Wild.

Wild and windy today as Storm Isha starts to build.

Below is part of a very useful FB post by James Davies with information about the severity of the storm when it arrives in full force tomorrow. At the moment the Met Office has upgraded the warning to amber though it may well get to red by tomorrow. I've already moved the chairs from the terrace down to the garden and jammed them in a corner and we'll take more precautions tomorrow. Should there be no post tomorrow it will be probably due to the electricity and/or the internet going down. Let's hope not.

I thought it was too early to get up at 4.00 so went back to sleep until 8.00. I'm still managing to get my head down by 11.00 at night and as a result either I wake nice and early or I get plenty of sleep. Both of those options are good.

As it was beginning to rain by the time I made some tea I sat in the kitchen doorway and did some birdwatching. First a group of blue tits arrived (or do five birds constitute a flock?) to feed on the many aphids in the hedges.

Then a dunnock who quite often comes up on the terrace for seeds, followed by a female blackbird and a bit later a male. A pair of robins have been coming down as I dug the lawn but today I only saw one when he/she? came to the terrace for seeds. A couple of seagulls sat on next-door's roof to complete my morning bird tally.

My first job of the day was to silicone all around the bathroom mirror frame. Much easier this time with a new tube of silicone. The trickiest part of the job was trying to wipe off the excess from the mirrors while keeping a neat finish. I'm glad I got that job out of the way.

My afternoon was spent sorting out storage tubs in the bedroom. That included rearranging the tubs hidden under the bed. There was already a large stack of empty tubs and by the end of the afternoon the number had grown to 21! This is the result of;  hanging clothes up, sorting out clothes and spare curtains for the charity shops and rearranging the contents of the tubs. This sort out has been spurred on by the thought of being able to order a carpet for the bedroom. That will be a luxury after bare floorboards and rugs.

The last thing to do was our Welsh language homework. This week we had to listen to a conversation on-line, answer questions and translate a few phrases. Nothing too hard and our little group is meeting on Monday so we can compare notes then. On the other hand Duo this morning was harder as the section I'm on is introducing two different ways of using the past tense. eg The apple was eaten. uses two entirely different verbs and sentence structures for North Welsh and South Welsh. Actually there are about five dialects but most courses teach either north or south. I found this example of all the variations used for sweets (UK) /candies (USA). 12 different words including candis and swits which are pronounced the same as in English. Are those examples of Wenglish, English words incorporated into the spoken language or are they the original words? Another map in the series shows six words in common usage for girl- hogan, geneth, lodes, croten, rhoce and merch. No wonder our progress is slow.