videos and assassins

Today I've been out in the garden aligning my sacred stones. Now what else would you do on the solstice?

Up at dawn I was, at 5.30 to check my alignments and listen to the bird song (what bird song? Socksie has eaten most of them...we twigged this when we saw him with a different bird in his mouth at any one time. He is, in short, an assassin and we don't know what to do about it)
Well, eager ears, my dawn stone alignment proved to be a complete success, by which I mean that I can confirm that our planet still is tilted at the same angle and hasn't change its orbit around our sun.
Not so with my westerly alignment at sunset. It was out by 7 degrees. Now this means, either we are heading towards Mars at a rate of thousands of K per second, or that Lilla (Socksie's sister) had jumped on it (as was her habit during the winter for some unknown reason) and Lili had just just stood it up again not respecting my cosmic organisation. Anyway, both deny it.
So equipped with just a garden fork, and under my barked instructions, Lili hopped from left to right as I set my sights from my main mini Stonehenge stone against the westering one, dipping as it was at that moment under the Sibillas' torso.
A passing outsider might have mistaken her movements for a solsticial pagan dance ritual ( Aaah! ..so legends and myths are born I hear you whisper)
But success, westering stone re- aligned and cosmic order (at least in our garden) restored.
Apart, I should emphasise, from the murder of birds, mice , bees and butterflies which is going on faster than Americans eat hambugers. (I mean, are we not feeding them at home that they behave so?)

Summer's here at last. Arrived on same mid summer day after weeks of rain and low temperatures. Now we get 30C by day and it looks to stay that way for a while. And look at the lavender!


And the profusion of butterflies. The live ones that is , not the fallen one-winged victims of Tikka's right paw. Bees a-buzzin too and a heady mixture of a thousand scents fill the air.
Everything good in the garden.
And in the fields around us, Quinto, Graziella and Renzo are cutting and bailing hay.
I like the noise they make and to hear them shouting to each other.
You ask about Tikka.









Still no feeling in her left paw, so we will try another trip to the vets, just to see if anything can be done, although she is getting around just fine. We just worry about when the sheep dogs do their weekly raid and that she might be outside alone in the garden and not be able to escape fast enough. She can't climb trees you see. Built her a ladder though, although when they attack, they are fast and brutal. Bessie does her best as her guardian, but she's getting on in years. Our garden, our garden.