Tardy Bears Picnic

After our meeting of the Ceredigion Moth Group on Saturday morning Morgan and I headed back down to sea level and collected Anna and a friend of Morgan’s called Lotti and we all headed off to the RSPB reserve at Ynyshir where we were booked in for a Teddy Bears Picnic – or as it should have been called a ‘Tardy Bears Picnic’ – D’you see what I’ve done there!

We got there about 10 minutes early as usual as the picnic was due to start at 11.30am There was no one else with teddy bears there so it looked as though it was going to be a quiet picnic, perhaps people had been put off by the grey weather. We had a chat with the wardens whilst Morgan and Lotti did some colouring and they said that 3 other groups of people had phoned that morning and booked so they should be there and they knew what the weather was like when they phone so we shouldn’t be on our own.

These other people did turn up in the and, but not until 11:50am, 20 minutes after we were supposed to have set off on the picnic, so in the end we didn’t get going until midday. Not a huge problem but the picnic was due to finish at 1pm and that’s what time we had planned to leave as Lotti had to get back to go horse-riding. So, in the end, everything was running late thanks to the late people and we had to leave at 1pm whilst the picnic was still ongoing. We missed out on the scavenger hunt on the way back through the woods despite being the only people who got there on time.

What is wrong with people, why can’t they be on time, and why when they are late do they not even acknowledge it. It’s just rude, but seems standard practise for many people these days. It annoys me and invariably it is those that are on time that end up missing out.

Anyway, apart from that we had fun. The children found bears on their way to the hide and stuck colourful things they found in the woods onto a sticky rainbow. Once at the hide they did colouring and dot-to-dots before having a story and a picnic. Morgan spotted a Buff-Tip moth on the way there too which was pretty good and I think he impressed the warden by seeing it and by knowing what it was!

There was supposed to be a scavenger hunt on the way back to the visitor centre but we missed out on that – We do have the sheets though so can do it some other time on our own.

I forgot to take any photos though.

One of Morgan’s friends, Lotti, invited us to her house for a little party on the beach yesterday. They had all had their reports this week and as they were good they were having a treat.

We all had a little surf, Morgan managed to stand up briefly and had good fun, as did Lotti, Yo-Yo, Emma and Guy. I even caught a few little waves.

Afterwards we had a BBQ and then the kids had a water-fight. Morgan seemed to enjoy getting wet – again!

A damp 5 year old!

It was Morgans School Fete yetserday and the theme was ‘The Circus’.

Thankfully the rain held off and we all had fun. Morgan went dressed as a clown wearing a home made bow-tie, my shorts, my shoes, a red nose and a clowns hat which looked pretty good.

We all raised lots of money for the school, had a chance to chat with other parents, won lots of prizes and even bought some books and plants for the garden. I quite like going to these events and helping out with the school always feels worthwhile.

Whilst on a treasure hunt Anna and I had a look at the wildlife garden they have as well, which looks good. We’re hoping to get involved helping out with that and maybe even setting up the noth trap there now and then so that the children can see some of the moths that inhabit their garden at night.

Morgan as a Clown

It looks as though everyone is jumping on the beekeeping bandwagon at the moment. A good thing for bees, a good thing for the environment and a good thing for beekeepers too.

Even the Coop are trying to encourage people to get into beekeeping. Their ‘Plan Bee‘ has been offering training courses and has even funded beekeeper starter packs including bee colonies and hives for  Manchester allotment holders.

They have now expanded the project from Manchester to London and Inverness. I’m not sure why they’ve picked those cities, but it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be able to get a free starter kit from anywhere. I doubt that they will expand the project to take in Borth and Ynyslas, but it would have been good to get some start-up funding to increase beekeeping in the area. I wonder if anyone else is willing to fund such a project locally?

My first triathlon in 20 years and preparations weren’t good. I’d been ill for a couple of weeks so hadn’t done much training and hadn’t managed to get out on my bike after fiddling with the position set up.

We arrived in Gloucestershire on Friday evening and I had a quick drive around the cycle course with Matt. It didn’t look like a particularly fast course. It was fairly hilly and all of the descents were on very narrow singletrack roads with lots of potholes, gravel and bends so the downhills would be slow. There was a nice flat stretch at one point, and then a couple of short but steep hills towards the end which looked as though they may cause me trouble with my high gear ratios.

Sleeping in a strange bed on Friday night meant I only got a couple of hours sleep before the birds woke me up at 4am. The drive down on Friday and the bed didn’t do much for my back either. Saturday was spent wandering around garden centres and shops (including Ikea) and all the time my sciatica was getting worse. Things weren’t looking good for the triathlon on Sunday.

I decided to sleep on the floor on Saturday night to see if that would help my back. It actually turned out that I didn’t sleep on the floor, rather just lay there and didn’t sleep a single wink all night long. My back did feel a little better by the morning though.

So that was it, race day was here, I had only had a couple of hours sleep in the past 48 hours, my back was a little sore and to make matter worse it was raining! Time for breakfast, get our stuff ready and head off to set up.

We dropped our running shoes off at the bike-run transition at KLB school and then headed up to the pool where we set up our bikes and cycling kit, got into our swimming kit and had the race briefings etc. The people I knew who were doing the Triathlon were my brothers Jay and Brad, my sisters’ boyfriend Matt and his friend Beale. They all mountain bike with us and are all younger than me, Matt & Beale especially so. I had to show them who was boss!

At 8am the race was on. 30 lengths of the pool with four people in each lane. The first wave of people to start contained most of the fastest people based on their estimated times – although there were a few fast people going later in the day as well.  I knew that swimming was a strong discipline for me so was expected to exit the pool towards the front. It wasn’t the fastest swim in the world as I was constantly having to overtake the others in my lane but I exited the pool in first place.

After a bit of a push and shove to get into the transition area I was a little slow getting my cycling kit on. I put my heart rate monitor and GPS on and was soon off on the bike and looking for the little red ‘WT’ signs on the road to find my way around the course. It was raining a little on the bike but nothing too much and I soon got into a nice steady ride. The bike felt good and the position was spot on for the aero-bars. Unfortunately the potholes on the road and the twisty country lanes weren’t ideal for the aero-bars so I didn’t use them much, but all felt OK.

Topo & Heart Rate from Cycle

Being out in front on the road is always difficult as you don’t have the incentive of chasing people down and are always looking over your shoulder. It also means that the marshalls aren’t quite ready as you are the first person to pass them. I kept pushing on though, negotiated the course OK, made it up the steep hills without any problem and entered the bike-run transition still in first place on the road and without seeing anyone behind me.

Off with my helmet, off with my cycling shoes and into my running shoes and off onto the run. No one else entered the transition area whilst I was there so I knew I had a little bit of time in hand. The run went quite quickly and I felt good all the way around. I didn’t push too hard as I wanted to keep something in reserve in case anyone caught me. No one did, but I did at last see some other people out on the course where the run route followed part of the cycle route. Before too long I wasn’t far from the end so picked the pace up a little bit and crossed the line in first place.

Topo & Heart Rate - Run

Now all I had to do was wait to see who was next in. It was actually quite a wait with the next person coming in 8 minutes later. In the meantime I learned that I had had about 10 minutes in hand over Matt by the Bike-Run transition and more over Beale, Brad and Jay in that order. Jay was actually a long way back due to a puncture on the bike which was a shame. A few others came over the finish line and then next in our group was Matt 20 minutes behind… Hah, the old man had beat them and by quite a way! Beale came in 4 minutes later, Brad a few minutes after that and then Jay about 30 minutes behind that having fixed his puncture and continued to finish the race.

Our final times were:

• Me: 1:30:11
• Matt: 1:50:37
• Beale: 1:54:25
• Brad: 1:57:10
• Jay 2:19:40

Although I’d finished first on the road there were of course still people who had started after me that could beat my time so it wasn’t until later in the day that we could see the result online and find out our actual finishing positions.

It turned out the the bad preparation, bad back and lack of sleep didn’t affect me too much as I managed to win overall with a margin of just over 6 minutes.

All in all a good day out and several thousand pounds raised for the pool and the school. The results can be downloaded here. Anna took a few photos where she could (below) and there are more photos online here. Hopefully Matt’s Dad got some good photos as well.

Morgan and I wandered across to the beach to help with the Borth & Ynyslas Beach Clean yesterday. Dave & Sarah organise these on a fairly regular basis and recently for various reasons such as being away, children’s parties, too windy etc. etc. we’ve been unable to help out so it was good to be able to lend a hand yesterday.

Morgan likes doing it even if he isn’t the most efficient rubbish-picker-upper out there. He also got cold meaning we didn’t stay until the end. As usual there was loads of rubbish and the 14 bags that we managed to collect barely makes an impression but it all helps. What would really help would be if people would stop leaving their rubbish on the beach and most of all if the idiot dog owners would stop leaving bags of dog poo all over the beach.

Borth Beach Clean

Sorry, I couldn’t resist a political post here on the weblog! Worse still, this is far too late, but it is interesting.

I’ve been complaining about the media coverage in the run up to the election and the fact that there is very little information about the policies of the parties, but more emphasis on the characters of the party leaders and what they are all up to rather than what they would do for us. I was quite looking forward to having a politician knock on the door as part of their campaign so that I could explain our personal situation as a family and see how their policies would affect us, but no one came calling.

I did however find a site called ‘Vote for Policies‘ that presents the policies of the major parties on various topics without telling you whose they are. You pick the policies you like and afterwards it tells you what the parties were. You start by telling it which topics interest you and work through from there. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to include Plaid Cymru so in our constituency it isn’t very accurate as the two main parties were Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats, but despite this the results make interesting reading.

Based on my choices on policies related to Crime, Health, Education, Environment and Immigration my results were as follows.

• Green Party 33.33%
• Labour 33.33%
• Conservatives 16.67%
• Lib Dems 16.67%

More interesting is that from the 232 people who have taken the survey in our constituency, the results are as follows

• Green Party 32.11%
• Lib Dems 19.93%
• Labour 19.00%
• Conservatives 12.54%
• UKIP 9.10%
• BNP 7.31%

Based on policies alone the Green Party are way ahead in this small survey, but it was the Lib Dems that won the seat. Of course, the number of people that have carried out the survey is small. The nationwide stats make interesting reading too. With almost 300,000 surveys completed the results were:

• Green Party 23.66%
• Labour 20.34%
• Lib Dems 17.84%
• Conservatives 15.66%
• UKIP 12.04%
• BNP 10.45%

Once again the Green Party was up there at the top. It does make you wonder what would happen if the media concentrated more on policies rather than personalities. Of course, it’s easy to write policies that the majority of voters will like, actually being able to follow through and implement them is what really matters. Most people would want lower taxes, better health and education, less crime etc. but doing it all just isn’t possible.

This survey is good and gives you an idea of which parties policies you mainly agree with but you are cherry picking the best policies without seeing the whole picture. You may find that you agree with more policies from one party but have really strong negative feelings about one of their policies that would make you not vote for them. This survey doesn’t allow you to see that.

Sorry this is too late, but did you vote for the right party?

Ceredigion Moth Group

I attended the formative meeting of the Ceredigion Moth Group last night.

Unfortunately there hasn’t been an active moth group in the county for quite some time and there hasn’t really been any structured recording of the species that we get. All other counties in England and Wales seem to have active moth groups and more importantly a ‘County Recorder’ who collates, verifies and shares the data with nationwide schemes. As in many things, Ceredigion (or Cardiganshire as Vice County no. 46 is known) shows up as a white area on any moth count maps due to the paucity of data from the region.

Hopefully, with the creation of a new Ceredigion Moth Group and the appointment of a County Recorder that is set to change.

As usual with such meetings where a committee of people each with different agendas is involved, the discussions did become a little convoluted and in many instances it seemed as though we were making things more difficult than they needed to be. But we all got on well, we all agreed to the need for a Ceredigion Moth Group and we were all fairly enthusiastic and willing to work on making it a success.

It is my opinion that we should start off small and keep things as simple as possible, especially while people are finding their feet. There was certainly a great deal of knowledge and expertise in the room, and a few enthusiastic beginners such as myself, which I think is a good combination from the start.

All in all the meeting went well and we have another meeting -  that will also involve some actual moth trapping - planned for March 27th. In the meantime I’m going to set up a mailing  list so that we can all communicate with each other and we’re going to organise a structured and consistent format for recording our own moth records which should make the County Recorders job eaiser. No doubt as a website designer my list of tasks will include the buidling of a website for the group at some point.

There was finally a little break in the weather yesterday afternoon so we decided to go to the fair. (See here for Aberystwyth Fair opening times). We hadn’t made any definite plans so didn’t tell Morgan until we collected him from school and hadn’t made plans to meet anyone there either. However, as usual it turned into a social affair for Morgan.

Not long after getting there we were soon in a little group with me, Anna and Morgan, Jackie, Cameron, Eva, Mike, Rachael, Cameron, Jamie, Taniel and Taniel’s Mum, Kirsten and Bethany. The fair was pretty much the same as it always is and Morgan certainly had fun. It isn’t cheap of course, but it is only there once a year and its all pretty exciting for a 4-year old.

Autumn Leaves

We had a break in the ‘Wild West Wales Weather‘ yesterday so though it would be a good idea to get out there and make the most of it.

I went for a quick mountain bike ride around the Summit Trail at Nant yr Arian. I’m still struggling a little on the hills but it was a nice ride with surprisingly few other people on the trails.

In the afternoon Morgan and I met up with a group of Morgans’ friends and their families at Furnace and we walked up the hill to a viewpoint overlooking the Dyfi Estuary. It turned out to be a gorgeous autumn afternoon with no wind and blue skies. The views out over the still waters of the estuary were well worth the walk up the hill and the ‘bracken bashing’ that the climb entailed.

Dyfi Skyscape

We do live in a lovely part of the world and it takes very little to get out there and enjoy it. OK, the weather isn’t always this nice but when it is the effort is well worth it.