Chilly.

Bright sunshine this morning followed by a few brief showers which later turned to hail. I've just walked home from Pilates in the local hall which unlike older traditionally built village/community halls is more of a sports hall. As we lay there doing our exercises the hail was thundering down on the roof. I had to walk home through another hail shower but at least I could use my rolled up mat to shelter my face and I'd taken Peter's heavy coat to wear. A funny thing happened half-way through Pilates, as I went to grab my band from the floor beside me I realised I'd put the strap for my mat there instead and had to jump up to get my stretchy band from my coat pocket before I could join in with the hamstring stretches.

This morning there was still a smattering of snow on the mountains but it faded away during the day. Incidentally, these first two photos were taken at the same time, just in different directions. That was a weird cloud blowing across behind the village.

It was so nice in the morning that I cycled down to the zoo. I haven't cycled for a while and it showed. I didn't even make it over the level crossing but had to get off and push the bike up the last bit each time. At the zoo I found a spot in the sun where I could weed. In the shade the weeds were too frozen into the gravel to take out but eventually enough thawed for me to weed most of one of the gravelled blocks and around a few other places. Then I had a wander round to see where I could do more and settled on clearing the gravel up by the wolf-dogs. There were hardly any weeds, just a few seedlings but the whole area was littered with small bunches of pine cones and catkins blown down in the latest storms. I must have been a buddhist monk tasked with keeping a zen garden spotless in another life as I got a great deal of satisfaction from picking off every cone, catkin and stick from that patch of gravel. I'd just finished when down came the first shower of the day. Perfect timing especially as it stopped quickly so I didn't have a wet cycle ride home.

My afternoon job was to carry on cleaning the top kitchen cupboards. As one of them contained china and glasses kept for when there are more than the two of us I gave everything a wash. It's good to know that it's all clean and ready to use when we have company. For fun I put all the fish design dishes together, three tin bowls and the rest ceramic. We've had a variety of these dishes, some with a bluer tinge to the glaze, that I've acquired going back nearly 50 years but because we used them a lot and still do eventually some got broken. I've never seen them being sold new but a quick look on-line tells me I could buy them on eBay or etsy, some at eye watering prices. We have enough but that wouldn't stop me from buying any I find in the local charity shops. When we left the farm I gave away all my blue white and yellow china and just kept the fish dishes and plain white china.