Thunderstorms and Village Fetes

Yet again the days seem to have disappeared in a summer haze. It's been baking hot recently, which has been wonderful and has felt like proper summer - but it hasn't been quite so good for productivity! Both the dissertation and the writing have slowed right now, but I guess maybe it's good to have a bit of a break from time to time. As always, I'm still pondering ideas and scribbling notes.

Anyway, the last week has seen has subjected to plenty of thunderstorms as well as hot weather. The thunder and lightening was at times a little alarm, but also kind of spectacular to watch. At one point the storm was right above us! One downside was the lightening lighting up my whole room at night. It's been very stuffy as well, and even with the windows wide open, it's felt very hot and uncomfortable.

Still, there's nothing quite like the beautiful summer days and the clear blue skies, and lying on the grass reading and writing. It's always easy to forget that the summer is completely full of days like this. These are the type of days I write about in my stories, and Treading Water is full of hot, stuffy days.

In other news, it was the church fete on Saturday, which meant an afternoon of tombola, hoopla, bowling for the pig - and the wheel of fortune (and much more!).

Here's the wheel in action:

It went down a treat!

Oh, and the bees are back - what joy. Although, luckily the storms cleared this swarm a bit:

Anyway, have a great week and enjoy the sunshine. I'm currently desperate to go windsurfing again, or maybe paddleboarding, so maybe that will happen this week - fingers crossed!

Olympic Fever!

I don't know where the last few weeks has gone, but it seems to have absoutely flown by, and I was very surprised to see how long ago my lost blog post was! It's been a busy time though, and I have been making the most of the wonderful weather the UK has been enjoying, until now that is, because it is a rare thing here, and so I didn't relaly switch my laptop on, which was probably a good thing! But now I'm back.

Over the last few weeks I have enjoyed the brilliant weather, had my graduation (which was terrifying and stressful, but actually went very well!), had a brief trip to Cornwall, watched the Olympic opening and lots of Olympics on the TV and got very excited, and have been watching lots of tennis, swimming and diving, and trying out some other things with entertaining results (seriously some sports are just so.... well bizarre!). I was very excited to see JK Rowling in the opening ceremony, and the wonderful tribute to children's literature. Oh yes! I also had to deal with a bee swarm (terrifying, bees have been haunting me for days now) and got to enjoy some amazing weather. (I was going to post some pictures here, but I will add them later). I sat outside all day every day (mostly) in the gazebo, which I made my makeshift office, and did lots of reading, writing and bracelet making (and lots of swimming too). Very productive week I was very pleased.

I managed to do an edit of one of my stories, on paper, reading most of it out loud (very tiring!). I still need to type up the edits, and probably go through it again and do a more detailed edit, but now it's all good. I also started the first story in my new series, which I'm very excited about and so far seems to be going well. I made so many notes and things over the last few weeks however it is being a little bit of a nightmare trying to work out what I meant when I put a star by a name or something silly like that.

What else can I tell you?

I think that's all for now. Looking forward to watching some more swimming later, and lots of tennis (come on Murray!) and some windsurfing!