The Most Exciting News EVER!

I have had the weekend, today and tomorrow off work, but have been very, very busy organising all sorts of things in preparation for some very exciting news! I can't reveal my news just yet, but all will be revealed soon!

I spent Saturday in Cambridge, collecting my sister Lucy's violin from 'Cambridge Strings', who changed the bridge on her violin, replaced two strings, a tail piece and re-strung her bow. So at least that is all sorted now.

There has been some very, very strange things going on in the world of rankings. My blog has been at No. 10 on the Fatbirder "Birding Top 1000" for a good while now and suddenly on Thursday evening/Friday morning it dropped to No.19 and then then again to something like No.32. My ratings have remained consistently the same, when I have checked my stats, but on the Fatbirder website they apparently dropped massively for a few days only – Bo Boelens (who owns/runs Fatbirder) has been very kind in trying to find out the cause, but we are no further forward! I did lots of homework and found out that if someone hacks into your blog, it can have that effect, so I immediately changed my password to something very long and complicated and since found it that it has not been hacked into! I contacted blogger, but didn't get any replies that assisted me. Bo reckons that I have must have had some kind of server outage. I seem to be climbing back up again today, so all good!

Sunday and today, I have been organising things.....! Tonight I visited my mother to assist in dismantling her pond. You know when you wish you hadn't started something! The pond at the top of the garden was dug out, lined and created by my father and he had done a very good job – until a neighbour's labradors bounded across the meadow, into their garden, into the pond and destructed the lining of the pond – this was many, many years ago. The pond then had a permanent small leak and had to be topped up constantly. Since then it has deteriorated massively and is now just a putrid mess of stinking mud and hardly any water – I didn't realise how bad this was, until I attempted to clear it this evening. Mother had started dismantling it earlier in the week, but she shouldn't be doing this at her age and it is actually quite dangerous. I thought it would be a quick job, but discovered after removing at least 20 buckets of sludge, that its going to take considerably longer than I thought! I am using a Stanley knife to cut through the lining as I go along – I got splattered in mud and it took several hand washes to get rid of the stink AND I had been wearing waterproof gloves! I've only done half of the pond – will finish it on Sunday hopefully.

Tomorrow I am actually going birding!!! Shopping on route for Muckboot wellingtons, although no one in Norfolk seems to sell the Arctic Sport model I want, but I can buy it on line. Also popping into CleySpy. My now very old Paramo coat is worn, split and leaking and I will be buying a new coat for Autumn, but think I will buy a different brand this time.