Happy Birthday Romas.

Happy Birthday

Romas.

It's our youngest's birthday today and I hope he's having better weather in Stoke than we're having here. He and his partner Laura (below) are in good health and are both stayed working during this horrible pandemic. (It takes something like this to clarify priorities.) This year he has been working hard on a complete remodel of his back garden.

He's also been drumming with a new band, CLKWRK and will be going on tour with them at the end of November (using holiday time from his work). I'm not sure if this will work as it's to FB but here is a link to one of their music videos. Who knew that our toddler hitting saucepans would do so well?

Today it has been wild and stormy.

I was able to go out and do some more work in the back garden in between the morning showers. Soil and stones were moved and the last coping stone has been moved over though I'm not sure if I'll keep it in that position. My main objective was to remove the final meta post and my heart sank when I saw that it was sitting in a block of concrete. However after some bashing and a couple of corners removed I realised that the whole thing was moving. That's when I discovered that the concrete had been used to secure a broken meta post and there was no need to dig out a long spike, yay.

By the afternoon the storm had arrived in full force with enornous waves blowing across the bay. I settled down to watch lifeboat rescues on tv and make a couple more tassels.

I took the photos below half an hour before high tide when the waves were reaching up to the sea wall in places. A bit worrying for the people in the houses on the beach.

Then disaster, at 3.35 the power went out. Not just for us but for the whole of the village. It came back on two hours later but it was a reminder of how our lives run on electricity here. Even though our boiler runs on oil, electricity is needed for the system to work, thank goodness for all the extra insulation in the loft and house walls which keep the heat in though we'd only had it on for a bit in the morning. Radio, kettle, cooker, tv and computers all off too. No piano though I have my guitar. Peter's phone isn't set up for internet though I can get the basics on my Kindle. I could hear that a neighbour got his generator running and I agree with Peter that it would be sensible to look into getting one which we could keep in the garage. With the weather becomming more unpredictable due to climate change we may well get more frequent and longer power cuts. Once the power came back on we switched on the heating and I made myself the coffee I was about to have when the power went out. We also made sure our Kindles were charged up and I've checked my MP3 which has radio. While the power was out we sat in the sitting room testing each other on our Welsh vocabulary.

Fingers crossed that we don't lose power while we watch Strictly tonight.