Changing plans. Craft activities. Some odd facts.

This morning’s plan was to get up and run to Uppermill where I would buy good bread from the bakers and a couple of things from the co-op store before catching the bus home. I would be home in time for breakfast. As  it was I snoozed the alarm a couple of times and so the run to Uppermill was postponed until tomorrow. I ran round the village instead.

On my way back, I heard my phone ringing. My daughter wanted to deposit the small people with us while she went into Manchester for some last minute Christmas shopping. And so we have done modelling with clay (some of the models, including my model pig, fell apart in the cooking process), made jelly and sampled the unset jelly, had a drawing competition (I learnt to draw Minecraft creatures) and did cutting and sticking to make paper monsters. 

Not quite what I had planned for today. 

In between times I peeled and cooked apples ready to make an apple crumble on Christmas day. Other preparations will wait until tomorrow.

I was reading about beavers. Like the wolf and the lynx there have been campaigns to reintroduce these creatures into the wild. They are useful for “controlling” rivers. And in places where they have been reintroduced they have up to six times as many species of fish, amphibians, water insects, water plants and dragonflies. 

The downside is that their activity has been known to cause sink holes in roads. And so, as with the wolf and the lynx there is some resistance from some of the people. Here’s a link to an article about it.

I sometimes get annoyed about adverts for gambling. In fact, more than sometimes. Today I saw this headline:

“Bet365 boss receives at least £280m in pay and dividends despite profit slump.” 

Proof, if it was needed that the only winner in the gambling business is the person who owns the business. 

Here’s an odd fact sent to me by a friend:

“From the Language Nerds:

Using full stops in texts and messages could offend or upset young people, linguists have warned. 

Teenagers and those in their early 20s - Generation Z - who have grown up using short messages to communicate can see the punctuation mark as a symbol of curt passive-aggression. Linguist Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted: "If you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone."

How very odd! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!