I have been quite busy lately though mainly with the sort of domestic activities that must be of minimal interest to anyone else, like mowing the lawn, putting up shelves and renovating the interior of our tiny garden shed plus, of course, my quota of the routine daily chores. It is amazing how fast a lawn grows when the weather is hot and interspersed with showers.
A better arrangement of shelves was needed in the garden shed and I decided to go further and repaint the interior while I was at it, thus brightening it up for the Head Gardener. She hadn’t said anything but I sensed that she was not as enthusiastic about her shed as I might have expected – and it wasn’t hard to see why. The ceiling in the shed comprised three roughly cut plywood panels nailed to the roof  joists.  Long stretches of the edges of these panels touched neither each other nor the walls. Thus, instead of isolating the main body of the shed from the roof space, the ceiling simply provided a nice dark shelter for a great variety of spiders and other multi-legged critters from which they could and did invade and colonise the shed itself. Though the shed roof is weatherproof it is not dustproof. What with the dust and the webs and the rest it was not an environment in which one would wish to sit for long.
So I emptied the shed, ripped out the old shelves and took a bit of time removing the old ceiling so as to preserve the main panels to be used again.  I have now reached the stage at which the new ceiling is in and sealed, and the ceiling and walls have had two coats of paint with one more to go. A couple of tubes of decorators filler have taken care of the larger holes and crevices in and between the  concrete blocks in the walls and a long gap between the window ledge and the wall beneath has been filled with mortar.  Eventually, all the shelves will be finished in brilliant white gloss paint.

Jobs of this sort can be very tedious but I have a great tool for overcoming that problem. It is the Sony MP4 player shown in the picture above. I don’t spend much time watching TV or listening to the radio, there is far too much rubbish being broadcast and I cannot be bothered to dredge through the Radio Times or other guides in search of the few gems that are worth seeing and/or hearing (though some of those gems are finding me now via Twitter but that is another story).  Instead, when free to choose I prefer to divide my time between glorious silence and listening to the sort of music that I mentioned a while ago in another post. My MP4 player has a memory of 8Gb of which about half is now occupied by my favourite music. The sound quality is remarkably good through the standard earphones and battery life is excellent. Though the Walkman/Ipod idea is far from new, it is amazing to me still that so much music can be stored and played in such a small player and is thus available just about anywhere – including when there is boring work to be done in the garden shed.
The musical activity has become even more varied recently – but more about that in the next post.