Catching Up

After a hectic few months of getting so busy that the butterfly count and moth night passed me by, teaching (with an inspection, just to keep me on my toes), doing courses and exams, nursing a sick hen (who got better for a couple of weeks, then went downhill again and has just died), hosting a special guest for a couple of nights, and all the preparation and rehearsals for the Cardigan Belly Dance Festival, (more on the latter two in other posts), I feel like I've reached a break point.

Not that there is now any less to do.  I have a few costume and jewellery commissions, a stack of paperwork to deal with, next term's classes to advertise and plan, a mountain of cleaning and laundry to do. I've made in-roads into the 'To Do' list, but it is still growing faster than the 'Done' list. I really want to reverse that, because it is getting on my nerves. Still, the lack of appointments looming in the diary helps me to feel that I have time to tackle the jobs in the house and garden. Time to catch up a little on this blog, where I'm still failing in my resolution to reduce the number of posts in draft. Time to finish projects and perhaps start new ones. Time to breathe and try to catch up a bit.

A teaching friend and I planned to go to the beach during the school summer holidays, but I realised with a  shock that this weekend is the August Bank Holiday, and she starts back at school a week later. In the meantime, she's on holiday with her husband, after which she's taking her mother away for a few days. We had some very hot weather in June and July - I remember sitting in stuffy classrooms, emerging into hot and dazzling sunlight at lunch time, and even wore skirts and dresses, as a cool change from my usual yoga pants. I got utterly fed up with my long, straggly hair and had it cut into a short bob, which is so much easier to manage and I love so much, I wonder why I didn't do it earlier. I commented on how unseasonably cool it was in my single post in June. Lammas brought a change back to unsettled weather, with patches of sunshine interrupted by drizzle, rain showers, downpours, thunderstorms and hail. The forecast yesterday was for ground frost in some rural parts of Wales - a month early!

There are still plenty of swallows around, but they seem to be flying south and east already. I saw my first group of thrushes while driving through the Preselis on Sunday evening and could smell September in the air, in mid-August. As the days shorten, I'm hoping that Summer hasn't given up altogether and that we'll have some more good weather to enjoy before Autumn truly begins.