Jogging along nicely thank you, especially in the garden!

Well, a lot of improvements - like replacement more of the draughty double glazing - will have to wait until my single solitary investment matures in September - but on the whole, the house is doing okay. The garden had deteriorated quite a bit over spring and very early summer - the patch of grass you're supposed to be able to sit on (other people call it a lawn) was over a foot in height, for instance, partly because the operation I had made it impossible to use two hands to do anything, and partly because of the rain, I never seemed to have any free time when it wasn't throwing it down. But over the last month - woo hoo! The turnaround started when a couple of people stayed with me over the weekend, and at the end of the last day, they spent 45 minutes in the garden pulling up the grass that had consumed the border, including a beautiful, beautiful little sedum plant I brought from my last house, that I absolutely adore. And these two lovely people got a whole dustbin-sized bag of grass from out of the border, and then rescued the sedum and replanted it so it could breathe again. And I couldn't let that work go to waste! So ever since then, I've been reclaiming the garden - cutting back the grass, weeding the borders, mulching wherever I can find space, and using anything I can for the mulch, all of which I gathered last year - the oak leaves, the wool carpet samples, old cardboard, all of it is down now, in the garden, slowly feeding the soil and making sure I don't get nearly so many plants growing where I don't want them!