In other news...
The weather's all over the place. There were a number of extremely hot (for here, anyway) days leading up to Wednesday last week. There were thunderstorms around, and on Tuesday evening last week we watched a distant one flashing away merrily for an hour or more. The lightning maps showed that it was seventy miles or so to our north, somewhere over Shropshire, but with not much cloud between us and it, it was quite a spectacle. Then, between about 6pm and 7pm on Wednesday evening a thunderstorm came much closer to us, the wind got up, and the temperature dropped 15 degrees. There were some whirlwinds over in Gloucester that ripped tiles off roofs and caused some damage, but we didn't get any rain until later in the evening when another storm came over. Since then it's been much cooler and damper. We've had a bit of rain (about 20mm all told) that's mostly arrived in short heavy showers, and there have been nights we've spent more or less in the clouds, with the humidity against the top stop.
Some gardening has been done, rather more by A than by me, though I am making slow progress with the long steps bewteen the two new levels. The rain makes that a bit trickier, as the soil turns to mud underfoot, and then things get slippery. The steps are being held by green oak sleepers, and I have a couple more (or maybe three more) to place, and then There's some work to make the edges a bit prettier that will involve getting some stone and building a wall of sorts.
During the really hot weather Miezekatze was finding cool bare earth under the densest shrubs to sleep on through the heat of the day. In slightly cooler (and potentially wetter) weather she prefers this spot in the greenhouse. We have to check before we water anything in there, or she gets a rude awakening.
With the building and gardening work going on, I've had my radio mast lowered for the last couple of weeks, and not done much radio, but I've not completely forgotten it. I usually get to join at least one club zoom/webex meeting each week, and I've been catching the weekly morse practice broadcasts on Thursday mornings regularly. I even managed a perfect score on one of them a couple of weeks ago. I've also figured out how to record the Monday evening ones so that I can attempt them at times that make more sense to me.
There's been rather less music in our lives though. While we've tried to keep NMC rehearsals running via zoom, that's proved rather less than satisfactory. It works well enough as a way of sharing single-household performances in circles and such, but for a choir it's a struggle. We have caught bits of some of the zoom circles that happen from time to time, when times match with practicality and the other things we're trying to do. We have also picked up some of the recordings folk have been making and releasing during lockdown. With some we've even managed to get them on Bandcamp Fridays.
At some point I'll try to get round to filling in the eight-month gap in entries that started with the election last year...
Some gardening has been done, rather more by A than by me, though I am making slow progress with the long steps bewteen the two new levels. The rain makes that a bit trickier, as the soil turns to mud underfoot, and then things get slippery. The steps are being held by green oak sleepers, and I have a couple more (or maybe three more) to place, and then There's some work to make the edges a bit prettier that will involve getting some stone and building a wall of sorts.
During the really hot weather Miezekatze was finding cool bare earth under the densest shrubs to sleep on through the heat of the day. In slightly cooler (and potentially wetter) weather she prefers this spot in the greenhouse. We have to check before we water anything in there, or she gets a rude awakening.
With the building and gardening work going on, I've had my radio mast lowered for the last couple of weeks, and not done much radio, but I've not completely forgotten it. I usually get to join at least one club zoom/webex meeting each week, and I've been catching the weekly morse practice broadcasts on Thursday mornings regularly. I even managed a perfect score on one of them a couple of weeks ago. I've also figured out how to record the Monday evening ones so that I can attempt them at times that make more sense to me.
There's been rather less music in our lives though. While we've tried to keep NMC rehearsals running via zoom, that's proved rather less than satisfactory. It works well enough as a way of sharing single-household performances in circles and such, but for a choir it's a struggle. We have caught bits of some of the zoom circles that happen from time to time, when times match with practicality and the other things we're trying to do. We have also picked up some of the recordings folk have been making and releasing during lockdown. With some we've even managed to get them on Bandcamp Fridays.
At some point I'll try to get round to filling in the eight-month gap in entries that started with the election last year...