The Journey: Around the world in three days!

We've had some more gorgeous sunsets

In three days, I have been given insights into life in Nigeria, Ethiopia, France, Portugal, Iran, Pakistan, India, Czechia and Egypt and travelled virtually to Riga in Latvia, Germany, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Australia, UK and Sweden, all from my little rural apartment. I've discussed the affects of climate change on coastal towns and how to begin to tackle the relocation process, to identifying areas where people can get involved in planning, to strategies to harvest water in a drought prone area using landscape adaptations, amongst other things. I've talked about an application to draft a workshop for an EU wide conference, to cold-water swimming and its benefits on health. I've chatted with family by email, WhatsApp and Messenger. Now I'm not sure my brain knows quite what's happening.

No one is swimming here, but they do in the summer

Hello, kind sir! can I trouble you for some food?

Lockdown hair cut. Looks worse from the
front.

That isn't all either. I've been sorting through articles on citizen science, policies, living values and which organisations are bottom up or grassroots or top-down and what's the difference anyway. I've used Miro boards, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Big Blue Button, Moodle, Wordpress and Blogger. I've tried to access Zoom while someone waits on Microsoft Teams, I've rapidly had to search for Zoom links for meetings I've supposed to have joined and had to wait for someone to get the right link to meet up with me. On my computer I've been working in Excel, Word, Powerpoint and with Pdfs. I'm thinking I'm getting quite dizzy with it all. As I'm writing this I now realise that my calendar is not effective enough and I need to actually use an excel sheet to keep track of meetings. At least then I can highlight which format we are using. My calendar isn't just for me but also my department so gets a bit messy. I already try to keep a record of the hours I work in excel and now my list of jobs is on there too, as it's easier to keep track, so maybe just a note about the meetings might work too.

One of the differences between Chanel and Ilvija
her daughter, besides the haircut are the black feet
on Ilvija. Other than that, there isn't much to be
able to tell them apart.

Turbjørn looks very suave in his coat.

Boo! Says Valeria

It's kind of exciting to be able to meet up with people from all over the world, but there is also a part of me that wants people to go back to work and leave the online alone, like it used to be, but that's not going to happen. I love it and loathe it at the same time. Once the decision was how many meetings could I go to in one year and if one meeting was too close to another with a lot of travelling in between then it was just not possible to go. Now.... I can almost go to all of them, but I still need to work too. So many exciting things to learn, so many responsibilities to meet. So many opportunities to network, so many opportunities to be sucked into more work.

Antonia is looking portly, or she has a lot of fleece.
Unfortunately she isn't pregnant. Maybe this year?

Ginger Tom is just so ridiculously
cute.

Shows some of the recreational
opportunities or not in our
village. The ski track has been
well used, but not now of course,
instead people play disc golf.
I'm surprised how popular it is.

One of the jobs I had to do this week was to go for a walk around our village and take photographs for a presentation. As I was putting them into the presentation, I saw that the colours were a little subdued, mainly a palette of the browns and whites of late winter and so I had to find one or two spring and summer pictures just to show some contrast. It was refreshing to have to go for a walk as it got me out of the house. At least it wasn't icy. I found some interesting memorials I hadn't seen before, including one to a music teacher.

A memorial for a music teacher

Creative Easter decorations

A bit cold for a song festival at the moment

Guarding the castle walls

More creative Easter decorations

Ruined manor walls

All mod-cons you know. Yes we
do have an electric charging point
in our village.

There are a few versions of this on the internet,
but it seemed rather relevant

At least despite the busyness of online work I am now more disciplined to take the weekend off and spend one day out on the land and another day pottering around the house, mainly sewing at the moment. I'm not sure the weather knows what to do at the moment either as we've swung backwards and forwards between winter and spring. The snow just about disappears and another load is dumped. On Friday it snowed all day, but Saturday was relatively clear, if a tad cold, so I went out to the land to help Ian cut the boys toe nails and give them Vitamin A, D, E and C injections. Now all the alpacas are up-to-date. I also helped Ian shift some hay bales, although I did linger in the greenhouse a bit with a cat on my lap so only half helped.

More Easter creativity. It now has a
candle to go with it too. I spotted this
on Facebook when looking for some pictures
for my presentation, a friend of mine has
made it and was selling them. Ian went
to pick it up from the little supermarket where
we had arranged for it to be dropped off

This came in a parcel our son and family sent
from England. It was full of goodies. A box of
broken biscuits (sounds bad but it's lots of
mis-shaped biscuits - should keep us going), a
box of tea-bags, an alpaca magazine with
pictures inside that our grandkids drew, as well
as other bits and pieces. Lots of thought went
into it and some precious gifts.

I finally got two of the dresses washed and as I suspected the red dye from creating the purple fabrics ran. Fortunately I anticipated this and sponge washed the dresses while they were hung up so the dye did not run into the yellow of the rainbow dress. It will need a few more washes where it is hung up to drip dry and let the colour run downwards. The blue dress wasn't too bad as there were only a few patches of purple, just for a little contrast. The next job was to decide how to make the last dress. I realised the design would mean that the skirt was too short for my older granddaughter or far too much fabric for such a skinny one. I finally worked out a pattern that would work. So now I'm creating larger patches from the small ones then I will sew these together into three bands, instead of six rows. I think it will look okay, but still a work in progress.