Weather

From http://ianrstewart.blogspot.com/

Apparently there have been reports of a weather onslaught on Aberdeen. It's not been great - there's been plenty of rain and wind - but, from watching some of the news reports from other parts of the country, it looks like we've escaped lightly this time - so far anyway.

What we did have was some pretty freak conditions round about Fittie, which brought sea foam ashore, making it look like a snowstorm. There have been loads of photos on Facebook already, but I rather liked the one on the front page of the Times today:

Never seen that before.

Nothing much else to say in this blog. Jo and I finished distributing the CAMRA newsletters on Monday evening, but otherwise all's quiet.

Holiday weekend

From http://ianrstewart.blogspot.com/

We don't do holiday Mondays at work any more, but it's still noticeable that a number of people take the day off. Not that I would have noticed any difference in the rush hour traffic this morning - I slept in - didn't waken until 7:50 am!

We were knackered yesterday and I just vegetated. We had gone for a drive and a walk on Saturday afternoon - it was such a lovely day. The walk wasn't hard - it was pretty flat and only 13kms long, but I had forgotten my wedges and the second half of the walk was absolute agony - I didn't think I was going to make it back to Ballater at one stage. Well, at least it proves that my wedges must be doing something - I didn't get any pain like this last weekend when we were in the Lake District on harder walks 4 days in a row.

I had also been refereeing - without wedges again - on Friday night at our little celebration for Andy Gore's 1,000th match - and it was a fairly late night too, so that probably didn't help the way I felt on Saturday.

Details of our walk are on the Hill-walking blog, but it was a loop from Ballater along the south side of the Dee, over the bridge at Cambus o' May then back along the Deeside Way on the north side of the river. Here we are at the halfway point:

We've also had a visitor this weekend - Charlie, Ross' pal Liam's lovely young lab. He was very good really but needed a fair amount of attention.

Got the quarterly newsletters for CAMRA to deliver this week - I've done about half already, but still have to get out to Aboyne, Tarland and Potarch. Apart from that, I've been preparing for our annual end of season Scotland v. R.o.W. Challenge match next Sunday, followed by lunch at the golf club, and also for our next overseas golf trip - to Mallorca a week tomorrow. I've hardly played recently - will need to sharpen up quickly for this trip.

The other little trip planned is a couple of nights in Ullapool on 19/20 October. Never been there, so it'll be nice to see it - and, of course, it's the weekend of their beer festival too - wouldn't you know it! The only slight downside was that it clashed a bit with the Steve Miller Band playing in Glasgow that Sunday, so I've had to cancel that.