Author Archives: Steve

About Steve

Man of leisure.

Snowdrops at Painswick

Blasdale Home Posted on by

Today started out as a beautiful sunny day, but cold. Rosemary and I decided to visit the Painswick Rococo Garden, which is situated in a hidden Cotswold valley in Painswick near Gloucester.

This time of the year is a special treat with floods of Snowdrops amongst the gardens and woods. After viewing the gardens we had a pub lunch with a pint of Hook Norton.

I took a few photos of the garden while I was there. Hopefully, they will be on the site in a couple of week’s time. I was not alone with my camera, there were several professional photographers taking pictures of the Snowdrop grove.

Big Fat Repack

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Went to the BFR at the Reading Rivermead Lesure centre.  I listened to the lecture on how to deploy, check and repack your emergency parachute instructions. 

After that I queued up for the deployment practise.  Here you were suspended on an aerial runway in your harness, in a precarious angle to simulate your position when everything was going wrong.  You were released to slide down the runway wire; you went for your reserve parachute and chucked it out.  It then opened behind you.

Next with the allocated partner you repacked your parachute.  This took almost two hours.  Then to see if it worked, we went for another ride down the wire to see if the home packing worked.  It did!!

A final repack, now down to one hour for my chute and my partner’s chute.

During the day I saw Mike, Brian and Derrick from the Annecy trip.

Tree planting

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After a few days of cold and chaos on the roads caused by two inches of snow, the weather improved and the weekend was fine

Managed to plant the poplars replacing those that died from last year, and also creating a cluster in the field corner. The Holly and the firs went in between the graveyard and garden.

Snowing at last

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Some real snow last night, all of three inches.  By the time I had driven into Aylesbury there was none.  We must have caught the edge of the snow because the M40 was closed going North.

Burns Night

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Well not quite Burns Night, but for the Plough and Anchor, it was Burns Night.

Excellant meal was hosted by Paul Ring of the Plough and Anchor.  The menu was Scottish, but was not all Haggis, Neaps and Tatties.  We though did all get the chance for some Haggis even if we had not ordered it for the main course.

Next day was rather quite for me, rather too much Lagavulin the night before.

Day off work

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Been a lovely day today.  Sun shone all day, and even though the wind was blowing from the North East it was not that cold.

Had been invited to partcipate in some paragliding, but alas the guys were here to fix the hot tub which sprung a leak at the weekend.  Instead waited for them, had a pint at the pub, downloaded some clip art of Scots men for the pub menu (Burns night) and had a big fire burning up all the rubbish wood from the grave yard, and cleared up some of the rubbish around the garden pond.

I could be a house husband anyday!

Snowing

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After the warm weather and the floods, the cold arrived for the weekend.  Now at last it has started to snow, although by the end of the day 3 mm is not a great deal.

Lovely to sit in the hot tub in the dark with your head freezing cold! 

The weather

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It rained alot today. Raining onto already sodden land. Poor Rosemary had difficulty getting home, The roads across country from the Motor Way to home were closed, or if not closed, were flooded with several feet of water. She did make it back in the end.