should be giving the house a thorough clean while there's no furniture in it. We've since bought a lawnmower, a grill, a dishwasher, a microwave and a blender, items we couldn't ship because of the different voltage here. 

We went to a boot sale at the old Workhouse location in town over the weekend. It was pretty underwhelming as an event, but we got to see the old historic building that housed poor families, who were separated into different wings by age and gender, so families got split up to be housed there.

The cutouts of people at the windows was pretty effective

Our best source of weekly groceries is in Welshpool (12 miles away) or Oswestry in England (14 miles - lower taxes on alcohol purchases). It takes us quite a while to shop since we don't recognize the product labeling, and have to search for everything on our list and still have to go back for things we couldn't find. Going through the checkout at ALDI is mindblowingly fast, like playing a shoot-'em-up computer game - trying to keep up with packing items into the cart as they're scanned is on the verge of being stressful!

Critters!

I was delighted to find these three newts huddled under a concrete birdbath I moved during my gardening foray. I was sorry to have disturbed them, but they seemed too confused/cold/sluggish to move away and hide. We got a good look at them, but forgot to look at their undersides for spots.

This is probably the common smooth garden newt, Lissotriton vulgaris

These bramble leaves indicate the presence of a critter having been there, most likely the caterpillar of the golden dot moth (Stigmella aurella). The larvae are often referred to as leaf miners.

The last critter is a beautiful sketch by Rachael for Mother's day - the silver-studded blue, native to Wales, but declining due to habitat loss. I really hope to see one in real life soon

Pant Cudd

A few of you have asked if we're learning Welsh. There's no real need, since we haven't encountered a single Welsh-speaking person thus far. Everyone speaks English automatically, so we're very fortunate in that regard. All road signs are printed in Welsh first, with English underneath. Yesterday I saw a road sign that warned:

PANT CUDD

HIDDEN DIP

As you can see, it's not very easy to decipher meanings. Even searching through our knowledge of German doesn't help us figure it out. 

We have had weather mostly like this next photo since we arrived. It's our village from a footpath (we are down in the PANT CUDD in the foreground, between the bluebells and the maroon foliage of what appears to be a copper beech on the right).

There have also been some blue skies and very little rain so far. It means I've been able to savor working in my garden just as much as I like! I'm in heaven! Except that, one afternoon we kept getting wafts of manure across our yard - we hope it's a one-off thing and the odor doesn't 'hang about' all summer 🤞.

We walked up to Myllin's Well, supposedly the site of the first immersion baptisms in the 6th or 7th century, which is on the hill behind our house. It's quite a steep walk, but short and manageable, with opportunities to stop and admire the breathtaking views/catch your breath!

Here is the deeply indented path to the top of the hill - you can see how centuries of foot traffic have compressed and compacted the path to now exist below the ground level of the tree roots bordering it. It is much deeper than this in some places

We had some grand views of the countryside from the top of the hill.

All the white dots in the pics are sheep (Hmm, I wonder what the ratio of people to sheep is?). I think this must be where the idea of counting sheep to help one fall asleep must have come from.