Month: January 2017

Fog – 21 January 2017

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Woke to fog, thick, cloying grey fog.  We hoped it would burn off because we were sure there was a sun up there, the weather fairies had said so.  They lied.

We waited until midday and there was still little respite from the fog, so we went out in it anyway, hoping against hope that it was the Cumbernauld Cloud, but it wasn’t.  It wasn’t until we were nearing Tillicoultry that the fog magically cleared.  Scamp was just saying that Fifers must pay a special fog tax and then we drove back into the fog again.  If they are paying the fog tax then they are being stung!  We wandered round the outlet village had a cup of coffee and came home.  The fog was lighter for a while, then thickened and merged seamlessly into the Cumbernauld Cloud.

What a grey day.

Today’s PoD is the second in my Words Ending In ‘ation’ series.  The rules are:

  • It must contain at least one Weeman.
  • It must have a one word title ending in …ation.
  • It must prevent me taking a photo of a flower.

Oh yes, and this is the sketch of the week.  Apples and Oranges.

I think it’s going to rain tomorrow.  I hope not, but I think it will.

“Excuse me …” – 20 January 2017

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Earlier today:
I’m sitting alone watching and listening to the films of the people’s stories in the Disappearing Glasgow exhibition in the Lighthouse. I’ve just had to shut up a couple of wahoos who were pontificating loudly about the photography round the walls.  I just got madder and madder with them and eventually turned round and called across the room “Excuse me. Do you mind if I listen to this?” That did the trick.  My seven days beard growth and my old battered and torn Bergy jacket probably helped.  They shut up then left … quietly.  They were english, so they didn’t know how to behave.

Later today:
When I eventually rose to leave, about twenty minutes later, there were six other people sitting around me.  I hadn’t noticed them arriving.  They hadn’t said a word throughout the films.  They were Scottish.  Brought up properly.
Definitely an exhibition worth seeing and hearing if you get the chance.

Glasgow was dull today with one of those milky white skies that simply drag you further down.  A January Sky.  No directional light, so no shadows.  I couldn’t see anything I wanted to photograph, so I got the train back home.

Stepped off the train at Croy and realised that it was only just coming up to 2pm.  It seemed a shame to just drive home and stare at a glowing screen for an hour or two, so I decided to travel east in the hope of finding some brighter skies in Stirling and also hoping that Tiso would still be in business there and would have a pair of the excellent Bergy gloves in a small size to fit Scamp, and that is what I did.

I didn’t get the brighter skies, but I did get a couple of photos.  One of the Wallace Monument through the mist and another of a closed down pub.  I also got the gloves.  I considered stopping for a coffee, but then decided I’d rather be on my way home before rush hour, because rush hour on the M9/M80 is a nightmare of drivers changing lanes, changing back, cutting in, cutting out. Just a situation to be avoided, and that is what I did.

I don’t know what we’re doing tomorrow.  The weather fairies say it will be fine with sunshine.

There’s been a Murder! – 19 January 2017

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Not a real one, or at least not one I’ve had anything to do with … honest!

After completing my initial roadie’s duties for Scamp and Gems today I had a couple of hours free to do as I wanted.  I wanted to drive in to Glasgow to get some sketching done before my Sunday cut-off.  That’s what I wanted to do, but I didn’t achieve it.  I got in to Glasgow without any problem, but when I got there, the two parking places I was heading for were full and I found my third, and realistically my last option given my time constraints, being taken away by a white BMW as I was driving towards it.  Nae luck.  The parking gods were against me, so I turned around and headed back home.  I stopped off to get ice cream at Soave’s in Muirhead so it wouldn’t have been a totally wasted journey.  Scamp has tempted me into joining her in her passion for Scottish Tablet Ice Cream.  It really is lovely.

I’d just got home and stashed the ice cream in the freezer when she phoned to tell me that ’George her faithful Roadie’ 1 was once again required to drive the stars home.  Got home and remembered that I didn’t have a PoD and it was too dark by then to get anything at all, let alone anything with a decent ISO rating.  Then I remembered seeing a framed photo in the Design Fair in Merchant Square before Christmas.  It was of a group of tiny wee 1/72 scale figures dressed as a forensic team photographing a dictionary open at the word ‘Murder’.  I don’t have any of these really expensive figures that would do for the project, but I do have plenty of minifigs, the notorious Weemen and so I got to work setting it up.  I used the Oly 10 because you can remote control it with an iPhone through a private WiFi connection.  No, I don’t understand it either, but it works.  After a couple of dummy runs I had the PoD you see above.

That’s about it for the day.  Tomorrow I’m hoping to park at the station and let the train take the strain in to Glasgow.  A much better idea, because they can park it for me too.

  1. “George my faithful Roadie” is a track on Billy Connolly’s 1974 album, “Cop Yer Whack For This”  Listen to the track HERE ↩

In The Wild – 18 January 2017

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Today we drove to The Fort in what used to be Provanhall in Easterhouse.  Where Scamp was brought up.  It certainly doesn’t look like it now.  It’s a Retail Park.  We were just getting out of the house for a while because it was depressingly dull and the howling dogs next door were doing my head in.  People who want dogs as a status symbol and who go out to work leaving neighbours to put up with their howling should be prevented from keeping pets.  They obviously don’t care about them and leave others to suffer from their noise pollution.  Maybe NLC will be visiting them soon.

While Scamp wandered round the shops, she left me in the creche that is Waterstones book shop.  It’s just a small book shop, but has some interesting new drawing books and it was one of them I tried to enter into my new app, Airtable.  That’s when the honeymoon ended.  I couldn’t get a signal on my iPhone.  Unusual in a shop these days when everywhere seems to offer ’free’ WiFi.  Yes, it is free, but you have to ask for the password and obtaining it is sometimes like pulling teeth or stone exsanguination.  Today was different, no 3G or 4G and no WiFi and therefore, no Airtable because it needs to download your database from ‘the cloud’.  I opened Bento and it obligingly added my book to the database I’ve been using for about five years.  When I returned home and Googled “No offline access Airtable” I found that over 40 people had registered the same complaint and the desire for that offline access.  I filled in the questionnaire and became number 44 in the list.  I don’t expect much will be done in the short term to fix this, but what is the point of making an app for a portable device that demand internet access.  In a perfect world, 24/7 internet would be the norm, but I live in Scotland where even the trains don’t run on New Year’s Day.  We’re one step away from horses pulling carts along the street.  What surprised me most though was the number of complaints from users in the US.  It appears that away from the cities, they are as bereft of trustworthy internet access as we are here.
So…. The search for a replacement for Bento continues.

When we came back from The Fort and I’d taken the wrong turn coming out of the carpark for the 100th time, there was just enough light to grab some shots of Mr Grey at St Mo’s.  Then the light mysteriously disappeared and I headed home for mince and tatties with ‘roop’  (AKA Beetroot).  But I didn’t do a treasure hunt, JIC 😉

I was a helper at Shan’s beginners salsa tonight.  Oh dear, I wonder why these poor beginners keep coming back.  This is not entertainment or education, this is purgatory.  Badly explained, badly demonstrated dance moves with as little humour as Marcus Wareing.  I felt embarrassed to be helping in this class and I don’t think I’ll be back again.  Jamie G’s class by comparison was a bundle of laughs as it always is.  Unlike normal classes, all the moves tonight had ‘real’ names, and mostly Spanish names too.  Great fun.  Nobody ridiculed or made to feel small.  He always denegrates himself rather than pour scorn on others.  A great teacher.  Many could learn from him.

Being a roadie for tomorrow Gems tomorrow when they head the bill at the Link on Cumbersheugh.

Perf – 17 January 2017

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Today we went to Perf, Perth to you.  It was a really dull, dreary day when we left the Cumbernauld Cloud, but true to form, the weather brightened up about halfway to Stirling and from then on it was a lovely day.

Walked from the carpark to the coffee shop to start our visit in the time-honoured fashion and stopped at Clarks shoe shop to see if there were any bargains.  There were and a new pair of shoes and trainers were soon bagged and paid for.  I think the trainers may replace the ones I got last week.  Both are Goretex which I think is the bees knees as far as walking in Scotland is concerned, in fact all three new pieces of footwear are Goretex.  Coffee scoffed we wandered for a while around Perf and decided on an early lunch.  We went to a new (to us) cafe and I had a lamb burger (which I am suffering for now) topped with feta cheese.  Not sure it’s a great combination.  I get the link: Feta – cheese made from sheep’s milk and Lamb, but it just didn’t taste that good.  Maybe it’s just me.  Scamp had a chicken burger which seemed to go down well.  Coffee was on a par with Callander Coffee!

After lunch we split up Scamp went shopping for a bag and I went looking for books.  Didn’t find any, but I did pick up a lovely Dylan album in  the Bootleg series.  From the Philharmonic Hall in New York 1964.  An all acoustic set.  Brilliant.  Scamp didn’t find a bag – the search continues.   I also got today’s trilogy.  The girl in the mono shots was busking next to the the iconic street architecture in the main street of Perf.  Actually she was quite good and I really should have dropped some money in her guitar bag.  I liked the graphical nature of the the square window overseen by the security camera.

When we met up again, I went and got some coffee and tea and also dropped in at a fabric shop and bought some blue cotton with white spots to make another bow tie, a keeper this time I hope.  By the time we got on to the main street, the light was failing and it was time to drive home.  I felt quite sorry for the old church at the end of the main street.  I’ve photographed it a few times.  It used to provide great shots of pigeons sitting in the broken stained glass windows.  The last time we were in Perf there was scaffolding on it and I hoped it would be renovated, but today there was a security fence round it and the scaffolding was gone.  Soon, I think the church will be too.  Such a pity.

I finally managed to rip the Monty Python DVD tonight.  I used an old program that I’ve used in the past and also one that Hazy suggested, ‘Make MKV’.  It wouldn’t work on the Mac, I think it didn’t like the DVD player being connected by USB.  Maybe the information stream wasn’t quick enough.  However, when I used the PC laptop, MakeMKV got to work right away and after half an hour or so later I had the rip.  Unfortunately it was a 4Gb rip.  Compressing it into an MP4 file looks like it’s going to take a couple of hours, but that’s a job for tomorrow.

No plans for tomorrow yet, apart from converting from MKV to MP4.

AirTable v Bento – 16 January 2017

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Another aimless day mostly spent under grey skies with the occasional shower of rain falling to give a bit of variety.

I spent most of the morning working with and learning to use AirTable, a multi-platform database that Hazy alerted me to.  Up until recently I’d used Bento,  the delightfully simple database for IOS and OSX.  I don’t use it much on the Mac, but it’s always there on my phone, especially the books database.  If I’m browsing in Waterstones and see a new book I like the look of, I type its name into my Bento Books Database, along with the author.  Then, when I have the time, I look it up on Amazon to see a price I’m willing to pay.  More recently, I have started looking in my local library e-book list to see if there is anything there.  Unfortunately, NLC library don’t have a great deal of e-books in THEIR database yet, but it’s always worth a look.  Once I’ve borrowed or bought a book, I tick it off as ‘Checked Out’ then later when I’ve read it or junked it I mark it either ‘Keep’ or ‘Drop’.  All done on Bento.  Unfortunately, Bento was itself ‘Dropped’ by Filemaker for reasons best known to themselves in 2013 (ish) and users were encouraged to replace it with Filemaker Go which is free, but really requires Filemaker Pro which costs around £170.  A hefty price to pay for a book database.  Enter AirTable which seems to fit the bill of price (free for non-commercial) and power.  I had a bit of a problem getting my Bento database into it, but with some HazyHelp, it worked a treat.  The main problem was that Bento on the phone wouldn’t sync with Bento on the Mac.  I gave up looking for a solution and in the end, just typed in the details I was missing.  Not comes the big test, when I take it out in the wild tomorrow to see if it cuts the mustard!

Went for a walk down the Luggie Water in the later afternoon, while Gems were invading the house, but saw very little apart from the ‘Ripples’ shot.  Drove up to Hulks Road, a wild bit of country road on the outskirts of Cumbersheugh, and got some lovely light on the landscape after such a dull day.  That’s where the rest of the shots came from.

Salsa tonight was a disaster.  I couldn’t remember the move we did last week, despite having watched our record of it before we went out.  Worse still, we did Chi-wa-wa (sic) which I know and like, and I couldn’t get that either.  I must have been one of the few leaders who actually knew the move, but was the only one who couldn’t get it right.  Embarrassing?  Just a little.  Lots of folk there tonight who hadn’t been to class for ages.  Good to see.  Scamp and I went for a coffee and a soft drink with Catherine and Linda after class to catch up with everybody’s news.

Tomorrow we may go to Perth for coffee and the run.  Weather looks as if it will cooperate.

Geese – 15 January 2017

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Half past one in the afternoon and I’m standing in the middle of an old coup that was previously a spoil tip for a coal mine. Now it’s just wilderness and I’m watching and listening to skein after skein of geese flying overhead heading north. What do they know that we don’t?

That was written much earlier in the day.  I’d cycled to the tip and by the time I was heading for home, an hour and a half later, the skeins were flying west, south and occasionally north, but not east.  By that time the light was failing and I imagine that these birds had been flying since first light some eight hours earlier and are now looking for somewhere to roost for the night.  There are quite a few fields around Cumbersheugh where geese feed and then roost.  That would explain the apparently contradictory flight paths.  It was great listening to the skeins as they ‘talked’ to each other.  Some will say that’s not true, that they don’t communicate, but if you listen, it does sound like they are sharing information with each other.

While I was walking around the tip, I got a few shots of folk on top of the Kirkie Volcano.  It’s really a pit bing (spoil heap), but from this angle it looks just like a volcano.  One day I’m going to walk up it and take some photos from the top.  East Dunbarton Council should really make it into a visitor attraction with a wee coffee shop at the top.  It would make a fortune.  I may suggest it to them.

It was a lovely day today with a few showers of rain, but the temperature was decent, very decent for the time of year with highs of just over 10ºc.  Not quite shorts and tee shirts weather, but not far off it.  I did wander around in my shorts for a while, but it was too cool to cycle in them.  I saw the moss fruiting bodies (Green Blobs) when I was putting my cycling ‘longs’ (the opposite of shorts) back on and was quite impressed with the colour the camera caught.

Tomorrow is back to Gems in the afternoon, so I need somewhere to go.  Not sure where yet.  😉

Bow Tie – 14 January 2017

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Firstly, you will have noticed that there is no photo of the bow tie.  That’s because it’s not quite finished yet.  It’s a prototype, made from a pillowslip, not something you’d expect to wear to a posh do, but essential as a practise piece.  I learned a lot from making it and I made it exactly as if it was made from the finest silk.  I stuck closely to the instructions and followed every step.  I made mistakes along the way, but hopefully I have learned from them.  Tomorrow I hope to iron (yes, along the way I’ve also learned how to iron) the prototype and finish off the sewing.  I might even try to tie it.  Every day’s a school day.

After the sewing session, we drove to Vecchia Bologna for lunch.  The place was mobbed, Scamp said it was the end of an Itison voucher offer.  We had to wait a little longer than usual for the food, but when it came, it was as good as ever.  Neither of us wanted or particularly needed anything in Stirling, so we just drove home and I went out for a walk through the ice and snow to St Mo’s.  Managed to surprise two deer, but the quality was so poor, they didn’t get published.  I did, however like the shots from the Oly 5 with the 9mm lens and that’s what you see above.

Tonight, I made some scones and have bread proving as I write this hoping to get it baked later.  Baking scones, baking bread, sewing and ironing.  Don’t tell me I’m not in touch with my feminine side!

As a bit of serendipity, you should read what I wrote last year on the 14th of January.  There should be a link to ‘A Year Ago Today’ at the bottom of the right hand column.  Navigate to the 14th from there.  Amazing synchronicity!

 

Cauld day in the Toon – 13 January 2017

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We went in to Glasgow, drove into Glasgow.  The ring road was still being dug up and we weren’t sure the buses were running normally and besides, we didn’t want to be sitting in a bus whose heater was pumping out cold air for 45minutes.  That’s one of the reasons we bought a car.

I bought myself some interfacing for stiffening the cloth I’m going to make a bow tie with.  Got it in JL (didn’t get it delivered!) for £1.50!  The bowtie itself, the prototype, will be made from an old pillow case.  That’s the essentials bought.  This weekend I’ll try to put it into practice.

After JL we walked down Bucky Street and on to Argyle Street, then up Miller Street to Paesano.  For the first time ever, we had to wait for a table.  When we got one five minutes later the food was just as good as ever.

After being fed, we went for a coffee in Café Nero in St Enoch’s.  Scamp went to wander round the St Enoch’s Centre and I went to do a quick sketch of the suspension bridge over the Clyde.  It’s rough, but it’s done and it’s on time.

When we got home, Scamp realised that she had fogotten to post a card in town, so I volunteered to post it in Condorrat.  I took my camera of course and that’s where the sunset shot came from.  It’s more a gloaming shot really.  Gloaming means more than sunset.  It’s that golden hour before the sun sets and it’s also the afterglow from the set sun.

Gloaming.  Make it a word you use some time today, in its correct context.

Snow – 12 January 2017

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Today dawned with snow on the ground.  Within fifteen minutes, there was snow in  the air too, but no time to gaze admiringly at it.  We had to be showered, breakfasted and on our way to Wishaw General Hospital ASAP.

Tried driving the M73 on to the M74, but it was gridlocked, so change of plan Nº 1.  I’d come off at the M8 intersection and take the M73 back to Cumbersheugh and thence through Airdrie – a nightmare at this time of the morning with the school run in full swing, but at least the traffic would be moving.  Change of plan Nº 2.  The M8 looked clear and running well, so round the roundabout and on to it.  At the very least, we were heading east (the right direction).  The rest of the journey was without incident.

Arrived at the hospital to find that the computer hub was down and nobody could access patients’ notes.  However, we were seen within minutes and twenty minutes later Scamp was ‘under the knife’ so to speak.  After the procedure was complete, we drove home unfortunately squashing a fox on the way.  Poor thing had no chance, and I had no chance to avoid it.  Such a shame.

By the time we got home, the sky was blue once again and I managed a walk across to St Mo’s.  Not a lot of interest to photograph, but I liked the water drops on the cow parsley.  Where would I be without cow parsley?  The female mallard seemed to be paddling around in a dream and I got quite a few shots of it.  By the time I was coming home,  the blue sky was gone and the snow had started again.

Tonight there hasn’t been any more snow but it was freezing hard the last time I was out.  More snow and wind forecast for tomorrow.