More rocks, and a lost dog

Friday:

I feel completely better today, yay! But Jasmine is still home sick, not yay. However, by late afternoon she seemed a lot better so yay.

I was heading home from the grocery shopping this morning, only a few doors away from my house, and there was a dog sniffing around on the road. A little black and white spaniel that I hadn't seen around here before. It showed no inclination to move. I stopped, it didn't budge. I rolled the car a bit closer. The dog looked up at me through the windshield and wagged its tail hopefully. I honked. It stood there staring at me. I live in a narrow street and when there are cars parked on both sides, as there was here, there is no room to go around. If you meet a car going the other way, one of you has to find space to pull over to the side to let the other pass. Even a little dog was a formidable barrier. And I was pretty sure the poor thing was lost. I was going to get out of the car but then a man came over from a nearby house and called the dog which ran to him. It obviously wasn't the man's dog, we shrugged at each other and I drove on. But then I felt guilty. I'd just handed responsibility for this lost dog over to someone else. But I had groceries to get into the fridge and a sick child at home, and I had a car sitting in the middle of the road. I hope the dog was wearing a collar with a tag, or at least microchipped (which is compulsory in Australia) and it wasn't too much hassle for the man.

In the afternoon I got stuck into some heavy gardening work. I'd already mostly weeded the area beside the house that I am going to use as a vegetable patch, it used to have plants in it but after various heavy machinery drove over it (and over, and over, and over) to get to the backyard we were left with a heavily-compacted wasteland with a few weeds. Oh, and lots of rocks, just like everywhere else on this property. Today I picked up another bucket-full of rocks, then spread out several bags of manure and compost and dug it in and raked it out ready for planting tomorrow. It looks quite nice (smells a bit manurey though, as Aiden pointed out, and so did I until I had a shower) but the problem is when I was digging I kept hitting rock only a few centimetres down. Big rocks, like maybe attached to the earth's crust. There is not enough soil over the rock, in about a third of the whole bed, to really sustain anything. I'll get Tim to have a dig tomorrow, he may be able to pull out a few boulders. Otherwise I'll be planting around those areas, maybe putting pots on top!

I was totally exhausted after an hour and a half, had a shower and fell asleep in my chair. But I feel like I actually got some exercise today, first time this week.