A little of the necessary indoor tidying (mostly involving paperwork) has been done, but there's a lot more to do.

My project in the garden hasn't made quite as much progress as I'd hoped, either. The weather's been a bit against it. There's been enough rain to turn the sub-soil where I've exposed it into sticky mud. The concrete foundations I'd put ( Read more... )

This week's been a bit of a "run out of steam" week. The wet weather hasn't helped. It rained for most of the day on Wednesday, again all day on Friday, and the forecast for today includes an amber warning for rain. Tomorrow's forecast is only slightly better, so it looks like I won't get much done outside before next week.

On Tuesday morning we ( Read more... )

Last Wednesday we went to join a small group on an outdoor outing to visit three productive gardens over in Stroud. The first was a herb garden, and was pretty wild as, by this time of the year, many of the plants are going to seed. The second was a small co-operative vegetable-growing enterprise with several poly-tunnels and a fair bit more of ( Read more... )

I put my HF hexbeam antenna up to full height for the weekend because it promised to be a busier than usual SOTA day on Saturday. While the main aim of a lot of the activators was to contact one another, there was plenty of space for the usual chasing and I made ten contacts (and missed making a few more). Most interesting for me were a couple of ( Read more... )

The last ten days or so have, apart from the business with builders, run pretty much as is now normal in these strange times. We're spending a lot of time at home. The only outings we get are shopping trips, and usually only one of us does those unless a bit of a drive is called for.

Last Saturday was a bit of an exception. We had a large item to ( Read more... )

The weather's had a bit to say about what happened in the last week.

On Tuesday I started a fairly major bit of antenna timkering which involved moving the box with the co-ax relay for switching antennas in it from the side of the house up to the mast with the hexbeam on it. The object of the exercise was to get the long-wire antenna I use for the ( Read more... )

In other news, mostly we've been getting on with garden projects. I did some work to raise the water level in the pond just a little. The aim is to get the level as even as possible, so that as little of the liner as possible shows above the water line when the pond is full, and that the pond overflows at one controlled point. The catch is that the ( Read more... )

Storm Ellen was broad enough that we caught the edge of it. About 20mm of rain fell during the morning and early afternoon last Wednesday. Thursday was a better day, but on Friday there were several short but heavy showers that dumped, in all, about another 20mm on us. Even so, we've done a bit of work in the garden, though some projects I'd like ( Read more... )

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... )

I normally try to get to the polls fairly early in the day, but this morning it was raining hard. The rain finally stopped at about 2pm, so I wandered down to do my civic duty and then a bit of grocery shopping. The back path I took on the way home wasn't quite a stream, but it was trying hard to become one ( Read more... )