Thursday, 12th May 2011
Posted by Geoff on 12 May 2011 | Tagged as: Archery
Geoff writes: wet and windy in the morning, but the sun came out in the afternoon and we went off to do some archery. Too windy to paraglide, it dropped off a little and became hang glidable. I did go up in the evening, but it was very cold in the strong wind, and I just couldn’t be bothered. Three hang gliders did fly though, and seemed to have a nice time.
Tomorrow the North South Cup starts. It’s based at the Mynd, but for Friday the forecast is better further south and east, so they are doing the 127 mile drive to Milk Hill, in the hope of getting a decent XC day. The option here is Clatter – a good XC site, but the poor weather, the cloud, will arrive here much sooner than at Milk Hill, so they’ve probably made the right decision. RASP is giving it very thermic there, but then our experience of RASP forecasting of thermal strength for this area at least, this year, has been very bad, with it usually wildly over estimating the thermal activity.
Geoff writes: a windy, but sunny day. Amazingly, Graeme flew his PG early on, well done to him! Dave T also flew later, and got reasonably high under a threatening sky – and the wind picked up massively in our garden just after he landed. The sun came out a bit later, but the wind also picked up more. Most of the day was devoted to more gardening (such is our life when it’s not flyable!), but we were hoping to fly and/or do archery later. So around 6 or so, we started to load up the car with everything – archery equipment, PG and HG stuff. Getting to the top of the 
Geoff writes: a dry but windy day, so we did some work. To be honest, a few days working is fine, we have loads to do. Judith spent much of the day preparing for the weekend – which included doing a lot of gardening. I spent all day converting some of the ebooks we publish into Kindle format. I actually started this last week, and it’s taken far longer than I expected, but hopefully it’ll be worth it, and combining it with redoing our online shop, it might generate some income for us.
Another howling day. It didn’t really matter with it pouring from 10.30am. Work, work, work and then we went to Bishop’s Castle in the evening to have a karate lesson at the local sports centre. I picked up a leaflet for it a few weeks ago and I’ve always wanted to give it a go. I did judo as a child, but this was competely different and I really enjoyed it. We’re off for our second lesson on Thursday. 
We had a late night late night and needed the extra few hours sleep, but had John coming round at 10am, so we reluctantly got up and saw to some DIY. We’re a bit listless at the moment. I’m not exactly inspired to do any work (although I have some) and the weather is putting a bit of a downer on the week, so I decided to cheer myself up with a bonfire. I managed to get nearly all the garden rubbish burned when the heavens opened and I had to try to keep the already dry stuff out of the rain. Getting the remainder burned turned into a bit of a game… 
The windy, showery weather continues. It was even to windy to go to archery. More jobs, bit of gardening, etc. And in the evening, nice dinner and drinks with Ken and Jayne.
Another windy day with occasional showers forecast. These didn’t materialise until the evening, and if we hadn’t been working, Geoff could probably have had a hang gliding flight. Instead we had work meetings. It’s at this time of year when we sit down and map out the work year, planning times and dates of conferences and looking at what other work committments we want to undertake. By 3.30pm, we’d had enough of meetings and went outside into the sunshine to do some gardening, including finding a suitable tree limb for the groovy hammock chair my parents gave us a few years ago for Christmas.