Late hellebores

We've had hellebore flowers on the balcony continuously since November. We bought a couple of relatively expensive plants from Crocus, but then I saw a really cheap tray of them in Lidl in mid November. These ones flowered early, from November onwards through March, and then since March the more expensive and unusual ones have started to give a show and are still going strong. It seems our balcony is a good environment for hellebores.

Today I succumbed to getting a bit more stuff for the balcony...first of all we saw a really nice pyramid fuchsia in the supermarket, so we had to have it.... and then, since we needed something to pot it out into, and we have a euphorbia that I came home with a few weeks ago that also needs repotting, we went to the garden centre and....came back with the two pots that were needed, plus three herbs and a new herb trough. At least we didn't need more compost. Plenty of that in the cupboard. It all got potted out in the late morning, and a few other things were moved around or moved on.

I spent most of the afternoon marking and doing a vicious peloton workout, then made some dinner (an excellent adapted sausage meat pasta from Jamie Oliver), and then marked all evening. At least that's basically done, and as with the first episode of assessment for that course, reading the essays was an absolute pleasure and very intellectually stimulating.

I look forward to when I can have (most of) my weekends back and can reducing my working hours to something more reasonable for a woman of 60 (when all around me are retiring....). I'm posting this on Sunday morning at 9.30am having spent two hours already on my chair doing "stuff", and still feeling like I am nowhere near caught up.