The Pitfalls of Going on Holiday

We had a fantastic time on our holiday back to Japan for 10 days to introduce Boudi to all of his Japanese relatives and heaps of our friends. While we were away I asked my Mum to feed my fish, pick up our mail and to water the veggies.

BEFORE

The fish survived although my external pump blew out but miraculously re-sealing itself and thus avoiding pumping the tank dry and flooding the apartment. This was not fault of my Mum’s however as I’d neglected to clean the filter before we departed. The filter ended up being a right-off and I had to make a frantic purchase on Ebay to get everything going again.

No problems with the mail and not too many bills to come home to which was nice.

Now on to my poor old ‘veggie patch’. As a disclaimer I should note that my Mum has ‘black thumbs’, a point I’ve known for a long time. About the only plants that she’s able to avoid killing are the type that you stick in vessels of water (lucky bamboo and the like). I think I set the fear into her when I suggested that my tomatoes were incredibly thirsty plants requiring lots of water every day.

We returned home and I found half the veggie patch a sickly yellow colour with puffs of mould here and there and what wasn’t yellow looked like Swiss cheese. A bunch of aphids and a tribe of caterpillars had moved in and made short work of anything that wasn’t yellow and / or mouldy. I salvaged what I could and junked the rest.

AFTER

It actually turned out not to be a bad thing in the end as it forced me to give the balcony tiles a really good scrubbing which was just as well because we had our 6 month unit inspection the following week.

Mum always taught me to look for the positives in any negative situation.