Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
Scuba Diving The main reason for the trip away at the weekend was for Morgan to do the confined water parts of his PADI Open Water Diver qualification. We had been trying to do this for a while, but coronavirus, GCSE exams and a heart attack all got in the way of our plans. Trips...
I let my aquarium slip a little after my heart attack. I wasn’t really up to maintaining it as lugging heavy buckets of water around was out of the question. It did OK as it is quite self-sufficient, but it did suddenly get a little overwhelmed with algae after a while. Balanced Ecosystem The tank...
Hector and Harriet our robot lawn mowers have been busy since Spring. They head out several time a day whatever the weather to mow the lawns. They’ve done well, and have kept them looking constantly neat and trim. We decided over the weekend that it was time for them to have a rest and to...
The bees have had their usual ups and downs this years. Things started well but we then lost a couple of swarms while I was in hospital. I did manage to split a colony though and caught an errant swarm too. We now have four colonies all of which are (we think) queen-right. The smallest...
Temperatures were in the high 20’s at the weekend. Skies were blue and breezes were light. I’m not permitted to do much at the moment so other than the odd walk much of the weekend was spent chilling in the garden. There are lots of candy floss colours around the garden at the moment. The...
I probably can’t really blame this on my recent heart attack but I may as well. Having been out of action for a few weeks I haven’t been able to inspect the bees properly. Typically this was during peak swarm season and sure enough the bees made the most of it. I did manage to...
Having worked additional hours on Wednesday and Thursday I’d hope to finish early on Friday thereby stretching out the weekend a little. As is often the case things cropped up at work and I ended up staying there until later than usual anyway. So much for my plans! Not to worry though we still managed...
My plan for Saturday included some apiary updates. Things here tend to rot really quickly so some hive hardware needed replacing. We’ve been gradually replacing our plywood and pine hives with cedar ones which do tend to last a bit longer. I had a new flat-packed hive ready to build and today was the day....
With a nice spell of sunshine this afternoon I thought it was time for a garden update. It’s looking nice out there and going through its annual purple phase at the moment. Bluebells, Aquilegias, Geraniums, Forget-me-Knots and a few other things have replaced the yellows of early Spring with a selections of blues and purples....
Thought I should share a nice photo of the sunrise over Ynyslas. Looking East towards the rising sun with the beach behind me. As you can see, it’s not a terrible place to live, even if this was the last bit of sun we saw for a while! It’s been raining pretty much the whole...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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