We’re back to default grey and miserable today, so I’m not jinxing anything by mentioning out loud: the last two weeks were… sunny.
It started with the Edinburgh Marathon Festival weekend. I’d warned my visiting Up & Running pals to expect hypothermia, windburn and/or bad hair for the race, but the blue skies made a fool of me.
While I was on cheer squad duty, Gareth lounged in the back yard for six hours listening to the England v New Zealand cricket test. It was cool and windy, so he had a hoodie on his top half, but he’d unarchived his shorts and sandals for the bottom half. This was the result:
“So I guess my theory that wind blows away UV rays is unfounded,” he said, “Besides, it’s your fault for leaving me at home unsupervised!”.
A sunny midweek followed, then I went to London to visit my sister and go to the Cybher blog conference. It’s in its second year and there were some great sessions, but the absolute highlight was randomly meeting three brilliant ladies: hilarious Caitlin from How To Play House, knitting maven Helen from Curious Handmade and photographer Kirsty Barton. I want to frame Kirsty’s business card… check out the eyes on the wee dog!
The next day I finally met the magnificent Sas in person for breakfast and yammering on. She is the bees’ knees and I grinned like a goof all day. #gingerpower
(Photo nicked from Sas.)
Back to Scotland for another sunny mid-week, including an impromptu drive to Anstruther…
… then on Friday night we spent an hour cleaning the BBQ (untouched since the “heatwave” of 2010), an hour waiting for it to heat up, then twenty minutes incinerating our dinner.
Finally on Saturday Gareth and I worked at the Farmers’ Market. He’s been helping out a local brewery lately, so we manned the stall while the brewer was on holiday.
We made a pretty good team. He handled the beer chat and tastings while I handled the dosh and made sure the beer labels were perfectly aligned on the shelves. I recommended beers to unsuspecting locals as if I actually drank the stuff. We only had one moment of deranged, panicky flapping when we had a sudden run on gift packs and neither of us could work out how to fold up the boxes. We ended up selling all but four bottles! Score.
You may be scratching your head at this indulgent photo fest, but you must understand the rarity of two consecutive non-grey weeks. Now the clouds are back and I’ve got nowt but freckles and memories…