May misery

After the driest and sunniest (albeit cool) April for decades, we've hit the buffers in May, which has been very disapponting so far - particularly given the Covid restrictions are now reducing and everyone was looking forward to things like sunny trips to beer gardens again. Jo and I have made do with a couple more virtual beer tastings via Zoom, although I've actually had one visit to a beer garden for some lovely real ale - my first this year. It followed my first group hill-walk this year so at least we had adequate clothing with us, but my goodness, it was cold. It's been a while since my last blog post so I'll catch up with a few photos, the first of which were back in April when it was sunny:

Jo was doing some weeding and general tidying-up of what she calls the "cavity wall". The next two were one morning when we took a walk along the river:

Jo likes the Uggs that she got for her birthday:

Cade's bun is no more, but, before it was cut off, a photo was taken as evidence:

Dawn bought a pair of Birkenstocks for Avery for her birthday, but the sizes got a bit confused:

The Tor-na-Coille has got its beer garden ready - all we need is some weather now:

The seagulls are still a problem in our street - so much so that our neighbours have now copied our bird scarer, making four in all at our end of Arbor Court - and there's more at the back:

Health-wise, Jo's had her beta blocker changed as the medics now suspect that was what was causing her very low pulse rate - and possibly her high blood pressure too. We are complete opposites in that respect - my pulse rate is almost twice as high as Jo's but her blood pressure is almost twice as high as mine. Anyway, the upshot is that Jo is going through another period of twice daily recording to be sent to her doctor. I got the all-clear after my recent repeat blood tests. This week it was the elections for our Scottish parliament and Ross came through to Banchory to vote (he's still registered here) so that was nice to see him again. He's applying for jobs but employers are getting so many applications they don't even have enough time to acknowledge applications, let alone interview all the applicants, so that's almost a year now that Ross has had no income other than Universal Credit. We really hope this situation changes soon but it's hard to know how things are going to pan out.