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 ( Read more... )

There's been a lot going on, mostly with our house ( Read more... )

I don't think much else got done last Thursday after the Morse practice. Friday was also a fairly quiet day. I spent a little while trying to catch SOTA activators using Morse, mostly (but not quite totally) unsuccessfully. There was no gaming in the evening, so I had a leisurely supper with my nephew when he arrived after a week of plastering and ( Read more... )

Thursday morning's Morse practice went fairly well, and a little later in the day I caught a SOTA activator on a summit in Greece, so HF conditions were definitely a bit better than they had been earlier in the week. I didn't manage any other contacts, though. I spent a bit of time in the evening listening to Silke's recording of Über die Brücke ( Read more... )

It'll come as no surprise that music sometimes gets to places other things can't reach, and there were many songs at FilkContinental that helped, one way and another. A few particularly memorable ones were ( Read more... )

Sunday morning's programme included the second half of the harmony workshop, and we managed to get the chosen piece into a reasonable performance. After lunch there was the traditional courtyard gathering for a photo, and then a short break before the afternoon sets. First up was Scott, with a hour-long concert that only needed a bit of front-of- ( Read more... )

Friday morning was relatively relaxed, apart from a bit of kit shifting. The main set-up happened on Friday afternoon, as usual. I caused a minor complication by turning the small digital stage-end box over without similarly arranging my notion of the numbering order. It took a while to find that microphones 1 to 8 were in fact numbered 8 to 1. ( Read more... )

Monday was a long busy day.

At a bit before 9am an engineer arrived to service the house alarm system, something that needs to be done every year to keep the insurance company happy. Once that was done I headed for London, meeting a friend along the way. We took the train and tube to Sloane Square, and arrived early enough to have a look around ( Read more... )

Last Friday, having worked up a few hours earlier in the week, I escaped from work at 4pm and headed for the Royal Albert Hall to meet a friend and go to the first concert of this year's BBC Proms. Public transport was working reasonably well until I tried to get to Embankment tube station. It was cordoned off. Caught a number nine bus instead. It ( Read more... )