bunn | Entries tagged with swimming

Goodness, it's been almost two months! I have been reading here and I've even started the odd post, then a cat landed on my keyboard or something and...

Anyway, here I am. What shall I put in a post?

The Shop continues reasonably busy, though less so than last year: it's the first year since it started that turnover is distinctly down on the previous year. Unsurprising given everything that's happening in the world, but a bit concerning on the micro-personal level.

Here are some things I've done:
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Here's a postbox topper dragon with daffodils that I met today in Ystradgynlais.

It's been a busy couple of days: yesterday I went to art group, packed games to post, and went swimming at Freshwater East with the Bluetits (the thermometers swore the sea was at 10 degrees, and although the sun was shining, I am sure those thermometers were optimistic by at least 3 degrees: we were not blue, but we were certainly very pink when we got out)

Then today I got up early, baked some bread, took Theo to a scentwork class. He was pretty good at it though he was a bit surprised I wanted him to find such easy things over and over. Next time we get to hunt for smaller things, but he has homework: a pair of large plumbing pipes screwed to boards, that he must practice finding things in for his homework.

Then since the sun was shining I and Pp hared off in the car eastward, and drove some of the mountain roads, from Llangadog to Brynaman, to Ystradgynlais (a surprisingly busy and thriving little town: would lunch again) to Defynnog and back along narrow lanes across the mountains through Ystradfellte and home via Neath.

We drove over the Black Mountain, but it was more golden in the sun today.

My birthday, as is usual, was cold and damp. Pp had his first gout attack in over a year, poor bloke. Under the circumstances, we kept the walk short.
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On Sunday, I took Theo out on a social walk organised by a local greyhound rescue. I wouldn't normally have taken him along, since he's a Greek Harehound and very definitely not a sighthound, but Julie, who runs the course he'd been attending and also organised the walk, suggested that we give it a go.

I wasn't entirely sure how he would react to encountering a huge bunch of greyhounds and lurchers. I thought he might be a bit wary, and was prepared to hang back a bit and take it slowly.

He LOVED it. Even though it was a grey old misty day (so no photos, too mirky for that). He was all over the place wagging like mad, sniffing all the dogs (well, apart from the single Afghan, which surprised him a bit), having a little bounce with some of them. He was SUCH a happy hound.

Conclusion: Theo is a scenthound, but having been raised by a sighthound, he considers sighthounds to be His People.

I didn't take Rosie, because she can really only handle very gentle bimbles now, and also she hates other sighthounds and believes she should be the only one. And she also hates rain, and has decided she will only go out if it's sunny. So many opinions!

We seem to have cleared the last of the Shop orders before Christmas OK, and I've made some progress on a new way of tracking stock that I hope will free up some time next year! And I made a Christmas card, as usual, featuring the Pigfaced Packing Orcs.

And today I went swimming, despite the gloom and wind, in a little sheltered bay where the water wasn't *that* cold, really, a mere nine degrees of so.

If I don't manage another update this month, I wish you all well and I am still reading your posts even if I don't always manage to come up with a comment. Also, apologies to anyone who saw this when I was fighting the editor and it was doing weird stuff. I'm still not entirely used to Dreamwidth.

I went to Sandy Haven, and swam in the high tide and rain with a friend. It was so wet that by the time we had got out 'dry' was a theoretical state we knew we could not achieve. But it wasn't cold.

I got a notification that LJ at last has got tired of endlessly renewing my 'professional' package for free, and wants me to pay. Which I shall not do, so it remains to be seen how usable it will be without it. I have been mostly crossposting to LJ even now.

I just scrolled through some of the photos I have stored on LJ servers, and made myself sad. Vanished friends and family, beloved beasts and landscapes, good intentions, mean-spirited grumbles, books read, plans and hopes, things written, things drawn.

I've had that account since December 2004, through thick and thin. It's almost half a lifetime. I still can't quite bring myself to let go of it.

It rained like mad today, then cleared to an amazing pink before the sun set.

I have been doing a bit of coding, for the first time in a long while: various bits of functionality for the Shop: reporting, mostly. It's remarkable how you forget, and then pick it up again: I've gone from clumsily googling for basic functions to cheerfully writing quite long sections before I test the code actually works. I am still slowly running down most of my website work to other providers, with the aim of focussing more on the Shop.

I keep meaning to photograph some of the things I've drawn recently, then not getting around to it till the light has gone: autumn is fading in properly now, though last weekend was very warm. The temperature when I went swimming at Hazelbeach on Sunday was 17 degrees. The pontoon is still out there, though the one at Dale has already been taken in for the winter.

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Went for a brief swim from the boat yesterday - upstream, because it was windy out to sea, so photo is from the middle Cleddau, still a wide tidal river, but a good way upstream. Getting out was easy. Getting back in was hard. I had to shin up the outboard motor by standing on the... fin things in the end.

Lesson from this is that getting into a boat even when there's someone on board to pull you is really difficult (at least now I am old and fat), and we should have a ladder in case of accidental de-boating, because even standing on the outboard, I didn't really have the upper body strength to pull myself back in fully (and anyway, you might not always be in a situation where turning the engine off was a comfortable option).

We had picked a spot where we could moor to a buoy to experiment and I was pretty sure I could swim to the bank behind us if worst came to worst. Also I have this very robust inflatable bag/buoy that has a waist strap, which usually I use so I don't need to leave my wallet phone and car keys behind me on the beach, but is also generally good and visible and also gives me something to rest on if for any reason I had to swim further than expected. Yes, I am a bit hyper-careful!

Yesterday, I saw a huge black crow eating a similarly huge dead white gull. It looked very Ominous.

Today I went for a swim and didn't get stung by a jellyfish, though one of the people I was swimming with did.

Pp and I decided we didn't know enough about the history of countries in Africa, so we're doing a blitz on African history doing a quick Wikipedia read-up/ Youtube whiz through on one country a day. Yesterday was Ethiopia, today is Sudan. Tomorrow is Eritrea.

I'm not sure how much of it will stick, but hopefully the odd bit? At a minimum I hope to more accurately be able to point to places on a map!

Speaking of maps, the Shop on the Borderlands now has sold things to customers in 46 countries. We've bought a map and some flag pins so we can see where they all are.

I took Theo for a social walk at the amazingly named Wolf's Castle, where, supposedly, the last wolf in Wales was killed. It seemed a pleasant spot for a stroll and Theo managed to not shout more than a token amount, even onlead and surrounded by other on-lead dogs (he finds leads hard! He's so much happier greeting off the lead.)

Pp has been diagnosed diabetic, which has come as a bit of a shock to him, given his usual diet of white bread cheese sandwiches, chocolate and (nearly) no veg. But he has risen to the challenge and bought an under-desk cycle, for exercise. He's eating a lot of boiled eggs now,but I need to work out some more low-carb recipes.

I've been enjoying swimming with the Bluetits this summer. I am cautious about sea swimming, but the Bluetits are active enough that there's always someone that wants to swim when I do, and usually someone who has already got a convenient time planned.

So far I've mostly swum at Freshwater East, once or twice at Angle: both of them conventionally pretty sandy beaches, and at Hazelbeach, which is a shingle beach inside the Cleddau estuary. A bit weedy, but you can go straight into the water and out without getting sand all over you.

Of the swims I've done so far, the most memorable was definitely the swim at Lydstep - a month ago now, but I wanted to make a post about it and have only just got round to it. The hillsides were full of tufts of pink thrift as we made our way down the winding path and steps to a steep cleft in the rocks.
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Current Mood: cheerful

This year my Mum announced firmly that she would really prefer to spend Christmas at home with her cat Pudding and no other company, so after we had popped down to visit for a couple of days beforehand then came back to Wales. It was very nice and relaxing and the quick visit to Devon was handy for going to the Cheese Shop in Tavistock to buy Christmas Cheese.

We had a nice lunch at the Bearslake Inn before we went home. I think my mother enjoyed it:

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The dogs were quite insistent that they could not possibly go anywhere or do anything due to their extreme levels of Woe, but must remain on their princess-and-the-pea layers of comfy beds. They basically stayed in bed apart from brief pee breaks for an entire day yesterday, and most of today too. I was really quite worried about them yesterday, but not quite worried enough to call on the emergency vet on New Years Day and they are much brighter today. Theo has had a little outing to the beach, and Rosie managed to run up the stairs this afternoon.

So, since there were no walks needed yesterday, I planted some rose bushes that I have had heeled in waiting for me to get around to them, and mulched the roses I planted last year with well rotted manure. The new roses are GHISLAINE DE FÉLIGONDE musk roses. They grow to a theoretical height of 12 feet, so should help to clad the wire fences I erected in a great hurry when we moved here and I urgently needed dog containment solutions. In a perfect world I would replace them with 6 foot fences, but I'm not sure I can endure further infestations of builders at the moment. We had enough of them in 2022.

Today I went and did a new thing: I went swimming in the sea in the winter! I had been swimming with a local sea-swimming group a few times in the summer (I am not brave enough to swim in the sea alone) but November and December were terribly busy and I fell out of the habit. But today someone I met in the summer asked if I would like to go along, and I thought 'WHY NOT' so I did.

It was terribly cold - not too bad on the legs or body, but my hands took one look at the temperature and burst into frozen pain. I've now ordered a pair of neoprene gloves. They will be handy for kayaking, even if I don't make a regular thing of sea-swimming in the cold.