13th September: A visit from John

Simon was delighted to see John turn up at our home today, armed with a couple of crownies and some wonderful CDs that he had burned. One of these is called "Educating Simon" an introduction to country music of the early twentieth century. Nice one John. They had a nice chat. Simon was keen to hear all the gossip from work, John was very diplomatic, don't worry guys! You can see them here in our front room, must work harder on composing these pictures, our dining room table is mayhem.
Apart from John's visit we got stuck into a very long film about superheroes, the Watchmen. I liked some of it, but the gory scenes were very nasty. Because it is such a long film we had to leave it about 40 minutes from the end for Simon's return to hospital. We will pick it up again next weekend. Skippy lurked around for a bit, and did briefly stand on Simon's lap, he is gently coming round to the idea of Dad and his machine.
Got up at the crack of dawn woken by riotous birdsong; the birds are all flirting with each other outrageously and they seem to compete for bandwidth first thing in the morning. Skippy is beside himself; "which one shall I chase first?". I got out into the garden by 8am (by which time Skips was exhausted and had to go back to bed) and got a lot done: lawns mowed, palm fronds cleared, potatoes earthed up, and some pesky lawn edging installed - much trickier than I had bargained for. It is all looking lush and green just now, and the spring flowers are bursting onto the scene, but I know that in a matter of weeks the heat will take its toll and we will be struggling to keep all but native plants alive. Gardening in Australia is very different - if you don't want it to grow it will grow like a thug! I still have to re-work my bricklaying job, along with a hundred other small projects around the place.
Simon enjoyed home-cooked stir fry this evening but had a bit of trouble manipulating the noodles, in fact he was fairly covered in noodles at one stage. "Call me noodle Si" he said.
Love Marian xx