Month: March 2020

Another rubbish day – 11 March 2020

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The weather was rubbish and the car was full of it too.

High winds and lashing rain. Not much chance of getting photos taken today then. I’d resigned myself to that and decided that instead I’d take a trip to the skip with a whole load of rubbish we had collected over the years. Stuff that was clogging up the front bedroom. Last week Scamp sold the keyboard which was a big space hogger. Today it was a collection of worn out shoes, ancient electrical stuff and a footstool that looked good in IKEA, but wasn’t really comfortable when we got it built up at home. Everything was sorted into bags of Electrical, Household, Wood and Metal and I dumped it all in the skips with those headings. The car was much lighter when I got home and the front bedroom was looking a lot more like a room and less like a jumble sale too.

After the trip to the skip, I went for a drive to see if there was anything in need of being photographed, but there was nothing the looked photographable. So, I made my way home via Tesco. There were no packets of loose pasta. Only four packets of toilet rolls on the shelf – the most expensive ones, and half a dozen bags of plain flour. These were the most obvious panic buys. I still can’t imagine why people need so many toilet rolls. Is it because the news is shite just now with every one of the so called experts contradicting themselves and talking crap? I managed to get the last bag of bread flour and a packet of spaghetti and I put a tin of soup in the food bank box. In the mean time Scamp had been out to the shops and bought dinner. Coincidentally when we both came out of our respective raided shops, the ground was white. Not with snow, but with hail. Strange days.

When I got back, I toyed with the idea of taking the Benbo for a walk, because the sun was out again, but before I could get my boots on, the clouds had closed in again and the rain came on. No point in getting wet for nothing.

Dancing tonight was in the new venue at the British Legion. Small dance floor, but level, and square (that’s not a Masonic Key Phrase by the way!). The night was devoted to sequence dances. Something I’d have turned my nose up at a year or so ago. Not now. I understand now that these are complicated dances certainly not to be sniffed at. However, I still draw the line at Line Dancing. No cowboy boots and stetson hats for me.

I did manage a PoD. It’s a Poinsettia. Scamp has had this plant since early December 2019, unfortunately it’s now getting to the end of its useful life. Before that happens, I thought I should photograph it.

Tomorrow we may go dancing in Gorbals

Cold, not Corona – 10 March 2020

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Woke with a stuffed up nose and clogged ears. Not the symptoms of Covid 19, just a common cold.  Still felt miserable.

I’d said I’d go with Scamp to see how Isobel was faring with her new knee, but decided it would be better to self-isolate to use the new term for ‘stay at home’. Scamp left early to have coffee with Shona before she went to see the invalid. I took some Haliborange tablets and searched for a ball and socket head I was sure I had somewhere for the new tripod, without success (it lets you turn the camera to almost any angle). When I got fed up with searching I sat and watched the rain showers thumping down then made a pot of soup for dinner tonight, so at least all my time wasn’t wasted.

Finally took some sketch paper upstairs to draw and while telling myself that it wouldn’t be there, I searched through some boxes in the chest of drawers and immediately proved myself wrong, because there was the ball and socket head! Things are never where you expect to find them. Forgot about the drawing and started trying out the new fitment on the tripod and it worked perfectly. It was about that time I started to feel better. I also started to watch the sky in the hopes that there would be some blue among the clouds. There was none, but the clouds were clearing above the Campsie and that’s usually a good sign. A couple of hours later I made the decision to go out. The sun was shining and the clouds had cleared. So had my head.

Got the tripod set up perfectly in an awkward wee gully at the outfall of water from the pond at St Mo’s. There was a fair volume of water coursing down and it looked a likely place for a moody slow shutter shot of moving water. I shot a few at different exposure times, but wasn’t really happy with any of them. I made a mental note to take a pair of secateurs with me next time because the barbs on the bramble stems were tearing into my ankles. Spoke to Susan G who was out walking her dogs and wondering what the hell I was doing prancing around a mucky burn.

Walked round the upper path and found a much better run of water. Just a little drainage ditch with water pouring round a boulder. Another tricky position for a ‘normal’ tripod, but easy peasy for the Benbo. It’s what that tripod is made for. By the time I’d shot my fill of oily looking water, I realised it had started raining. Walked back along the boardwalk and the heavens opened. That’s when I got today’s PoD. It’s a three shot hand-held HDR image, but you probably guessed that, so I won’t bore you with the details. Second place went to the oily water shot, taken with the camera on the new tripod. Brilliant piece of British engineering.

Soup, bread and a baked potato for dinner as we listened to the news that Italy was now basically cut off from the rest of the world for at least two weeks. So strange to see the Colosseum in Rome with about four people standing beside it. Similarly St Mark’s Square in Venice virtually deserted. Strange days.

No plans for tomorrow. Hoping I’ve not passed the cold on to anyone else. If I get the all clear from Scamp, we’ll maybe go dancing at the British Legion, our new venue for Wednesday night classes.

A new toy – 9 March 2020

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I got the email this morning that my new tripod would be delivered today to the WEX shop in Glasgow. So I knew what the day held for me at least.

First, Scamp was off to Tesco to see if there was any food left on the shelves. Thankfully there was still some cold meat and there were bags of rolls, so lunch was sorted. While she was off on her food hunt I did the hoovering and cleaning that’s become part of Mondays for us.  A parcel arrived with the final bag of coffee that Hazy & Neil-D gave me for Christmas.  I haven’t started it yet, because I’m just finishing off the last bag which was very nice.  It took me a while to get used to the taste, because it was much lighter and fruitier than my usual ones.  I will give you an honest opinion when I’ve tried it. The email from WEX to say that the tripod was ready for collection appeared just after the cleaning business was completed.

After lunch I had a chat with Margie and she gave me an honest critique of my sketches and paintings from EDiF. It’s refreshing to have someone who paints and draws and who also has no axe to grind, tell you what you already knew. Sometimes I delude myself into thinking I’m better than I know I am. I’m not an artist. I never will be. I’ve seen real artists working and know that my work sometimes looks decent, but nothing more than that. Some of it is just plain crap and I cringe when I look back through old sketchbooks and see what I thought then was brilliant. Some of it is good though. I’ll take good, any day.

When the full complement of Gems arrived, I made my excuses and left for a drive to Glasgow. As I left the house the rain was just starting, but when I reached the motorway it was on full blast and on for the rest of the day. Picked up a far lighter tripod than I’d anticipated. This was going to be portable after all. Drove home through more rain and hauled the tripod out of its box. No instructions, but hey, it’s a tripod, how difficult could it be. Well, according to the majority of the reviews I’d read it could be very difficult. It’s been likened to “wrestling with an octopus” and “controlling a drunken giraffe”. Actually I thought it was simplicity itself to work with. Bear in mind, this was in a bedroom in a house, not in the teeth of a gale on a blasted moor, so maybe it will be difficult when I actually have to deal with it ‘in the field’. That wasn’t going to be today. Still raining.

After dinner we drove up to the dance class. I was thinking when I was driving home from Glasgow “Thank goodness I don’t have to drive in to Glasgow and back out again tonight for salsa.” It was a bit of a wrench leaving the AdS, but there were parts of it that were a total pain. Like driving into Glasgow in the rain in a traffic jam. Ten minutes up the road and we were parked and in the dance hall. Brilliant. Tonight was almost entirely devoted to a new routine to bolt on to our existing Waltz routine. It was a bit more demanding, but that’s to be expected, we are moving on after all. Scamp and I took lots of videos of the different ‘figures’ and how they are put together. Neither of us was perfect tonight, but it will get better, I’m sure.

PoD was the BENt BOlt that gives the Benbo it’s name. Apparently based on the pivot of a WW1 gun carriage!

Hopefully tomorrow I will get a chance to get it dirty in the wild world!!

Final bit of news. A dental practice in Cumbersheugh village is temporarily closed as a precaution after as positive case had been identified there. I didn’t know there were any pangolins in Scotland!

Frogs, Frogs, Frogs – 8 March 2020

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No, not plagues of them, that was in Egypt. Here it was an invasion of frogs.

In the morning it was bread making that was occupying me. I got that done fairly easily. Forget all the rigmarole of different kinds of kneading, the last three loaves I’ve made have used the same method.

  1. Weigh out the flour, butter, yeast and salt.
  2. Weigh in the water. Yes, I know water is a liquid quantity, but 160ml of water weighs 160gms.
  3. Add a pook of sugar. Technically it’s a pinch, but my mum always called it a ‘pook’. Always trust your mum.
  4. Mix it up quickly with a metal spoon.
  5. Adjust the flour or water quantity to make it wet enough to mix, but dry enough to be lifted from the measuring bowl without it dripping everywhere.
  6. Drag it about in the bowl. Squash it and pummel it, but keep it in the bowl. Keep moving it around until it feels smooth to the touch. If it’s too dry or too wet, repeat step 5.
  7. If you’re feeling daring you can scoop it out of the bowl and go for a walk around the house squeezing and squashing it as you go. Bread dough likes to see its surroundings.
  8. Dust the bowl with flour and dump the dough gently in the bottom and leave for about an hour in a warm place with a tea towel covering the bowl. The dough by this time is exhausted and needs to sleep.

The rest of the process is simply the baking. You’ve done the hard part, the kneading. Easy kneading.

So, with the dough sleeping, I started on my dinner.

Dinner for me was slow roasted short ribs. Scamp took the easy option, salmon fillet. The ribs had been living in the freezer for almost a year, so I had brought them out yesterday and allowed them to thaw out. Today I mixed up my marinade which is Oil, Salt, Acid, Sugar and herbs. All as confirmed by the book Hazy bought me a year ago. Thank you again, Hazy. Olive Oil, Sea Salt, plus some Soy Sauce, Balsamic Vinegar, Honey with some Rosemary and Thyme. I added a bit of French Mustard to help the oil emulsify with the other ingredients once I’d whisked them together. Poured equal quantities of the marinade into three flavour lock bags and put a short rib in each. Stuck them in the fridge to soak up all that goodness and went for a walk.

Walked over to St Mo’s in the rain and found the inundation of frogs I’d mentioned. A week or so ago I’d found a couple of frogs cavorting in one of the wee burns that someone had cut through the woods, but this wasn’t just a couple, this was a couple of hundred. Clambering over one another and creating great rafts of frog spawn. Last year’s frogs were a bit low on IQ and had sprayed all their eggs over the flooded flood plain. When that dried out they were let to desiccate under the early summer sun. It’s really a miracle that any survived to procreate this year. Today’s PoD is one of those frogs relaxing after a tough morning.

Back home it was lunch first, then time to shape the bread and help Scamp clear out some stuff to go to the skips tomorrow. Roasted the marinaded short ribs but left them too long. Should have kept them at 2 hours, but turned the heat in the oven down to gas 2-3, I think. May try again some time soon.

Spoke to JIC later and got his take on panic buying and Covid 19 which hasn’t changed since last week. Keep Calm and Carry On is his sensible advice. Mine is Whit’s Fur Ye Won’t Go By Ye. Pretty much the same thing. Why is everyone fixated on panic buying toilet rolls and why do people want to buy all the tinned veg and potatoes? Who wants to live on tinned potatoes?? Not JIC and not me either.

The recipes above are for my reference and as a memory jogger for me, but feel free to try them. No guarantees of success, but they do work and the Oil, Salt, Acid, Sugar marinade definitely works. It’s even scientific (ish).

Tomorrow my new Benbo, not Benro and certainly not Bento, tripod should be delivered to a shop in Glasgow. Wrestling an octopus is one of the more generous descriptions of using it. Hopefully I’ll let you know if I agree soon.

Lunch at The Cotton House – 7 March 2020

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That’s what I was looking forward to.

A lazy morning watching the rain and, for me, testing out the sketch book I got yesterday. The rain just kept coming and the sketch book didn’t hold a wash very well, but did respond nicely to pencil, so that was ok.

Drove through the rain and darkening skies to The Cotton House. The “The” appears to be important, no just Cotton House. The definite article seems to be important here, possibly because it is the only definite article in the English language. There, you probably didn’t know that and now you do. You’ve learned something today.

Scamp had Thai Spring Rolls followed by Chicken Chow Mein. For me it was Chicken Noodle Soup followed by Chicken Green Pepper in Black Bean Sauce with Noodles. Both were deemed excellent, but that’s what you expect at TCH. Inside it’s gone through some changes, but the food is just as good as it always was. That’s why we booked a table today, because you just have to on a Saturday. Scamp’s coffee and my Chinese tea afterwards were disappointing, but I suppose some corners have to be cut to keep the price of lunch to an acceptable level. I’ll forgive them.

After that we drove home via Tesco for essentials like milk and stuff for tomorrow’s dinner. Oh yes, and toilet rolls. Because we need them. Nothing to do with the dreaded Coronavirus or Covid 19, whichever you prefer. It seems that shelves in supermarkets across the world are becoming depleted and the most sought after articles are toilet rolls. That’s a load of shite if you ask me. Come on, you expected that, didn’t you?

Scamp was selling her old keyboard and asking a ridiculously small amount of money, but it was her keyboard to sell (don’t panic people, it’s not the Clavinova) and the woman arrived this afternoon to buy it. I think it was much bigger and more complicated than she realised. She seemed overwhelmed by it, but money crossed hands and there’s more space now in the front bedroom.

I’d thought of going out for a walk in St Mo’s today when we got back from lunch, but the light was failing even at about 4pm, so I gave up on that. We’ve had almost a week of dry shiny weather and we’ve forgotten just how dull it can get by 4 o’clock. Today reminded us. With that in mind I took a bit of broccoli, a bag of yellowing parsley, a few mushrooms and a bag of coffee beans upstairs and arranged them, tastefully on an A3 piece of cartridge paper and photographed them. Then, in ON1, I added a bit of grassy field to the foreground. Imported the resulting image into Luminar 4 and added one of my skies, but missed a bit of it and that bit rankled with me, so … I exported the image to an old version of Photoshop, cut out that bit and then pasted a new bit in behind the hole then exported the image back into Lightroom. Cropped it, adjusted the levels and that’s what you see up at the top. Photography took about 15 minutes. Post-processing took a couple of hours. That’s what digital photography is all about. A PoD was created.

On Netflix we watched three episodes of a documentary about the 2019 F1 GPs from the viewpoint of the smaller teams, not the big three. Really interesting. Also watched another video about an actor chef being tutored by a real chef. How to make an omelette, followed by how to cook a steak. A massive steak, but it was set in America where they don’t do things by half.

Tomorrow we aren’t going dancing, but we may be practising. More rain forecast.

A day in the Toon – 6 March 2020

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Scamp suggested it and I agreed. A day in Glasgow. No driving, no dancing, just a day in the Toon. Sounds good to me too.

Walked over to Condorrat and got the eXpress bus to Glasgow. Coffee in Nero first then a walk through JL. Visited the ‘toy shop’ on the top floor, just to see if there were any bargains on show, but of course, there weren’t. Didn’t really expect any, but I’m not in the market for bargains anyway, so I wasn’t really bothered.

The new Aaronovitch book (with luminous cover!) from Waterstones and the prospect of a pair of Wranglers in TJ Hughes took us along Argyle Street. The book was bought, but the jeans weren’t. Mainly due to the lack of ability in TJ’s staff to assess the size of the queue and stop changing tags on stock and man (should that be ‘person’) the tills instead. Nope, Job Demarcation demands that I stay at the job I was given and not deviate from said job until sanctioned by a more senior member of staff Or in other words “I was only obeying orders”. Left the jeans back on the shelf and walked out. How do these stores survive? Especially when others like JL are sinking?

In Paesano, a Number 3 pizza (anchovy, olive, capers, mozzarella, sugo and EVOO) for me and a Number 1 pizza (Sugo, rocket, No garlic, No cheese) for Scamp with two glasses of house red saved the day and brought a little bit of Italian sunshine to Glasgow.

Walked back to the bus station via Cass Art for black watercolour paint and a cheap sketch pad then caught another eXpress bus back to Condorrat. Walked home with smiles on our faces. It was a good day.

PoD was some folk heading up Bucky Street for the bus home after ‘Making Glasgow’!

Scamp made Chicken Goujons for supper, washed down with another glass of red wine.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to be fed at Cotton House, with the prospect of a walk afterwards.

Dancing in Paisley – 5 March 2020

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Not exactly the place that springs to mind when you think of dancing.

Scamp was out early this morning to check that Isobel was all right after her first night back home after she got here new knee. She said that the patient hadn’t realised just how painful the recuperation would be, but that she was not going to be beaten by something as simple as a replacement knee.

After lunch we changed into dancing clothes, because although these tea dances are informal, there seems to be a standard of dress that it’s as well not to drop below. Today we were in Paisley, far side of Paisley really. I put my trust in the sat nav, because I don’t know that area of the central belt at all. It seemed to know where it was going and I didn’t, so I was happy to let it direct me. I usually drive by the map, but Paisley is an old town where the road intersections are not as clear cut as they are in places like Glasgow. With only one missed turning, we arrived at the community centre where our tea dance was waiting for us.

We got invited to sit with another couple and soon the room was beginning to fill up. Many of the faces were becoming known to us, plus, of course we already knew Stewart and Jane who were running the dance. We started off with a waltz and managed to get round the floor without too many slip ups. We danced quite a few sequence dances, something I wouldn’t have admitted to a year ago. Sat and talked to a couple we were on nodding acquaintance with from salsa. Overall, it was a good day, plus Jane’s homemade dumpling made the tea much tastier. The only fly in the ointment was the traffic on the way home. Basically it was a crawl from the community centre all the way to the motorway. A few miles of clear road then the usual crawl through Glasgow city centre.

Scamp wanted a new plant, a Skimmia she’d seen at the garden centre we were at yesterday, so we stopped there on the way home. I’d spotted a nice beech tree there and thought it might make a decent PoD. It looked ok through the viewfinder, but the final result wasn’t all that it could have been. Must try harder.

Fish ’n’ chips from the chip shop for dinner tonight and it was greasy, hot and delicious.

Tomorrow we may go in to Glasgow. With the warning from the Scottish government that the Coronavirus will escalate quickly now, we may have to look for hand sanitiser and some face masks first 😉

Last Dance in The Weavers – 4 March 2020

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Thankfully the last dance in that pokey little room, but we beat the corners.

First we got a phone call from Isobel to say that she was indeed getting out today. Although she’d get transport from the ward to the car, she would need a wheelchair to get from the car to the house, because the hospital wouldn’t load us a chair. Absolute nonsense, but totally in keeping with expected NLC policy. Scamp was not to be fazed by this problem and phoned one of the Gems singers and an hour later we had a wheelchair in the back of the Juke. You don’t realise just how much room a folded up wheelchair takes up in a car. I see the problem now Hazy.

By the time we’d worked out how to transport Scamp, Isobel, me and the wheelchair from the hospital to Cumbersheugh, Isobel had phoned to say she’d been told she was going to get hospital transport. Because she had more than one step up to her door and also she only had one handrail, she needed an ambulance person to get her safely into the house. One problem solved, but now we had to return the wheelchair and also return our life to what sometimes amounts to “Normal”. We went to lunch.

Lunch was in Craigend Nursery which used to be a decent sized plant nursery with a small tearoom bolted on. Now it’s very large tearoom with a nursery bolted on almost as an afterthought. Lunch was a beef burger and chips and salad and a dollop of ‘coleslaw’ that looked like a dog had been sick on my slate (no plates, just slates. Retro chic). Scamp had a very greasy looking Mac ’n’ Cheese. I don’t think we’ll be rushing back there.

Drove back and Scamp went to offload the wheelchair while I went to visit the ducks in St Mo’s. I also walked to the shops to try to get lemongrass for tonight’s dinner. Met an old friend of ours from salsa. Haven’t seen her for years, five years at least, according to her. How time flies. Didn’t get the lemongrass, but I did get today’s PoD which looks as if it’s been taken with flash, but it was just low afternoon light. A lucky shot.

Tonight we were dancing for the final time in The Weavers. I won’t be sad to leave that horrible room with its strange angles. What we did do was produce a decent foxtrot and another ‘work in progress’ quickstep. After a long explanation of how to dance in any shape of room, we even managed to remove the corners of the room and turn them into gentle curves, just by altering stride length and not dancing in entirely straight lines. It worked!

G&Ts tonight to remove the rough edges of an awkward day. Much like The Dukes of Hazzard song “Staightenin’ the curves Flattenin’ the hills …”. Exactly like tonight’s dancing.

Tomorrow more dancing in the afternoon hopefully. In a proper room this time.

Hey look. Not dancing today! – 3 March 2020

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A day to relax, perhaps.

I’d intended to do some painting today while Scamp was out having coffee with Annette. What I did instead was pot up some chilli plants that had been lingering on the kitchen window sill. While was in this horticultural mood, I also split up a succulent that’s been aching to be repotted for years. When I looked at what it had been growing in, it seemed to be almost all gravel. There was a tiny wee ring of compost on the surface, but the rest was just pure grit and old dead roots. Although it looked a bit tired, it had been producing quite a few ‘babies’. I managed to dislodge five little suckers which have now been repotted in a mixture of compost, grit and sharp sand. I’m sure it have a fair bit more nutrient than they have been used to. I’m hoping they have enough, but not too much.

Scamp returned at lunchtime and after that she went out to buy dinner which turned out to be a Chinese stir-fry using noodles rather than her usual favourite rice. I enjoyed it, but I think Tesco were being a bit mean with their mixture which would have benefitted with some ginger to gee it up a bit. Other than that, the noodles made a pleasant change from rice. I think it will be my turn to cook tomorrow, so I have to think up something interesting. It’s so easy to get stuck in a rut. I have something in mind, it just depends on whether it ends up on the plate!

While Scamp was out shopping I grabbed my camera bag and went for a walk in St Mo’s. That’s where I found the little seedling growing in a tree. It seemed quite settled in its elevated position just about head height. I think it may be an ash and it’s growing in a sycamore tree. An interesting cross fertilisation.

Scamp’s aunt, Isobel is currently in hospital after having a new knee fitted. She phoned today to say that she wasn’t getting out today as she expected, but might get be allowed home tomorrow. We’d already agreed that if she was kept later than today, we’d be ’hospital transport’. So, tomorrow is partly put on hold until we get a phone call. Hoping to dance at night for the last time in a that tiny awkward room in Condorrat. Next week we’re supposed to be moving to the British Legion in Cumbersheugh which will definitely be a big improvement, we’re told

Dancing again – 2 March 2020

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Waltz, Foxtrot and Quickstep it that order. Luckily we sidestepped (pun intended) the Tango because there wasn’t enough time. Oh dear, what a shame 😉

There wasn’t much else to talk about today. I took the Red Juke out for a run in the afternoon and ended up at my favourite landscape viewing site between two big stands of Scots Pines over by Fannyside Moor. Today there was a grand view across to the Meikle Bin and the Campsie Fells. So that’s where today’s PoD came from. There wasn’t much point in having a colour version as there wasn’t much colour. Besides, in colour the snowy Meikle Bin in the distance was lost against the sky, but it stood out much more clearly in mono.

Waltz:
It was quite good. We managed a few rounds of the floor without too many mistakes. It would be wrong to say that it was perfect or even nearly perfect. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s certainly getting better. Danceable.

Foxtrot:
Not all that good yet. Some mistakes still, especially towards the end. The big problem I have here is that of navigating the floor. I believe the proper name for this is ‘floor craft’ I have a different name, but I won’t sully the blog with it. Not yet danceable.

Quickstep:
Despite a fairly lengthy practise session this morning, this is still a work in progress. It’s improving and again the problem I have is dancing round the corners. Needs more practise. Not yet danceable, but with a bit of work it could be.

Reporting Scotland suggests that there could be up to a quarter of a million Scots hospitalised by Coronavirus. In the actual report a figure of up to 200,000 was quoted. A fifth of a million. I suppose that’s what inflation is all about.

Scamp is out tomorrow morning to have coffee with Annette. I may paint.