Would you just look at that tulip! I've never seen anything like it - it looks like the edges have been dipped in iron filings. I love it. 

I've been thinking about flowers this week, although I don't have any other pictures to show you. I've spent a bit of time pottering in the garden, preparing it for when we sell the house. I'm slowly removing things that are high maintenance (looking at you, willow hedge) and plonking in all manner of pretty flowers for a riotous display - all the time wondering why I didn't do this before. 

Like this little trip out yesterday to one of my favourite cafes. I don't get out here very often as it's not that close, but I have a friend who is often there, so I occasionally pop out to meet him. It's in an old flour mill, and you can sit and watch the little river idling past while you drink your tea. 

Tomorrow I'm meeting another friend in another cafe, and then another day of plastering before the half marathon. 

That's how things are round here right now. Plaster, tea, run, repeat. Not a bad life. 

I bet you didn't know triathlon had a fourth discipline, did you? That discipline comes before all the others, and is called organisation-and-admin, and it's by far the most complicated. Stick this here, put that there, read these instructions, follow those signs, don't do this before 10am, but make sure you've done those three things before quarter past. 

It's amazing that anyone makes it to the start line really. 

However, we did indeed make it to the start, and we also made it to the end without being disqualified for some minor infraction of the rules. The sun shone for a while - long enough to get a photograph of me demonstrating my perfect head-out-of-the-water breaststroke technique. 

I'm stupidly proud of this photograph, as ridiculous as I look in my pink child's goggles and my bright pink hat. I've never been a swimmer - I hated being in the water as a child and have not been much better as an adult. After I signed up for my first triathlon I had to have swimming lessons because I could barely make it from one end of the pool to the other - literally. 

So the very fact that I can now get into a pool and know I'll reach the other end is really rather incredible. And if you look, I'm actually smiling in this photograph. Me - smiling in a swimming pool. Unheard of. 

The sunshine didn't last, and by the time I got off my bike the heavens had opened and we ran through a torrential downpour. 

Needless to say, my sister beat me in every discipline except the transitions (oh, and organisation-and-administration of course) but since it was her first one, I'll let her off. She too was a non-swimmer, and hasn't really done much cycling either. We were both ridiculously pleased with ourselves. 

Today I'm tired. Not only because of the triathlon, but because the thing-I've-been-doing-at-work, the new thing I've not done before, which has devoured my last six weeks, has come to an end. And now it looks like I have seven whole days off. 

I'm planning some plastering of course (more on this later), and there's the small matter of a half marathon on Sunday. Not entirely sure whose idea that was... 

Well, it seems we are sticking with Weebly (for now, at least). I've had several helpful suggestions, so thank you to all who made them, and to you lovely people who said you'd follow if I moved (again). Hopefully that won't be necessary, I do like it here!

The problem, of course, is of my own making. I thought Weebly had unlimited storage, and so never bothered to resize any of my photographs before putting them up here. I'm sure I didn't invent the unlimited storage - I wonder whether they've changed their minds, or whether I just read the wrong information on another website? No matter - it is what it is. I have several options it seems: (a) stump up for extra storage, (b) host my photos externally and provide a link to them here (thanks to Karen for that suggestion!) or (c) go back and resize all my photographs. 

For now, I've resized the pictures on the last few posts, and that seems to have bought us some time. I'm not sure how much time, as there doesn't seem to be any way of finding out how much storage you have left,  until you come right up against the limit. Still, it's good enough for now, and maybe if I resize one post for every new post I write, I might stay ahead of myself.

Anyway, enough of this technological nonsense. Today we've abandoned the DIY (again) and been out to the peak district for lunch. We are SO lucky having a national park right on the doorstep. Although I confess today felt more like a national traffic jam at some points. 

Today we went to Matlock, which is a cheery little market town around 22 miles from here, and which we don't visit as often as we should. It's full of antique shops, and the park has a sweet little boating lake with ducks paddling round in circles with the boats, which seems to delight the children (and me) no end. 

We walked along the valley to Matlock Bath, which is the closest we get to 'seaside' around here. It's not seaside, of course. It's a string of shops and houses nestled in the bottom of a steep wooded valley. It was famous as a spa town in the nineteenth century, and is now full of cafes, fish and chip shops and an amusement arcade. But it does have a distinct 'seaside' air, quite different to anywhere else in the peak district. Last time we were there, we counted 26 large fibreglass ice creams. There are shops selling postcards and novelty t shirts and fried doughnuts. And there are motorbikes, hundreds of motorbikes, and people in leather trousers even on this warm spring afternoon. I have no idea why Matlock Bath is so popular with motorcyclists, but it is. In fact, it seems there was even a mass protest there earlier this year against council plans to charge motorcyclists for parking. 

We ate the world's largest scone, and for once I barely took any photographs. 

Back home, this is what we're faced with. It might look like chaos, but it's actually evidence of Much Work and Planning. The bathroom cladding is done now, and I've plastered another wall this weekend. Slowly, we're getting there. 

In the meantime, we strip back the layers of this old house and occasionally uncover a gem. This, for example, is what we found when we removed the bathroom radiator. 

I'm quite taken with it, although I can't imagine having all of my bathroom papered in such enthusiastically-patterned wallpaper. 

Oh, it is so very cheerful to be back here again! 

It was my birthday this week, and I'm now closer to forty than thirty. 

As birthdays go, it was pretty uneventful. For the first time in goodness knows how long, I was at work. I didn't work very hard, mind you, but there were several meetings I didn't want to miss. We went out in the evening, and again the next evening, and again the evening after that. I'm tired now. 

Now I'm distracted, because Weebly has just informed me that I have hit my limit for posting photographs on this site. I'm surprised - one of the reasons I chose Weebly was because I thought there was unlimited storage. Clearly I misread - turns out you can have unlimited pages, but storage of photographs is limited to 500MB, which it looks like I have reached after just over a year. 

I confess I don't know what to do now. I'm reluctant to pay Weebly £60 a year to upgrade. I've switched blogging platforms twice already, which something tells me is unwise, but really - why? As long as there's a trail from one to the next, does it really matter, for a quiet little blog like this without millions of followers? Do I go back to Wordpress, with a new name? Register my own domain? Would that give me any more storage? Right now I feel baffled by the whole thing and unable to make a decision. 

And now I do sound old.