Wild weather

It's a wee bit windy at the moment. Friday night in particular was - er - interesting. We shut the curtains so we couldn't see the windows moving (it's quite an unnerving experience sitting in the house watching the glass bend) - but we could feel the house vibrating and we could certainly hear the wind. Amazingly we seem to have no damage - we haven't even lost any trees (maybe because we lost several last winter...). We had to hose down the windows though as we couldn't see out of them due to a combination of the salt and all the grass, etc. stuck on them. One of our neighbours described his car on Saturday as "furry" and that's a pretty good description of our windows too.

The wind also affected the TV signal - although amazingly we didn't get any power cuts at the height of the storm (we had torches and candles at the ready just in case). We had a power cut this morning though! Anyway - the TV signal vanished for a lot of Freeview channels on Friday evening about half ten - we still had BBC1 & BBC 2 on terrestrial but not a lot else and we haven't got most of the others back yet. There's some strange anomalies though - we can't get E4 - but we can get E4+1 - I can't understand this one! Oh well, I've lived without a TV for the past 4 months, so I'm not really that bothered about not getting some channels at present.

There's plenty of good local entertainment on anyway - much better than anything on TV. We went to the Deerness Drama's production of Oliver! yesterday - it was really excellent. Amazing how such a small community group can keep putting on productions of this standard (about 4 years ago they did the best pantomime I have ever been to - Cinderealla - complete with 4 ugly sisters). Instead of just using the usual stage set-up they had a 'runway' coming right out into the middle of the room and they used the entire room as the stage at some points - it was a really great show. Such a lot of talented people!

And we were at the 60th Anniversary bash for the Orkney Sprathspey & Reel Society on Thursday evening. Lots of great music - and an amazing cake, complete with edible music!

Drama

Well I not only survived the Drama workshop today, but I actually enjoyed it!!! We did some nursery rhymes complete with actions - 1 2 3 4 5 once I caught a fish alive.... Twinkle twinkle ...(fine motor skills) and Humpty Dumpty (gross motor skills) then mime of Old MacDonald getting dressed and winter theme (our group did mime of making a snowman which also involved counting - one nose, two eyes, three buttons, etc). Then we had a look at movement and music and some props and did some work about the sea with the whole class working together. I'm still absolutely amazed how much I enjoyed it!!!

Anyone for tennis?

Wow - Andy Murray beat Rafael Nadal last night in the semi-final of the US Open. I don't have a TV but managed to get it live on online radio. Fantastic.

The final - against Roger Federer -is on at 10pm tonight so I'm not sure how much I'll manage to hear as I'm pretty exhausted with the course and also I have a cold so I don't feel very great. But if it gets very exciting I'm sure that'll keep me awake.

Off to walk to Uni now - this is the start of our 2 weeks of Early Years topics in the lead up to the 3 weeks nursery placement. Got a Drama workshop today which I'm a bit nervous about - and an Art workshop tomorrow which will be even worse, especially as we had to buy an A3 sketchbook so we are obviously expected to draw. Oh dear.