Sunday 17 May - Random Witterings from Home #16

In a parallel world, where our year proceeded as originally planned, we would have been in Scotland at the moment*. Specifically, we would be at the end of our tenth day of sitting in the Kinnaird Room in the Park Hotel, Montrose, manning Challenge Control as 350-ish people walked across Scotland as part of the TGO Challenge. That said, we would have nipped away from Montrose this weekend and zipped up to Elgin to attend the annual RAF CXX Squadron dinner.

Same dinner, same hotel, two years ago

In the real world we are, of course, still at home, at the end of a week that positively flew by. I’ve been out precisely 10 times this week (7 runs; 2 walks; 1 shopping trip) but even with all of the rest of the time being spent at home there just aren’t enough hours in the day! The daily crossword habit has been neglected, for two consecutive days my knitting went untouched and although I keep recording things on TV to watch, they’re mainly piling up.

I’ve not got much to report for all the activity that’s been going on (Mick’s doing some work; I’m doing some reviewing of that work), but here are the bits for which I have illustrations:

Are you fed up of seeing cake photos yet? I probably need to ease up on my cake consumption (in my defence, I don’t know what’s going on with carrots at the moment, but they’re going off far faster than I’ve ever experienced before, so I had no choice but to make more carrot cakes).

This week’s loaf of bread didn’t come out well. Not sure what went wrong, but it still tasted fine:

This is not representative of what our bread machine usually produces! 

My proudest make of the week was a TGO Challenge themed face mask, as prettily modelled by Mick in this trio of photos:

There’s a virtual-TGO Challenge in progress on line; the maps are part of virtual-Challenge Control (Southern Division)

Otherwise there has been more cleaning out of cupboards (an activity that went by the wayside a few weeks back but I’ve started attacking again this week; I do have photos of this activity but am too ashamed of the mess to share them!), and a small amount of gardening. The courgettes in the garden are now all officially dead, but the ones indoors are growing well and hopefully it’s now warm enough for them to thrive when I plant them out next week. Meanwhile the runner beans and the potatoes are all looking good and there’s a reasonable crop (considering the small size of the bush) of gooseberries just begging to become a crumble in due course.

 

^{(*Had we, for some unfathomable reason, decided to stay in Spain and not even come home in April when we were due to, then we would have got all excited a week or so ago when it was announced that Spain was moving into Phase 1 of their lockdown, with businesses, including bars and restaurants (subject to certain restrictions) being allowed to reopen. Then it was announced that not every region was moving into Phase 1. The region we were in at the point we decided to come home (Castellon) is one of those that is being kept in Phase 0. Whilst the State of Alarm has been extended, permanent residents of other EU countries (which for the time being can be read as including the UK) are still permitted to transit across the country in order to return home.)}