1a) There is a proposal for a wind farm on land south of Smalltown, which is causing controversy amongst residents. I'm not particularly against the idea; I'd probably put myself as "disinterested but verging towards in favour". There's no doubt that we need to look at alternative ways of generating electricity, and wind turbines are a lot less unsightly than a power station.

1b) I think wind turbines look rather elegant, and the fact that they are spaced apart means that you can still see through them, which you can't with a large building. And isn't it clever how they all rotate at the same speed.

1c) incidentally, wind turbines have only two blades, unlike the three or four on a traditional windmill, because otherwise the turbulence created by one blade would affect the next. I bet you've always wanted to know that.

2a) Eurovision song concert on Saturday. We were able to miss most of it as we went to a far better concert and only caught the last two entrants and the summary before voting opened. Hang on ... was that my friend and fellow blogger Stepfie moonlighting as one of the backing singers for Hungary?

2b) We were talking about previous Eurovision winners and CGF mentioned the "lady who used to be a man". You could see the confusion on CGF's Sprog 3's face: "what do you mean 'lady who used to be a man'?" I euphemistically explained that he started to wear a dress and call himself Mary - the delicacies of trans-gender surgery being TMI for an 11-year old.

3a) The far better concert we went to was performed by one of the Hampshire youth brass bands and a Chiglean schools orchestra (the plural is correct; it's an orchestra made up of schoolchildren from across Eastleigh).

3b) There are three youth brass bands provided by Hampshire music service. There are also, according to the programme notes, 55,000 pupils learning music. I wonder how reliable that figure is. For example is this just the number learning music as an extra-curricular activity or does it include those having music lessons as a timetabled activity? (Are music lessons still a timetabled activity?). And are pupils who learn more than one instrument and/or play in more than one ensemble double-counted?

3c) The event included a raffle. I didn't win anything (but did buy a ticket). I was surprised (at the raffle, not the not winning) as the event was held in the Methodist church and they generally don't allow such things.

4a) Work has been busy. We were told on Monday that we were to start immediately on a new high-priority project - so important that all other work was to be postponed. "And it has to be delivered by next Tuesday". Ok, so no pressure. Five days to produce something that would normally take five weeks. Just to add to the excitement, the user didn't know what data they wanted to capture.

4b) We can pull out he stops when we want to. A few long days, a couple of customer visits, some cross-team working and, not only did we have something for them on Tuesday, we also gave them a backup system, in case it all went pear-shaped. There's still a fair bit of work to do - such as in-depth testing. But one happy customer.

5) Scientists have tedious jobs, don't they? They can spend ages setting up an experiment, and the experiment itself takes only a few seconds. Then they have to do the same thing all over again, to check they get the same results, or to see what happens if one parameter changes a little bit. But then, that's how they can trust their results.

6) Saturday I had SJA meeting. It was for the whole of southern England, but, by happy coincidence, was held only about five miles from Smalltown. It was OK, as these things go. The morning session was far too much management-orientated for my liking (or needs). Someone had developed a spreadsheet that we can use to record objectives and progress against those objectives. It produces pretty graphs and all sorts. But while I could understand the colour-coding of the cells, I couldn't work out what the figures indicted. OK, so it goes orange when 50% is entered; but what does the 50% mean? If I have 100% completed my first quarter's objectives, is my year-to-date 100% or 25%? And if I have six one-hour events over three months, I don't need a Gantt chart, I need a diary.

7a) Sunday morning I did some clearing in CGF's garden, with help from CGF's Sprog 3. We filled five large garden bags with rubbish.

7b) Safety advice: While trying to get waste into one bag, I found my gloves too cumbersome to hold the bag. So I took one off. And put a thorn in to my thumb. That's a lesson on the usefulness of PPE. The thorn I later pulled out carefully with a pair of sterilised tweezers dug out with a clean(ish) sewing needle (disregarding all my useful first aid and infection control training).

8) In the afternoon we went for walk which turned out to be both longer and muddier than expected. So a true Ruby walk. But we got back to the cafe before it closed (just) which was a good thing; otherwise I might not have been popular.