The weather forecast is for 33^o today so our plans are for a day of reading in the air-conditioning.  We can justify it because we’ve been busy for the last week or so.  Jamie has been finishing off a new garden bed under the front windows and I’ve been building a rockery.  We certainly have plenty of rocks around the place: some as big as a table and as immoveable as Uluru, but others are able to be lifted or at least manipulated with a crowbar.

We had a pile of rocks all ready and waiting but a rockery is not just a pile of rocks and I’d been avoiding making the commitment to what I could see would be big job.  However, Marilyn made a trip to Bunnings on Tuesday and came home with a collection of plants for the proposed rockery she’s been talking about for months. That certainly put the pressure on and I had to get stuck in and create some order out of the chaos.  The result is not too bad and a few more hours of moving in dirt and planting will make it something I can point to with pride.

When I came in to the house, exhausted from my unfamiliar manual labour, Marilyn said, sympathetically, I don’t like you lugging rocks around.  I’m always keen to have sympathy but it’s easy to feign sympathy after the event.  She didn’t feel sympathy when she suggested it would be a ‘nice’ thing for me to do.

I tried to write this blog on my iPad but haven’t yet worked out the process.  I bought the iPad as a reward to myself for organising the Craft Fair.  As I suspected, it has little practical value but I use it to play mindless games like Solitaire and Jigsaw Scrabble when we’re watching TV in the evenings.  I find that I can’t just sit and watch TV; I have to have something to keep my hands busy, and the iPad fills that role perfectly.

I noticed on the Diamond Princess forum that a previous passenger commented how interesting it was that the schedule of activities on the ship included a get-together for passengers with iPads.  Marilyn laughed when she heard that, envisaging the motley group of nerds, all in the same room but interacting only with their iPads, in splendid isolation.  We’re cruising on the Diamond Princess at the end of this month and I don’t know whether I should look for this iPad get-together or not.  If I go, will that label me as a nerd?