Rambles from Frog End: It's all been happening

What a week it's been this last week! We've done all sorts of jobs around the house and garden including painting much of the new kitchen, peeling the protecting covers off all the drawers and cupboard fronts (which sounds an easier and quicker job than it turned out to be), drilling and screwing on the drawer and cupboard handles, weeding the back garden, staking all the plants that the rain had battered down (yes we've finally had a reasonable quantity of rain) etc etc.

On Friday we had a meeting with people from Ambios, with whom we'll be collaborating to make a website that maps the Sharpham Estate on the river Dart. Simon, the leader of the project is an ecologist like us so we were pleased to carshare on the way down to Sharpham. Rather than meeting in an office on the estate we met in a little hut high up in the woods where volunteers on the project igomango were camping. It was so much fun to have a meeting in the woods with a dog at your feet and the sound of chickens and forestry going on nearby and we were very pleased that the rain held off long enough to take the paper maps down to the car. I'm sure I'll blog again soon on the subject of Sharpham, but it turned out that discussing the new contract was not the most exciting thing to happen this week:

On Saturday night we got a call to say that Ian's brother Gary is now father to a baby girl :-) so we made an impromptu trip up to Preston including a stopover in Formby on Sunday night. This is Leonalia, Leona or Leo, depending on how much you shorten her name: