Dumpy

What do you mean, "dumpy"? We can't all be Charlize Theron.

At the beginning of the week we had a five yard skip delivered, with a view to clearing a quarter century's accumulated rubbish out of the garage, and I began randomly chucking a few things in it. Then yesterday I went out and bought a tractor mower, as you do, and the need to make enough space in the garage to park it became pressing. So today R and I set to, and filled the skip. Because of the state of R's back it would be fair to say that I did most of the work, but without his engineering expertise I wouldn't have been able to dismantle my ancient and effectively useless rowing machine and exercise bike, and we'd have missed out on the extreme satisfaction and smugness we both experienced as I levered the beastly things over the edge and into the void. 

The Offspring are both popping home for a visit at the end of the week, and I've been threatening to put them on skip-filling duties, but as the skip is already full I'll now have to think of something else for them to do. Building some garden furniture, perhaps, or maybe a little light roofing. I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Even after R and I finished work at lunch time, I could hardly tear myself away from admiring the immaculately filled skip and the immaculately emptied garage. But then I remembered that I had a couple of urgent errands to run, and I hadn't yet taken any photos, so I grabbed the macro and scuttled off around the garden. In the space of half an hour I made some nice finds, including a male Beautiful Demoiselle (uncooperative) in the wild garden, and a Meadow Brown (uncooperative) and a Bumblebee Hoverfly (extremely uncooperative) in the secret garden. Both the butterfly and the hoverfly were first sightings of the season, as was a lovely fresh male Megachile ligniseca, who wasn't uncooperative as such, but was feeding frenziedly, and led me on an increasingly frantic dance around the geraniums. The end result of all these encounters was the same: dozens of record shots, but no really pleasing images.

This, on the other hand, made me laugh when I was taking it, and still makes me smile now. Given that it was on the same plant stem, I believe it's the same Iris Weevil (Mononychus punctumalbum) as I photographed two days ago, but today was a brighter and calmer day and I made a better job of capturing its portrait. It may not be Charlize Theron, but I think it's a bit of a babe.

R: C1, D21.