possibly fed up with spoiling us rotten, my father in law decided today to put me to work in the garden while my husband was, conveniently, out running a four-hour errand.

so for the first time in my life, i drove a motorized lawnmower... one of those massive and cumbersome machines you see on telly. it makes these aweful bone-breaking sounds everytime it hits a twig or a terrified escargot, and shoots miniscule pieces of grass and snail bits at you. the funny thing is i tried to recall any one time i saw a lawn being mowed in singapore but i couldn't think of ever having seen it done there before, so i wasn't quite sure how to do it stylishly.

anyway, now that i know first-hand how to operate the creature, it's not much to write home about. it's hard work, no fun, and i know i don't cut a scene like jesse metcalf does, glazed toned muscles rippling in the morning dew... cut grass spiralling away in slow-mo... the rose of exertion in the cheeks... which might be a good thing since i'm built, er, differently. but i digress.

unfortunately, i didn't cut the grass so well, so i was sent off to plant geraniums. i had to romove them from the temporary plastic pots they were bought in, and replant them in groups into rectangular thingies. and i had to use my hands because i was warned that the flowers were fragile. this meant digging my hands into last summer's soil already in the rectangular thingies and removing the weeds that had grown underneath in the past year, and then making little soil holes to put the geraniums in, and then covering it up with newly purchased moist fertiliser the colour of my poochie's ka-ka. yummy, said the geraniums. i had latex gloves, but they were too big, so soil kept falling into the interior and getting roti-prataed against my hands and collecting between my nails.

before the afternoon's toil, at the start of a day that held no warning of a gardening theme, my hubby and i managed to sneak a half-hour's visit to the Cardinal Richelieu's massive castle grounds. Richelieu is the meanie from Louis XIII's reign back in the 1600s, whose legacy inspired Alexander Dumas' Three Musketeers. Much of his chateau has been destroyed and what remains has been preserved as a national park. A great park it was, complete with gorgeous lakes and big old trees lining walkways and such. we fell in love with it but in the rush, we couldn't find out how and when it was destroyed.

the internet this evening provided the answer. the estate suffered a more tragic fate than a war or revolution. merchants had tore down the buildings and structures on the grounds in the mid 1800s and sold off the estate, brick by brick. what stands today are a fraction of the extravagance of the area. the site is now owned and protected by the Sorbonne in a move to ensure that what's left is preserved. (Richelieu and the Sorbonne go way back.)

Apparently, selected professors are permitted to spend their summer on the grounds and in one of the villas still standing. imagine... having the access to the massive garden and its lakes... having the history of one of the most formidable prime ministers in france surround you... taking evening walks beneath trees ripening with flowers, waking up to fresh, crisp air and having breakfast in the middle of an eden, dinners at a long rennaisance-style table in a mirrored room of sky-high ceilings...

"and here you are planting geraniums," laughed my father-in-law.

wah lao eh.