Hello Plus Member. How are you? I do hope that you're well. If you are listening to this at the weekend, first thing on a Sunday morning, then I hope that you've had a great weekend so far. Do you have anything interesting planned for today? The weekends for me are generally a chance to catch up with my household chores. There's so much laundry. There's so much laundry in my house. I think because I've got two young boys, one of which who likes to strip off all the time and just leave his clothes in different places, like around the garden and hidden in different places around the house. So, I keep finding random socks and T-shirts and trousers in different places and I don't know if they're clean or dirty. And so it's a nightmare. And then they do things like go to the park and sit in muddy puddles and it just creates huge mountains of laundry. So, the weekends are a mix of getting things done, but also I try to make sure that I get out and about and I have a nice time, do something physical, get some fresh air, blow the cobwebs away. Now you might've noticed I've been peppering in some phrases that I hope you're familiar with. Today, I'm going to introduce you to a couple of other phrases. We're going to look at the colloquial phrase, chucking it down, the word brolly, the word overcast, the phrases out of the blue, on the spur of the moment, off the cuff and the words irritated, agitated, and exasperated. So, today has been a very frustrating day in general. I started off the day feeling overwhelmed because yesterday it was chucking it down all day. And yesterday was meant to be my filming day, the day when I did the majority of my recording. And I can't just decide to film something on the spur of the moment. I have to plan it and be ready in advance. So, I have to prepare the material is the first thing. And then once the material is prepared, I need to set up my equipment. So, when I'm recording a video, I need my camera. I need the batteries all to be charged because I have a battery for the camera, a battery for the monitor. Which is where I can see myself, which is mounted on top of my camera. I need batteries in my microphone. I plug my lights in, so I just need to set them up. I don't need batteries for them. But I also need to charge the device that gives me my lines, my auto cue. And so that all has to be charged and ready the night before and then I need to set up the equipment. Now, I also have to prepare myself. I have to have a wash and make sure I've got nice clean hair that's been blow dried so that it looks nice and not frizzy and scruffy. I have to put makeup on. I try not to put too much makeup on these days, but I like to look, you know, presentable. I have to make sure I've got some nice clothes to wear,'cause to be honest, most of the time I just like to be comfortable. So, most of the time I'm just wearing my comfy clothes, my comfy jeans and a T-shirt and a tracksuit top hoodie or something like that. And often I don't wear makeup. But when I'm filming, I will make myself look presentable. So, I have to do that, and that doesn't happen easily either. I also like to try and make sure I've had a good night's sleep, because if I don't sleep well, it comes across on camera. And I feel like you can tell that my energy is low. So, I have to be prepared. And so I choose my day in advance by looking at the weather report and thinking,"Okay, that would be a good day to film because the weatherman says that that day is going to be a good day." So, yesterday was supposed to be an'okay day', but it was a nightmare. Not only was it chucking it down in between the rain, we had this horrendous wind that was making the trees bang against the studio and the wind was blowing the cloud across at quite a speed. So, it wasn't complete overcast. It was like intermittent cloud and the cloud was moving really fast, which meant on the camera. I was either really, really blown out, like really white because there was so much light flooding in or it was like super dark with just my face lit up. It looked like it was night time and it kept moving from this bright, bright white to really, really dark, bright, bright white, really, really dark. And it was a nightmare. So, I felt very frustrated yesterday. I went to bed last night and thought it's okay. Tomorrow's going to be better. I will just prepare myself again tomorrow and have another filming day. So, this morning we woke up and my son threw up, which meant he couldn't go to nursery. So, from first thing this morning, we knew that today was going to be a difficult day, but my partner's at home and he said,"I'll look after Caspian. You go and do what you need to do." So, I prepared myself, I put on my makeup, brushed my hair, dressed myself nicely, came down to the studio, started to charge everything, making sure everything was ready. And finally, everything was charged. I turned on the camera, turned on my microphone, and then it started chucking it down again. But this was different. This wasn't your general English rain. This was heavy. This was violent rain, rain that just, you know, you don't want to get caught up in because even just walking across the garden, this rain would absolutely soak you to the bone. And within moments, like out of the blue, it started hailstoning. So, it was throwing down hailstones and these hailstones were the size of ping pong balls. Now this is April, this is mid-April and it was heavily hailing. It was completely out of the blue. So, I decided on the spur of the moment, because I couldn't film, I thought, well, I will go outside and I'll record a short video to go on Instagram. Initially, I thought I'd go out with my brolly and film literally in the rain, but protected by the brolly. But the hailstone was so intense that my brolly couldn't cope with it. So, I had to ditch the brolly idea, put that away for its own safety because it was also very windy and, and just stand under the shelter in order to film my little short video. So, I did that on the spur of the moment and I didn't have a script ready. So, it was off the cuff, which was fine. I do most of my things off the cuff. Today I'm talking off the cuff. And I posted that out and then the weather improved and I thought, fantastic. I made the most of that downtime. I used it productively, so it wasn't that bad. It was obviously an interruption to my work, but I made use of it. So, I was irritated, but I wasn't, like, really frustrated. So, came back in, turned everything back on again. I got ready to start filming again, literally within 30 seconds of filming, the rain started again. But then also one of my neighbours started blaring out some rock music at full blast. Like I have never heard music coming out of a house that's so loud. It sounded like it was a nightclub, but obviously they've got some new fantastic speakers or something that they were testing out, but it was so loud. I was flabbergasted. I was absolutely shocked. And beyond that, I was really feeling agitated now. I was starting to feel quite angry, to be honest. I was very agitated. Anyway, the rain didn't last for that long. The music eventually turned off. The sun came back out. Finally, let me get back to my video. I turned on the camera and then my partner messaged me and said, Caspian is asleep. You need to come back into the house while I go and get our eldest son from school. So, I was disrupted once again. I went back into the house. I looked after Caspian and tried to make use of the time, but I was really starting to feel agitated because this was such an unproductive day. And then I get back to the office and I thought, this is my last chance! This is my last chance to get things done. I turn on all my equipment again and guess what? The batteries in my microphone are dead. So, now I have absolutely no chance of getting my videos filmed because my microphone's not working and you can't do things without sound. So, I ordered some more batteries from Amazon and now my filming day has been postponed until next week and I felt completely and utterly exasperated. Argh! Have you ever had a day like that? It's so stressful, but all you can do is look back on a day like today and laugh, because if you don't laugh, you would cry. And I prefer to laugh than cry. So, I thought, you know what? I'm going to turn on my recording equipment to make a podcast and I'm going to talk to my Plus Members about this very irritating, agitating, exasperating day. And I'm going to laugh about it because I don't want to cry, basically. Alright, so let's now have a look at some of the words I used. I talked about it chucking it down yesterday. To chuck it down is a colloquial way of saying it's raining very hard. So, yesterday it was chucking it down. It wasn't just dropping down. It's like someone was throwing the water down, throwing the rain down from the sky. I talked today about using a brolly, trying to use a brolly. A brolly is like a slang term or a more friendly term to describe an umbrella. It's just like an easier way of saying umbrella. We just say brolly, a brolly. I also use the word overcast when describing the clouds. If it's overcast, then the entire sky is covered with clouds. So, you can't see a break in the clouds. There's no blue shining through. And it's often overcast in the UK, which can be quite depressing if it's overcast for a long time and you don't see the sun or the blue sky. But it wasn't overcast today. There was intermittent cloud or intermittent sun. So, it was bits of clouds, bits of sun. It was mixed, which is actually quite common for the UK as well. So, we tend to go from overcast days to days of intermittent sun, where it's just constantly changing. And this is the difficulty with British weather is that you can have four seasons in one day, you do not know what's gonna happen usually with the weather in any day, regardless of a forecast, it's always good to be prepared to have a little brolly or a rain mac in your handbag or, you know, to have layers of clothes so that you can wrap up or strip off whatever you need to do, depending on what happens with our unpredictable weather. Okay, what else did I say? I used the term out of the blue, I said,"Out of the blue, it started hailing." If something happens out of the blue, then it happens unexpectedly and it happens without warning. Now, we had no warning that there was going to be a hailstorm. In fact, what happened during the storm was there was a very sudden flash of lightning and a booming, booming crack of thunder. And they were two seconds apart. It actually, my studio shook with the thunder. I've never known lightning and thunder be so close together, which means obviously it was very, very close to where I was. I started Googling,'am I safe in my garden studio?' Because this is just a shed. I don't think it's safe to be inside a wooden shed when there's a thunderstorm literally overhead. So, I was like, do I wear my rubber shoes or not? Should I be earthed? I can't remember. What do I do? It was quite unnerving for a moment, but it was all out of the blue. There was no warning. I said,"To cope with this I did a video on the spur of the moment." So, to do something on the spur of the moment, spur is spelled S P U R. On the spur, on the spur of the moment. This is an idiom that means to do something without planning in advance, and you do it impulsively. You just go,"Oh, let's just do it." So, I hadn't planned to make a short video. I didn't think about it. I just picked up my camera and did it. It was just an impulse. Now, on the spur of the moment is usually involved with an activity. It's something that you do. You do something on the spur of the moment. Something might happen out of the blue, but you do something on the spur of the moment. Now, another idiom that's very similar that I used was off the cuff. Off the cuff is an idiom that means to do something without preparation, but it's usually used when you're talking about speaking, or it could be used for doing, but maybe more for something that you're performing. So, I sang a little song off the cuff, or I gave a speech off the cuff, or I made some predictions off the cuff, but I hadn't really had a chance to think about it. So, off the cuff is normally or typically related to speaking. On the spur of the moment is related to doing something. And out of the blue is describing something happening. Okay. So, someone might arrive out of the blue. And you might decide to sing them a song on the spur of the moment and I might tell you a story off the cuff. Okay, so they're all very closely related and in some cases they can be interchangeable. I then used the words irritated, agitated, exasperated. These three words all describe a level of frustration, but they just describe different levels. A low level of frustration where you're a little bit bothered by something is irritated."Ugh! That fly is really irritating. It keeps buzzing around my head." Agitated is more intense. It's where you start to feel like you're getting a bit angry. Okay, so the fly is irritating me, but the constant clicking of your pen, you keep clicking your pen and that's actually making me feel like my blood is starting to boil. That's making me feel agitated. I might have to say something in a minute because I'm feeling a bit annoyed. I'm agitated. And exasperated is where you are like exhausted with irritation. You're so very annoyed that you almost give up. You don't know what else to do. Like you've tried and tried and tried to deal with a problem and you're just, you don't know how to deal with it anymore. Okay. So, the three levels of frustration: irritated, agitated, exasperated. Well, I hope that you are not irritated or agitated or exasperated by today's episode. And I hope that at least one of the items of vocabulary has been useful for you today. Have a wonderful day, whatever you're doing. And thank you again for your ongoing support. Until tomorrow, take very good care and goodbye.