Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Two days into Stage One water restrictions, and I looked out of the window to see the guy over the road washing his car. Admittedly, the restrictions don't actually forbid you to wash your car.  They limit you to using a hand-held bucket (does it count if you put it down on the driveway?) or hand-held hose "for quick rinses".  But they are pretty much "if you don't mind" rules at this stage anyway, with holes large enough to lose whole buckets of water through (hand-held or otherwise).  For example, we are now limited to watering our lawn twice a week, but this only applies to sprinkler systems.  You can still use a hose as much as you like, presumably on the assumption that you will get bored of standing there holding it very quickly.  And besides, everything you read about good watering technique says it's better to water thoroughly just once a week.  Our garden would think Christmas had come early if it got watered every three days! So hopefully

Nor for those who have an irrational fear of snakes, or for that matter an irrational love of cute little bunny rabbits.  But for those who are intrigued by the natural world and don't get too freaked out by the ickier bits of it, this was our David Attenborough moment. John and Kristal's dog Boudin spotted it first, and went bounding up before the rest of us had a chance to register any more than some kind of mound on the path.  It was so interesting he resisted all Kristal's attempts to call him away for a while.  Even though she quickly identified it as a non-poisonous black snake, and besides, its mouth was far too full of rabbit to bite anything else, we were glad when he was safely to heel. We stood and watched for a few minutes.  The rabbit was clearly dead; whether the snake killed it or just found it, we don't know.  It was eating in a leisurely fashion, which I suppose is fair enough when your dinner is actually wider than your body.  Every few momen

Funnily enough, it was the trees that we really noticed this time.  Spreading oaks three times higher than the houses huddling beneath them.  Fat roots wriggling beneath the brick pavements.  And on the highways, you barely got out of town before the road became a channel between two walls of green leaves.  In Texas they have fast food joints and billboards along the interstates.  In Virginia, they have trees. Richmond is a nicely-situated city; if you go south-east you get to the Atlantic Ocean, if you head north-west you reach the Blue Ridge Mountains.  We did both. Family photo on Sandbridge beach Graham and Toby at the Shenandoah Pass lookout point John and Kristal took a day off work so they could accompany us to Sandbridge, where we set up camp underneath a big green umbrella and tried to stop Toby from eating sand.  He was quite a fan of the beach (great texture!) but the sea was far too cold and unpredictable.  One minute it's round your toes and the next it