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Sunday, 31 May 2009

An absence of wind......

... no not my digestive system (well that too), but I'm referring to the glorious weather today. This morning I sat outside in the sunshine and it was too HOT! No breeze at all. Thankfully a breeze picked up in the afternoon making life more pleasant for working outdoors. Which is just as well as the island has been busy today. (Photo from South side of Graemsay looking towards Moaness and the Hoy Hills).

Farmers are sowing seed in the fields and moving livestock around. The kids next-door spent most of the day on the beach. I've been pottering in the garden again. Plus some more work has been done with the digger in the garden.


Button enjoyed the lazy sunny day today too, and the hens enjoyed a doze in the sun.

The air was filled with bird song, plus the drone of various water craft from Stromness harbour. Several yachts were out in the bay, the Lifeboat seemed to be doing extended exercises, a couple of jet-skis were around as well as a speed boat or two. Because of sea temperatures, tides, wind etc it tends to be the fairly hardy who take to "watersports" in Orkney, so the area doesn't get as busy as some shores in the South of England where jet-skis and speed boats buzz around from dawn to dusk.

So I've enjoyed a lazy Sunday watching everyone else doing some work. Well two days really as yesterday I watched Mick mow the grass around Sandside. His ride-on mower is broken so he has been using my "walk-behind" one - well he said he wanted to lose some weight....

3 comments:

  1. Strange, isn't it, that as soon as the wind drops and the sun comes out, the insects appear. The Skin So Soft has been liberally applied in Westray.

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  2. I think using a digger to do the garden is a bit over the top,but much quicker than a spade. Glad the sun has been shinning.

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  3. Malc - Do you have midges yet? Various flying insects on Graemsay but no midges. They seem to appear enmass about August. It is amazing how insects appear after a gale even - I wonder where they hide - you'd think they'd all be blown away by now!

    Walrus: LOL! The garden had been used as a silage pit in the distant past so there were big indentations in inconvenient places and when the digger was filling these up with earth from higher parts of the garden to level out it was also digging up corrugated metal which had also been used for the silage pit but got buried. So in the end the digger has had to trawl through most of the garden. Even when I was digging the veg patch the traditional way (with a spade!) I was pulling up rubbish and finding huge paving slabs from old paths just a few inches beneath the soil which had to be pulled up by the JCB. Once the garden is levelled it can be rotavated and will then be left for a year to settle. Bit of a bigger job than anticipated, isn't that always the way. Sigh.

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