Category: Butterfly

Not going far – 29 August 2023

Posted on by Zogman

I had enough exercise yesterday. I didn’t want any more today.

Scamp was out early to get her nails ‘done’ again, then she was meeting Shona for coffee. I was asked if I wanted to join them, but I decided they would get on better without me!

Instead I stayed home and read for a while and looked through the photos that had arrived in Flickr overnight. The window cleaner arrived and I spent a wee while blethering to him. Basically, I did nothing, or as close to nothing as I felt I could get away with.

After Scamp arrived home with her new lilac nails we had lunch and then I went for a walk in St Mo’s. It was one of those days with gusty winds blowing the rain clouds around, creating what the weather fairies delight in calling ‘scattered showers’. PoD went to a rather demonic looking photo of what looks like a pair of horns behind a bush. It’s actually a macro of an earwig’s rear end! There are over 1000 species of earwigs in the world and only 4 are native to the UK.

The competitor for PoD was a shot of a Peacock butterfly with its wings locked together to keep a sudden rain shower out of their delicate upper surface. As soon as the rain stopped the wings folded out and it sat there taking in the warmth from the sun that had appeared after the cloud cleared.

Dinner tonight was an experiment. Pasta Carbonara with mushrooms, shallots and finely sliced bacon. It seemed to go down well and will be worth trying another time.

A short dance practise in the evening  just to make sure the Joy’s Waltz and the new short(ish) cha-cha are firmly in my head.

Tomorrow is an early rise. Scamp and the rest of the witches are off to Pitlochry on the bus for the day. I’m driving them to the Town Centre to catch the bus which leaves at 8.45am! I hope they have a great day. No singing on the bus, though!

Out to Lunch – 25 August 2023

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It was Scamp who suggested that we go out to lunch today.

In the morning she went to her FitSteps class and I did some housekeeping. Actual, physical tidying-up housekeeping, but also the more interesting and almost invisible housekeeping on the computer. I was searching for a sofa bed that I knew was in the back bedroom / painting room / spare room. I’d seen it recently under a pile of books, a rucksack and a blizzard of paper. After some rearranging of things, a disposing of rubbish and just finding better places for jackets and hats to live, there, under it all was the sofa bed. It’s not completely unearthed yet, but now I know where to look the next time I might need it.

The computer clean-up took longer, although there was far less physical work involved. It’s so easy to get sidetracked into looking at photos you haven’t seen for a while and then that leads to more photos that look interesting until nearly an hour has gone and you still haven’t accomplished what you set out to do. It was when Scamp returned I realised that I was only half way through the clean up or what became a clear out. However I did manage to get the required photos put in the bin and their replacement put in place. I’ve still to empty the bin, because, well, I’ll need to check that I wasn’t throwing good photos out with the bad, and you never know when I’ll need that one or that one or …

I shut the computer down. I powered it off and we went out to lunch, just as the rain came on. Thankfully it didn’t last long because we’d agreed to walk down to Broadwood Farm for a cheap lunch and a glass of something alcoholic. After all it was Friday and the end of the historical working week. Not that I’ve been involved in any working for a while now, but you have to keep these traditions alive! Fish & Chips for Scamp and small carvery for me. Small because that means two of the three meats that are always available, Gammon, Turkey and Cardboard. It’s actually advertised as Roast Beef, but it’s so dry the gravy won’t be absorbed into it and it tastes like cardboard, so let’s cut to the chase here and call it what it is – Cardboard. Some mixed veg and Cauliflower Cheese brightened up the plate and actually the food was good, washed down with a pint of Tennents for me and a glass of 19 Crimes Red for Scamp. The father of a family sitting on the other side of the room had a broad southern Irish accent, and although he was speaking quite loudly, I couldn’t understand more than about three words in every sentence. This got me thinking: Is that what I sound like to English folk? I must ask Simonne the next time we meet. Scamp thinks Simonne can probably decode my accent by now!

Back home the streets were drying, but not for long. I was just thinking I might get an hour in St Mo’s when down it came, straight down rain. As soon as it had disappeared to bother somebody else, I got my boots on and went for a walk with the A6500 and a 50mm macro lens. The 50 did its magic again. 50mm used to be the lens to stick on your camera. A general purpose go anywhere lens that could handle most things. That part hasn’t really changed, but having the ‘macro’ part means it’s possible to focus down to about 30mm from the front of the lens and still get super sharp images. Kind of two lenses in one. Today it took a photo of a swan drying its wings while standing on a rock in the middle of St Mo’s pond – the swan was standing on the rock, not me, BTW! Daft, but not stupid. It took a photo of a tiny, about 3mm long spider on a web. Last, but not least it took a photo of a Red Admiral butterfly sunning itself on a bush. First red admiral I’ve seen this year and even better, there were actually two of them! The butterfly got PoD and the other two are able to be viewed on Flickr.

Swans are sneaky things.  You’ve only got to ask Jamie about their wiles!  The one referred to in the previous paragraph successfully enveigled itself into the photograph, but it’s now been bounced out and replaced with the butterfly.  Swan’s! You can never turn your back on them for a minute.  Ask Jamie!

A thin G&T each tonight because we’re out early tomorrow intending to drive to Brookfield to demonstrate that we have been practising the Outside Spin, if not the Cross Basic.

The Complaints – 21 August 2023

Posted on by Zogman

We have an ongoing problem with British Gas. We have not had a gas bill from British Gas since November 2022. Since May 2023 Scamp has phoned, chatted with the ‘help bot’ and sent a picture of our gas meter as requested, but still no bill. Our smart meter still reads and updates the electricity and gas usage and sends the results to British Gas who are our supplier for both gas and electricity. We receive regular bills for the electricity we use, but the gas readings go into a bin somewhere, I think.

We have received FOUR identical replies from British Gas recently, stating that problem has been “picked up by their specialist team and is currently in the process of being worked on”, but, as yet, they still haven’t produced a bill. It may be time to move on! Scamp wrote another email to them today which will probably generate a fifth identical reply.

My part in this sorry tale was to give a one star review on Trustpilot today. It was picked up and I now have an address on Twitter (or X) to write to or an address on Facebook if I don’t tweet or X. The message was probably generated by a ‘bot’, but who knows, maybe it’s some poor soul’s job to reply to these complaints.
At least it gave us something to do this morning.

I think that was the excitement over for the day, after lunch I went for a walk in St Mo’s to see if there was anything wanting its photo taken. There were clouds of Peacock butterflies in the sheltered parts of the park, and also a couple of dragonflies, but that was it, really. One of the dragonflies got PoD, but only after using some very clever AI apps in Lightroom. I’m not a great believer in AI, but it has its uses.

No plans for tomorrow. Weather looks less than brilliant.

Tidying up – 14 August 2023

Posted on by Zogman

Not my room this time, but the car.

Tomorrow is MoT day for the wee blue car and there were some things that needed fixing before it went in for its first checkup. I watched a few YouTube videos about replacing the rear wiper. I never knew there were so many variations of rear wiper blades for one model of car. It took a while, but I eventually found our model, or near enough our model and it seemed really simple, except the old blade refused to come off until I coaxed some WD40 into the pivot and then everything went like clockwork. Drove up to Halfords and found the correct blade. It cost £5.95 for the blade and it would have cost another £5 to get them to fit it! Thank goodness for WD40. It saved the day again.

The car got a wash a couple of days ago but today it was the inside that needed cleaned. Crushed leaves and the sticky covering of buds from the trees, with the addition of the usual collection of parking receipts and sweetie papers all had to be hoovered up. I drained the battery of the portable Dyson and put it back on charge while I decanted the mats from the footwells and brought them in to the house to be hoovered with the big plug in Dyson. The boot too was emptied, everything hoovered and put back in place.

Dusters were flying around the dashboard too to make everything look sparkling, or as sparkling as it can be if I’m doing it. Filled up the washer bottle and cleaned more detritus from the wiper sockets and we were ready to go.

Time for a relaxing walk in St Mo’s. There wasn’t much to see and the rain clouds were rolling in, so it was just once round the pond. PoD turned out to be a stem of Purple Loosestrife which has rings of purple flower at intervals up its height. Allegedly it is an invasive species, but so are humans, they say, and we’re still here!! I had a fallback photo that I took in the morning, a Peacock butterfly on our Buddleia bush in the garden.  I now have proof that our buddleia does indeed attract butterflies!

I lost track of time when I was out and that meant the dinner was about an hour late, but it was penne pasta in a vegetarian sauce with “what’s left in the fridge” contributing to its richness, plus some of our home grown herbs bolstering basil from the pot on the window ledge. That was Scamp’s idea and it’s a good one.

She is intending to go to meet one of her friends from work tomorrow after she gets her nail polish professionally removed. I’m driving the blue car in to Glasgow to get its first MoT done, hopefully, successfully!

Out to lunch – 15 May 2023

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We got the text just after 9am. Ben went to school!

That meant we were on track to take Ben’s mum, Shona to lunch. Picked her up just before midday and drove by the backroads to The Stables because it was such a lovely day. Shona was adamant that this was her treat. In fact this was her contribution to our Golden Wedding anniversary. When she told us that, how could we refuse. Scamp and Shona had a Fish Finger Sandwich each. Big chunks of fish in batter in a panini, with a cup of chips each. I had the meat eater’s version which was a slice of fillet steak cooked rare and also served on a panini and also with a cup of chips. Both lunch meals were delicious.

After lunch we went for a walk along the towpath of the Forth & Clyde canal which runs past the front of the restaurant. We walked for about a mile in the general direction of Glasgow before we turned back. Loads to see today. Butterflies all along the path, Peacock, Orange Tip and Cabbage Whites, mainly. Bluebells growing under the trees and a big Aquilegia growing wild in the hedgerow. Loads of people out on bikes making the most of an unexpectedly good day. There was even a canal boat chugging sedately heading for Glasgow, probably. It was the Yarrow Seagull and it got PoD with Scamp and Shona getting in on the photo too.

We dropped Shona off at her house and we drove home via Tesco. Back home, Scamp swithered, whether to cut the front grass or not. Eventually she decide she would and I was enlisted to lift the flower pots out of the way of the mower and replace them when she was finished.

Some of the roses needed a last trim before the flower buds appear and that was my job. I also pruned the Forsythia now that the flowers had gone over and before the leaves come fully out. My final job was to tie back the pink fluffy plant in the back garden. I can never remember its name. I know there are two of them, slightly different from each other but both are planted beside each other. The one I was working with today is really tall and although I’m sure it can stand up for itself, a bamboo stake and a couple of fairly loose cable ties wouldn’t do any harm to give it a little more support in today’s gusty breeze.

Today’s prompt asked for “Artwork you love”. Scamp and I both love the massive Kelpies. The 30m (100ft) high artwork was created by Scottish sculptor Andy Scott. They stand in Helix Park in Falkirk at the eastern end of the Forth & Clyde canal. They are made from steel and each one weighs over 300 tonnes. They were modelled on real Clydesdale horses Duke and Baron.

We’d ordered a pair of slipper shoes for Scamp at a fair discount last Friday. They were supposed to be delivered today, but the postcode was wrong. A mix up at the ordering stage. My fault for not checking properly. However when we got home the parcel was there waiting for us. One of the benefits of having the same postman all the time is that they get to know the names and addresses and don’t rely too much on postcodes.  And while I’m on the subject of shoes.  A big thank you to Scamp for sneakily getting my favourite black and white dance shoes soled and heeled for me.  I’ve been meaning to do it myself, I even bought Evostick glue to do it, but just never got round to doing it.  Sometimes you have to get the expert to do it properly, so thank you again, Scamp.

Tomorrow, unbelievably we’re hoping to go out for lunch again with Crawford & Nancy.

 

Dancin’ – 10 September 2022

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We drove over to Brookfield in beautiful sunshine.

We arrived early, mainly because there were no football matches on today as a mark of respect for the death of the queen, so the road was fairly clear.

First today was a reprise and a cleaning up of the Charnwood Cha-Cha, which we managed fairly well. Next was a new Foxtrot routine. We only did about half of it, but it was looking quite good. A lot more technical than the older foxtrot we learned earlier in the year. After that, things started to go downhill rapidly for me. Stewart announced that we were going to learn a new sequence dance called there Balmoral Blues, and nodded to us, because we’d attempted it on Thursday by watching what others were doing and following them. Today was different. Today we were learning the proper version and it seemed to have many more steps than Thursday’s version. Jane said she hated this dance and by the end of the lesson I fully agreed with her. None of the figures seemed to gel with each other. It just looked like a hodge-podge of moves. Lastly was the waltz we’d been learning. I think my brain had shut down after the Bloody Balmoral Blues. I’d had enough. I just couldn’t figure out where we were and what came next. I apologised to Scamp and sat out the last five or ten minutes and watched other suffer.

We drove home by our alternative route through the Clyde Tunnel which cuts out the dastardly Kingston Bridge. It worked its magic again and we only had about five minutes of queueing on the other side.

Back home, Scamp went out to get chicken for tonight’s dinner and told me to get up and go out for a walk in the sunshine to brighten my mood. I took her at her word, but it wasn’t until she came back that I was kitted out to go for a walk in St Mo’s. Lots of butterflies, Peacocks, Red Admirals and maybe a Tortoiseshell. Lots of bees and hoverflies on the Scabious flowers too. PoD is a Common Carder Bee. Ended my walk by going down to M&S and sourcing a fish pie for tomorrow’s dinner.

I’m still searching for my next phone. I did think about an iPhone 13, but after some good advice from Hazy, I may review the Samsung again. Now it’s your turn Jamie and Simonne. I’m looking at either an iPhone 13 or a Samsung S22+ with 128GB. Hoping it will give me a decent camera and enough storage space for my needs. Do you pair have any suggestions?

Tomorrow is the Cumbernauld 10K.  We may go and cheer the runners on if it’s not raining and if we’re up in time.  We will not be running!

White Rabbits (x3) – 1 September 2022

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Scamp was feeling a bit dizzy this morning, so instead of taking Shona out for coffee, she came to us instead, for tea.

It was really a ladies morning with the two of them going over Shona and Ben’s recent visit to her cousins in London and Warrington. There was so much talk going on that there was no time to show her our holiday snaps. Just before we left to take her shopping, a parcel arrived for me! It was a surprise packet of tea from Jamie. Not your ordinary tea either, this was Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster tea. It’s peppermint and blackcurrant flavoured in a black tea base with ‘sparkles’ that glitter when it’s brewing. It actually tastes quite good. Maybe not quite as good as the bright blue “Intergallactic Space Juice” that came as a concentrate and was added to Sodastream bottles, back in the late ‘70s and early ’80s. Thanks for that, Jamie. It certainly brightened my day.

Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster was of course a cocktail created by Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

We dropped Shona off at the Town Centre and headed back to Tesco for some messages. After lunch I took the camera out for a walk in St Mo’s, but found very little to inspire me. However, back home Scamp had managed to get a photo of a Peacock butterfly on one of our multicoloured buddleia bush. This is probably the first butterfly to visit these “Butterfly bushes” and is certainly the first this year. I think she was quite pleased to beat me to the photo. I managed to get a few shots of it when it returned to the bush, but none are as good as Scamp’s. She must have a really good camera!

It was Mince ’n’ Tatties for my dinner and Bubble ’n’ Squeak for Scamp’s. Both good old fashioned plates of food. I managed to keep a few spoonfuls of the M&T to have for my lunch tomorrow.

PoD was a ball of thistledown waiting for the wind to distribute it to the four corners of St Mo’s. I liked the way it seemed to be bubbling out of the flower head.

Scamp has an appointment at the health centre tomorrow morning to let one of the nurses have a look at her ears and hopefully see if that’s what’s causing the dizziness although it seems to have settled down as the day progressed. After that she’s off to a Witches meeting at Moira’s. I’m thinking about getting the Dewdrop back on the road and going hunting brambles, if the weather holds.

Another day, another test – 17 August 2022

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This morning Scamp did another test, but it was just positive and no more.

The general rule seems to be that you have to stay at home for five days from the first positive test. I assume that after that time you aren’t definitely clear, but are unlikely to pass on the infection. Everything is so vague now that hospitalisations are so much fewer than they were last year.

Anyway, Scamp declared herself still positive although she was feeling better than yesterday. I declared myself happy that today I was up to date with blog posts and also with Flickr posts, but was intending going for a walk in the afternoon to get more photos to post and stories to tell.

While Scamp was busy in the garden I went for a walk in St Mo’s. There were lots of lovely dragonflies fluttering around the boardwalk at St Mo’s pond. Mostly common darter males but also a few black darters circling the ponds. Butterflies too were in plentiful supply almost all of them were Peacocks. Had a chat with Fred while I was out and before my signal broke up. I really do need to look into the possibility of changing my phone. One of the common darter males (head on) got PoD.

Hoping for another sunny day tomorrow.

Walking in the woods – 10 July 2022

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Another lovely day with wall to wall sunshine in the morning.

Scamp’s suggestion for today was a walk round Broadwood with the extension through the woods. It suited me too because it meant I didn’t have to drive. Just for the sake of it, we went anticlockwise as opposed to our usual clockwise walk. I didn’t think there would be much to photograph and I was right. We did see a pair of crested grebes on Broadwood Loch, but they were too far away. I think it was just the feeling of being out with shorts and tee shirt in the sunshine that made the walk interesting. Also, for me, not lugging a camera and a couple of lenses, just one small camera with one lens made the walk more enjoyable. An as yet unnamed butterfly followed us on our Sunday morning walk through the woods at Broadwood, stopping occasionally, but never long enough for me to get close. Finally, I thought I knew where it had landed, but then couldn’t see the insect. Purely by accident I triggered the shutter button and took a photo of a butterfly I couldn’t see! Almost perfect camouflage. That photo of the butterfly became PoD.

Back home for lunch and then I volunteered to walk down to the shops to get some salad veg for dinner and a carton of milk. No wee man to offer me a Mivvi today, but after I got home I thought I should really have bought a packet of them just to stick in the freezer.

While I was out, Scamp was hacking into the blackcurrant bush and doing a great job of cutting it back while opening it out to remove all the criss cross of branches in the centre of it, Those are the ones that limit the light getting in to the bush.

I was on dinner duty today and it was quiche. It’s a while since I’ve made quiche and I had to stick to Scamp and Jackie’s quantities and techniques to get the pastry made and then the filling added. Two quiches as it happened, one with broccoli, smoked salmon and tomatoes. One with cheese and tomatoes. We ate half of each and have the other half ready for tomorrow.

After dinner we sat out in the sun for a short while before deciding to water the garden. It really needed the water with the temperature reaching 25ºc which is positively tropical for Scotland. Later when Jamie phoned, we found that they could beat us with a 31ºc, but that’s becoming the norm for those in the Deep South. Who knows what the temperature was in London.

We watched an almost interesting Austrian GP with a commentator nearly bursting a blood vessel trying to make it sound like the earth shattering race it simply wasn’t. Nice try, pal. Hope the blood pressure is back to normal now.

Now here’s a strange thing. I just checked and the title of the blog one year ago in the 10th of July 2021 was … “Walking in the woods”. Maybe I’m becoming predictable. Hope not!

Tomorrow we may go out for a drive. Not been out driving for ages.

The first of July – 1 July 2022

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Hopefully a warmer and calmer month than ‘Flaming June’.

We faced the potential of more rain and drove up to Tesco for milk, bread and breakfast cereals and ended up coming home with what was a fairly substantial weekly shop.

Back home I had my usual end of month clean up of the last month’s photos. It’s amazing how many photos I take in a month, even once I’ve culled and deleted the obvious junk photos.

Because I’d cleared out some space on the computer, that gave me the chance to fill that space with more photos. That’s why I went out for a walk in the afternoon to get some photos. It was definitely going to be an insect of some description that was going to be PoD and it turned out to be a Ringlet butterfly that filled that first space in Flickr. I’m trying to actively reduce the number of photos I post in Flickr to increase the quality of my submissions.

While I was over in St Mo’s taking photos, Scamp was pruning and clearing space in the garden, digging things out and moving things around. Just keeping things in good order.

We did manage half an hour or so in the garden when I was back from my walk and Scamp had taken her gardening gloves off. Time to read a bit and have a glass of wine. Then the sun disappeared and it was time to head inside again.

Tomorrow hoping to get one more dance lesson at Brookfield before the teachers go off on their three week holiday work on a cruise ship.