Hi, I hope you are all keeping well and as much as possible keeping yourselves busy and active. I have found that there are only so many routes to walk for exercise. The one thing I have found is you walk further than you think as you either cross the road on seeing others approach (whilst of course shouting Hello and thanks) or you step to the side going in an arc as you pass! I have found a way to make the walks more interesting, just walk backwards!
LIZ DAVENPORT, welcome back with us Liz, great to see you are getting better. Passing on your thanks for the groups thoughts and message to you.
HUG 1st Anniversary Celebration, thank you to all who participated to make the evening good fun and successful. I have received photos and as soon as I can I will post them as a memory of the event, thank you to those who have sent in images.
Now we go in to planning mode for our actual celebration!
Celebration quiz, we did have a quiz for all on the website to say how many songs were in the 2 paragraphs I posted in the member area. Whilst 3 people did take part, I have decided not to allocate the prizes but to keep them for another time. It would have simply been each of the three receiving a prize!
hugukulele123 TV channel, we have now been streaming for five or six weeks and have built up a good selection of songs for us to play along with. The number of songs available in the stream will continue to grow. We are now in a position to go back to playing requested songs as we would for the second half of our Heswall Hall meetings (remember them, doesn't it seem a lifetime ago!)
So this Friday I will be asking whilst live streaming for requests. If you can check the website for the songs available for request and have them ready that will help speed things up. The available songs are highlighted in yellow, from memory there are about 40 available at this time.
Friday live stream, it is VE Day so it is appropriate that we will play a few WW2 favourites.
Thanks to Sharon, Barry, Roger and Geoff and Sheila for recording some songs for us. As soon as I can do I will post the song sheets onto our website and inform you they are available. I will be putting these songs in throughout the morning stream so we will play favourites as well as the VE Day songs. For this reason the songs have been recorded individually rather than the more traditional medleys.
(Diddley dee, who is she?)
75th anniversary VE Day, on the theme, it would be great to enter into the spirit of the day so anything you want to do, such as bunting, dressing up even, food, drinks (might be early for Hawaiian Guinness though!) If you have images to share, or brief stories of relatives then send them to me.
hug ukulele quiz at The HUG & LETTUCE we have an established group of hard line quizzers who each week demonstrate a unique level of quizzing and drinking!
I hasten to add we do NOT take it all that serious as the main aim is to break up the week and for those who want to get together in an activity outside of playing the uke, as important as that is. So if you haven't joined in yet why not tune in and say hi. We are joined by a group of now friends from Bury who are putting us to shame with their music knowledge, an honourable mention goes to Val for keeping HUGs end up!
House keeping, over the weeks we have been live streaming as you can imagine I have been manipulating a vast amount of data on my laptop and iPad, typically it usually involves juggling items between the two. I am now experiencing problems with the fact that I have not done housekeeping as I should and the tasks being asked of my laptop is causing issues. To safeguard the live stream I need to do some drastic pruning and filing of data over the next few days. I apologise if I miss something you have sent but for example my emails locked for 2 days and only opened up when I started to cull some earlier emails.
I am trying to keep my personal email address separated from HUG issues which is why if you can, please use dave@thewus.co.uk for HUG things, thanks.
My poor old laptop is showing signs of old age, as am I, and whilst there is no hope for me, I will be upgrading my laptop as soon as I can to one more tailored for our needs, whether it is streaming in a more extensive way, to displaying song sheets to play along to. The world of what we can do has permanently changed and we were already thinking of embracing technology to help the group. The timetable is very much about when my daughter can fly over from Germany to help select the right computer for our needs and set things up that cannot be done remotely.
I have some ideas for our streams now we are established, I will share them in the coming weeks.
Finally, do keep checking the website for the updates from Claud on Covid-19, as we move towards an easing of the lockdown we will be guided by this advice and information. At all times decisions will be taken with safety in mind.
Stay safe, and thanks to all of you for supporting HUG
Dave