Indoors and Outdoors

This week we have been busy decorating as it seemed like a good time to do it whilst the weather was stopping us doing anything in the garden. When the house was for sale we didn't bother to re-paint as we thought whoever bought the house would want to do their own thing anyway but now we've decided to stay here for a while the paint brushes and rollers have come out. First we moved the contents of the back bedroom into the garage and decorated that room. Then we moved the contents of the front bedroom into the back and decorated there too. Now we are moving the contents of the small bedroom we use as a computer room - I hesitate to use the word study as it sounds a bit too grand for the reality - into the front bedroom so that too can be painted. Meanwhile the contents of the back bedroom are still in the garage and poor little car is out in the rain. In other words - complete chaos!

However, the sun did honour us with its presence a couple of times this week so we were able to go out and have a walk and to breath air that didn't smell of paint.

We managed a muddy walk in the woods on the Trentham estate, where we saw Jays flitting secretively through the trees and squirrels scampering up the beech trees to collect the nuts. When there were several of them in one tree the sound of the nuts falling to the floor was quite amazing.

On Thursday we optimistically set out for Cannock Chase but arrived in pouring rain and hail so parked up drank our coffee and ate our homemade scones and then moved on. We headed toward Blithfield Reservoir where we watched swifts circling and swooping over the water. My camera isn't great for capturing wildlife but I did manage to catch this image of just one of the swifts. The rain had stopped for a short while but it wasn't long before we were treated to another hail storm.

On Friday we took a walk at Dimmingsdale one of our favourite local areas to walk in, as you can see from the photo above - the sun did shine whilst we were there.

Here are some more scenes from our walk

Thank goodness the rain was very good and stayed away until we got home - oh, well it's time to return to the chaos!