Two 3.8-mile city rides, and only the second week in the 18 months I have commuted all five days under my own power. I haven't driven all five days very often either, but at least one day a week a lot more often than I ought, especially this winter, with my bus route canceled.
Yesterday I watered the cherry and painted the doors one thorough coat, and I think that's all I did. Plus some playing in the kitchen. Today I watered the hell out of the raspberries. Also I cleared around the olive stump, which has been overgrown with bindweed and the two other, unidentified, main weeds since I ripped out the grass around it trying for for morning glory a couple of years ago--despite the thick of pine needles I naively thought would suppress other growth. I raked with the fork and dug out some of the not-clovery tree roots, and then pegged landscaping cloth all around it with flagstone over it until I get more chipped bark mulch.
I did the same on three sides of the new vegetable bed, which will be crawling with water- and nutrient-hogging weeds in a day or two. I swept the walk, out of which I cannot keep sand and weeds especially with the low spot right near the olive.
We ate off the grill at the patio table watching the birds attack the newly weeded old vegetable garden. One cock house sparrow took a dirt bath while another tugged out baby spinach leaves, the little fucker. Others feasted on the bugs in the newly turned soil. A flicker turned up after scoping the area more carefully than the sparrows and finches had. It went after bugs (I hope), flicking bits it didn't want to either side, for all the world like Blake eating his buddy chow, disdainfully flinging green beans.
Meanwhile, Blake himself was devouring enormous amounts of spinach. We had a pile for our burgers and he ate his way steadily through all of it, shredding it merrily while managing to get quite a bit down his gullet. We watched his wing muscles bulge out just moments later.