It’s still hard to keep my eyes open. Each time I sit down, they close and I start drifting away. The same is happening to Pádraig. It’ll take a while to get over those four weeks at bootcamp and that epic journey back home!

In case you’re not living in Ireland: we are having our summer! It is warm, bright, and calm. No wind whatsoever. A perfect garden day!

What one of Pádraig’s friends set up a couple of years ago as a sensory garden is taking shape. It’s the first year that the plants are covering the ground. It’s looking really great and the smell is fantastic! Even the ‘water features’, simple granite slabs, are beautiful, producing that calming sound of water flowing down a stream.

Pádraig had a visitor this afternoon, a good old friend. We did the German thing and had Kaffeetrinken mit Kuchen. It was so nice and so quiet you could have thought we were in the middle of the country.  Sadly, that friend who came over to visit is in hospital for some tests and checkups and had to go back there early in the evening. Even thinking about hospitals and listening to what is happening to our friend is making me feel terrible. People are trying to do their best (well, most of them:), but working in a large organisation, in an institution, requires you to adapt to how that institution works. There is no room for individuality, for individual preferences, requests, wishes or ways of being.

The only choice is: custard or jelly for desert.

Neither of them terribly exciting.