Month: January 2024

Dancin’ – 11 January 2024

Posted on by Zogman

It was going to be a busy day, so I took the opportunity to go for an early walk in the woods.

The sky was clear and the sun was shining, but it was cold when I was walking over to the park just before 11am. That’s early enough for me, these days. There was a time when I was driving to work just after 7am. Thankfully those days are gone now and in the past they will remain. Fewer dog walkers in the morning, although there were some. Mostly it was couples or single walkers unfettered by canine accomplices. Although the weather was good, there were very few opportunities for photos. I took a few, but when I got home and inspected them, there wasn’t much of interest. Anyway, time was marching on and we were going to Glanburn just after midday for the first tea dance of the year.

The hall was filling up nicely for today’s dance. First up was a waltz and we opted for Kirsty’s Waltz Nioli. First track was a bit of a mess, but in the second track I found my feet or more likely, my feet found the script and it turned out fine. In fact, the Rumba, Cha-Cha and even the Quickstep all fell in to place today. I hope it’s not an isolated instance.

It seems that Stewart & Jane have started a new regime where the first half of the dance is devoted almost entirely to Ballroom and Latin. After the tea break, the second half is now almost all sequence dances. I’m not sure I like that approach, I prefer mixing the styles, but I don’t run the show and possibly that’s for the best. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed today’s dance and it’s not often I say that. I think it was that I’m beginning to become more confident in the routines and a lot of that is down to the work Scamp and Kirsty put in pointing me in the right direction. Short routines that can have extra parts added to them or awkward ones removed. After all we are doing this so that we can dance, not so that we can blindly follow the teachings of others.

Drove home feeling that we’d achieved something today. Then when we got home, Scamp got a text from Kirsty to say that she’d fallen today and broken a bone in her wrist and would be in plaster for at least two weeks! Poor Kirsty will be distraught, and so will we! One day back in her class and disaster strikes.

Since Scamp was going to be busy getting ready for Crawford and Nancy on Friday, I suggested an M&S curry might be best for dinner and the suggestion was accepted.

I eventually settled on a picture of a path through the woods at St Mo’s for PoD. It was the best of a bad lot, but not really all that bad.

Tonight the prep for Friday started for Scamp, but tomorrow I’m intending to make my half of the bargain, the main course.

Shopping – 10 January 2024

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We were off to Waitrose today for some (for some, read a lot of) shopping.

I felt the wee blue car squeal when I put the message bags in the boot after we left Waitrose. There were a lot of bags in there and quite a few of them were full. Despite that, I challenged the wee car by driving up the back road from Stirling to the top of the Tak ma Doon road. It’s a long and sometimes quite steep climb, but before we reached that, I gave it a rest at the entrance to Loch Coulter where I wanted to take photos, not of the loch, but of the wee farm across to the north-west. It’s a favourite place of mine to photograph and today the mountains off behind the farm were covered with snow, which was even better. Two or three photos of the landscape were enough in the cold breeze that was coming in from the north, so we drove on past Carron Bridge and on to the Tak ma Doon road, the twisting single track road with few passing places and great craters where NLC can’t be bothered to fill them in. But at the summit it gives a great 180º uninterrupted view from the Forth estuary in the east all the way to Glasgow in the west. Except, not today. It was too cold to take advantage of the views, even if they were stunning. We had reached the highest point in the road and it was downhill all the way now and I’m sure I heard the wee blue car give a sigh of relief.

Dinner tonight was Haddock Chowder. It’s one of those recipes where you have to have everything prepared in advance because once you start you’ve just got to keep going until you serve it in bowls after about 45 minutes of constant stirring and mixing. It wasn’t my best today, I admit that. Too much flour in the roux we think. However, as Scamp said “It’ll stick to yer ribs”. Very Scottish!

We were going dancing to the first dance class with Kirsty this year. After everyone had quietened down, Kirsty announced that today’s dance was to be a Foxtrot. As usual, she demonstrated the men’s part then the women’s part and after that we were pitched into the dance. I admit that I was flummoxed at first, but then realised I’d done all this, or something very like it with Stewart & Jane. After that, when things were baffling me, I just let muscle memory take over and while it wasn’t perfect, it was near enough.

Later we watched the first Landscape Artist of the Year with Dunnottar Castle in Aberdeenshire being the subject. For once, Scamp and I were in agreement about today’s winner.

PoD was a photo of that wee farm.

Tomorrow we might be going dancing. First tea dance of the year.

Out on the Ice – 9 January 2024

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp was off in the morning to meet Shona and June for coffee and a blether. I stayed at home.

Well, I’d things to do and the first one was trying to locate Katy. I’ve photographed her before a few years ago before she changed her name to Katy. It took a bit of searching to locate her, but I finally found her back in 2017, skating on a frozen pond. That was my intention for today too. I though I could get a few shots of her skating on a slightly smaller pond, a frozen bird bath to be precise, but first I had to find her. Like most of my ‘weemen’. Which for the sake of political correctness can be pronounced ’wee men’ or the Glaswegian ’weemen’ which translates as ’women’ in English. I was sure she lived on the window ledge in the bedroom, but she was nowhere to the seen there. Some weemen live in various stages of disassembly in a big cereal box and a smaller subset of ‘favourites’ can be found in a smaller Lock & Lock box, but Katy was not in any of those places. After Scamp had left, I finally tracked her down to a turned square wooden dish I’d made many, many moons ago, when I had skills.

After dusting her down and ensuring she still had her skates with her I set up a tripod in the back garden next to the ‘skating rink’ cum bird bath. I just couldn’t get the shot I wanted despite using two cameras and umpteen lenses. I finally settle for a hand-held A7m3 camera with 50mm macro lens and got a few shots with of her standing on the ice, looking like the star she is.

It was a cold day, but the temperature must have been just above zero, because by the end of the photo session, pools or water were appearing on the ice. Poor wee soul looked frozen out there on the ice. Back inside in the warm, she got a place on the bookcase while I checked the quality of the photos and they passed muster.

By then Scamp had returned from the coffee and blether group and it was lunch time. Yesterday’s rolls warmed up to hold some slices of bacon for me and an egg for Scamp.

The next task I had set myself was to try to mail-merge a spreadsheet of photo info using Microsoft 365 on the Mac. I had cancelled my subscription a few days ago, but had a few days grace left on it. I tried everything I could think of to get MS Word to work with MS Excel, but they kept finding errors. Eventually I borrowed Scamp’s HP PC and using the same apps and the same data set, at the first attempt got exactly what I wanted. Just to be awkward, I tried to do the same thing on my old slow Toshiba PC laptop and after a lot of huffing and puffing (from the laptop, this time!), it too came up with the goods. I went online to find a solution to the problem. I didn’t find it, but I did find a lot of people with exactly the same problem. All of them trying to get Word and Excel to work together on a Mac. In one case, 695 folk had the same problem as me and Microsoft were no help to them at all. And they wanted me to pay £80 a year for their faulty software? The sheets are printed out now, so if I need a “Where was it took in 2024”, I’ll know to use my old Windoze 7 Tosh laptop with MS Office 2017.

That was today’s two tasks completed so I de-stressed over Fish Fingers, Egg and Chips for dinner, followed by the last piece of Scamp’s Apple Pie.

Tomorrow we may need more shopping to cook for visitors on Friday.

The ice is melting – 8 January 2024

Posted on by Zogman

And not before time say some!

But first things first. We were in dire need of food, so Scamp and I drove to Tesco to see what they had to offer. Blueberries, onions, bacon and razor blades were high on the list as well as bananas, milk and bread, but for some unknown reason there were no rolls. Real rolls, that is. There were plenty of those soft fluffy pretend rolls, but none of the crusty or well fired variety. You couldn’t call those soft things “Rolls”. This dearth always seems to happen on a Monday. Maybe the bakers were joining the junior doctors and going on a one day strike every week. Maybe the bakers really are qualified junior doctors and they had been called up to plug the gap in the NHS. For whatever reason, it looked like we’d have to forego our roll ’n’ banana today.

I had a plan that might avoid a roll-less day. On the way home we drove in to Condorrat where I managed to pick up a half dozen crusty rolls for £2.22. I even paid for I using cash. Real, hard cash, coppers and silver coins counted out carefully into the lady’s hand. We would eat a lunch of roll ’n’ banana!

Suitably fed and knowing we wouldn’t fade away from starvation, I went for a walk in St Mo’s, hoping to grab some of the sunshine that was coming through holes in the clouds. Ah, but as soon as I got to St Mo’s, the holes were filled in again and the sun slid from sight. I should have known. Still, I managed a few interesting photos. The first was a hogweed which had been covered in ice that was now gradually melting. The second one and PoD was one of my Dangerous Dan shots. Take an expensive camera with an equally expensive lens. Place it on the ice of the pond. Point it in the general direction of a subject and press the shutter button, lightly. As soon as the shutter clicks, whip it away before the ice knows it’s there and tries to grab it. Of course I’d tested the ice first to make sure it would hold the weight of the camera. A passing bloke walking his dog asked me I was all right, kneeling on the boardwalk. I told him I was fine, but afterwards I wondered if he was asking me if I was “alright in the head!” Maybe I’m not, but I love taking photos from strange angles.

After what I hope is the final adjustment to Lightroom Catalog 2024, I think everything is back to firing on all cylinders. The photos went into Lightroom and came out the other side looking better for their trip through its many and varied boxes of tricks. They are now on show in Flickr and one of them, the Dangerous Dan one is at the top of this page.

Dinner tonight was pasta with a nicely spicy Amatriciana sauce ( bacon, tomatoes, dried chilli flakes and basil) dusted with some Parmesan cheese.

Tomorrow Scamp is booked in the morning for coffee and a blether with June and Shona. I’m hoping to parcel up the calendars and get them sent out to the north of Scotland and the south of England and some places in between.

Freezin’ – 7 January 2024

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It really was freezing. Freezing fog. Temp just below zero.

Just to check it out I took out the rubbish, slipped on the icy step and landed with a bump, knocking over the bin in the process. I don’t do it every day, but occasionally I do try to get a bit of gymnastic practise in and this seemed like a good time to do it. Thankfully it was foggy, so nobody was about to see my wee slide. Then I went round the garden in baby steps picking up all the fallen cardboard and yoghurt tubs. I think Scamp got a bigger fright than me!

Back inside I grabbed a camera and gingerly walked out into the back garden to grab a photo of what were our sunflowers with trails of frosted ice crystals hanging on them. It wasn’t a day for hanging around, so I equally gingerly made my way back inside again to the nice, warm, safe kitchen.

If you read yesterday’s blog (published today), you will have read that last night I gave up on trying to fix the botched attempt at clearing up the mess of the Lightroom catalog. Well, I did sleep on it, and somewhere in the restless night, I came up with a plan. Why build a new catalog when you can just adapt the one you’ve used for a year. There must be a way of changing the name from 2023 to 2024. There was and it was a Scottish lady who explained the intricacies of the renaming in a YouTube video. It was really simple, but also convoluted, with some parts being done while Lightroom was active and others when it was shut down. Long story short, it worked. So now it looks like I have an operating catalog for 2024. However, I’ll know better tomorrow.

Dinner tonight was the opposite of last Sunday’s three course meal and was lentil soup with apple pie and custard for dessert.

Spoke to Jamie later and heard about aquaplaning cars and flooded fields and roads. However he says it’s not too cold in the house and the builders start again this week. So work is progressing.

The frosted sunflower stalks with their necklace of ice crystals were PoD.

I think we will have to go out tomorrow to get some much needed supplies. Just simple stuff like bread and milk. No alcohol was mentioned!

Dancin’ – 6 January 2024

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Scamp was out first to defrost the car. We were driving to Brookfield for the first dance classs of 2024.

The temperature was hovering around zero when we drove out to Brookfield, but the sun was almost blinding, shining from a bright blue sky. Thankfully we got there without any roadworks apart from the usual 40mph drag through central Glasgow.

First surprise was that the tiny dancers, who usually take ages to leave the hall, had already gone! Maybe someone had complained. I should have asked Jane if it was her. Only four couples ready and waiting to go dancing. Last in were Peter and Gillian who travel almost the same distance as us.

First dance was the Blue Angel Rumba which we’ve almost mastered and was the gentle entry into this years dances. Next was the, new to us, Christmas Waltz. It looked complicated, but taken in bite sized pieces it wasn’t so bad, although there were a few unpronounceable and complicated bits to it. In retrospect, I think we managed not too bad in it, but it will need some practise during the week to cement it into my head. Finally a fast and frantic Samba with Samba Walks, Botafogos and Voltas. Voltas were described by Jane as “Like kids pretending to ride a horse”. A sort of “John Wayne dance step.” Google it and you’ll see what I mean. By then, my little brain was full to bursting and I was glad to change my dance shoes for clumpy black street shoes and drive us home.

Lunch was two bits of bread with a slice of square sausage between them. Scamp had similar with an egg substituting for the square sausage.

I struggled for a while trying to work out what was going wrong with the 2024 catalog on Lightroom. Eventually I gave up and as the sun was still shining I went for a walk in St Mo’s. The road and paths were quite slippery, but the boots coped with it. The sun was low by the time I was walking along the path behind the woods and I got a few decent shots of the trees and the shadows they were casting. One of them became PoD.

Dinner came from a cold walk over to Condorrat to Golden Bowl. As I was coming back I could see the mist lying about a metre above the grass. Quite creepy looking. I tried to photograph it, but failed to get the impression I was looking for.

Later in the evening I tried again and almost managed to repair the damage to the catalog. I gave up and left it until tomorrow when hopefully a night’s sleep will make things clearer

Temperatures around zero predicted for tomorrow. That will decide what we do.

 

Dull day that brightened up later – 5 January 2024

Posted on by Zogman

It started off misty and cloudy, but later in the day the sun came out and it was fairly bright.

The task for today was to take down the decorations, pack up the tree and get everything ready to go up into the loft later in the week. Scamp was in charge of operations and as usual she was organised. Cards were taken down and left in a pile for checking later. Tree decorations went into their box and then into their bag. Batteries were removed from lights to stop them corroding. I took the lights down from the wee tree outside and from the fence. They are still drying out, hanging over any vertical surface that will carry them. It really was a military operation.

By lunch time it was all done and I’d had enough time left to go for a walk in St Mo’s. Today’s PoD turned out to be fern fronds glowing in the sunshine. There wasn’t much else to photograph today. I should have taken a macro lens with me, but I forgot. After that it was computer time.

One of my SSD drives that power the iMac now has a dodgy connector socket, which means that if I’m not careful, and it gets nudged, I lose everything I’ve been working on. Most annoying. What I wanted to do today was transfer the data from the drive to a replacement that doesn’t seem to have the connector problem. It’s a fairly easy procedure to do, but even with the super fast SSDs, it takes time. That means there’s a lot of sitting about. Thankfully I could check the progress on my laptop as I was following an instruction video on YouTube that I’d used before and it worked. It worked again today, but took most of the afternoon to complete. I’ve now got it running fairly well, with just the occasional blip to fix.

It was late when I finally turned the computer off and had dinner which was baked potato with veg chilli. The chilli had been in the freezer for a few months and was really needing used up. It tasted fine, so being frozen for months hadn’t harmed it much.

We did manage a quick practise dance tonight. Part of Joy’s Waltz, part of the Quickstep routines from Stewart & Jane and also from Kirsty, then Kirsty’s Waltz Nioli to finish off.

Tomorrow we’re intending going to dance class in Brookfield, hence today’s practise. Other than that, nothing much planned.

Going out! – 4 January 2024

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Today we were going in to Glasgow on the bus.

We weren’t going for anything in particular, although Scamp had a free offer of a cup of tea and a cake for two at JL. So that must come first.

Because Scamp was the owner of the golden ticket, she got to collect the tea and a scone each while I was tasked with finding an empty table for two. I got one with a view up Sausage Roll Street, one of my favourite views in Glasgow. JL’s offer was for tea or coffee with a cake or scone with butter, but we had to pay extra for jam. I thought that was a bit mean of JL. Giving you something free, then asking you to pay for part of it. Penny pinching.

The rain had been torrential when we were heading to Glasgow, but when we stepped out of Buchanan Galleries the sun was shining and it remained shining all day long. We walked down Buchanan Street and along Argyle Street then down to Clyde Street, along the Clyde Walkway, then over the suspension bridge before turning right and along past the new Business Centre, turned right there and crossed The Squiggly Bridge to the other half of the Business Centre then back into the city centre with a stop at Nero for a coffee. Not a bad walk, that gave me nearly today’s 10,000 steps.

We hadn’t anything else to do, so we walked back through JL and just managed to catch the X3 for a run home, but not just home, because we stayed on and got off at the shops, a new experience for us, getting the bus to the shops! Scamp got flowers because it was Thursday and we chose some veg, prawns, noodles and sauce to make a stir-fry for dinner.

Scamp had intended taking the tree and decorations down today and I had intended having a practise of the Quickstep, but instead I sourced some pictures of the Kelpies to send to Simonne to add to a Memory Book for her dad. Then I wrote a message to Hazy and finally I updated the OS of my blog. It was only about two years out of date! If I get this blog posted, that will be most of my To-Do’s, To-Done! Yes, I know the apostrophe shouldn’t be there!

PoD was a photo of the Metropolitan Cathedral of St Andrew down by the Clyde in Glasgow.

A good day out, just walking. No plans for tomorrow, but some things still on the To-Do list.

Yet another wet day – 3 January 2024

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Admittedly, the rain wasn’t constant. We did get some respite in the short dry spells.

There may have been dry spells, but there wasn’t much light to go with it. I know, I should be grateful for the fact that the rain wasn’t constant like it has been, but just a little bit of sunshine would help a lot to relieve the awful dullness. That’s the thing about January, it is terribly dull.

Scamp was out in the morning to visit Isobel. She had done something to her front door and couldn’t get it to lock, but the maintenance man was coming to fix it and Scamp went to have a blether with her while she waited. The door was easily fixed and the bloke showed Isobel what she was doing wrong. It’s sometimes the simplest things that trip us up.

While she was out I was fighting with the printer. I was working my way printing out the calendars and everything was going well until it suddenly failed to pick up the paper and reported a paper jam. The paper wasn’t jammed, it just couldn’t find it. I told it so umpteen times, but it just wouldn’t listen. Printers are so cantankerous and so pig headed they just refuse to accept that it’s THEIR fault, not ours. Eventually I got fed up arguing with it and turned it off. When I started it again, instead of loading a dozen sheets I only gave it six and asked it to print pages 1 to 6 inclusive. It did that. Good, it was seeing sense and behaving. Then I loaded another six sheets and it went on strike again. This time I read the riot act to it, warning it that I’d been looking in Amazon for a new, better behaved printer and if it didn’t mend its ways it was going in the skip. That finally got through its thick plastic skull and it printed off three lots without a whimper. After that I gave it a pat and allowed it the rest of the day off. I might return to the fray tomorrow.

After lunch I wandered round the house looking for things to photograph, but couldn’t find anything until after dinner I remembered the teasels that were drying out in the back bedroom. I don’t know if you’ve ever lifted a teasel, but if you do feel the need, wear thick leather gloves because those thorns on the stem are lethal. Anyway, after a fair few test shots of the jaggy seed pods, I took four shots of the teasels with the camera on a tripod and with the magic of Photoshop managed to get almost all of the apprentice porcupine in focus. Technically it’s called focus stacking, but you don’t need to know that, do you?

We watched the New Year Bakeoff, Hazy, and we enjoyed it. We had already watched the Christmas one. I think the New Year one was better. Also, Hazy, I opened the tin of coffee and made a cup of espresso with it. Very nice indeed, and no need to grind, either. Thank you both for that.

Oh yes, and on the subject of coffee, if the weather improves tomorrow we may go in to Glasgow, just for a walk and maybe a coffee and a cake.

Another wet day – 2 January 2024

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Another day when it never really stopped raining.

It wasn’t a day for doing much. I didn’t go out to take any photos, because it was raining and there seemed to be little point in getting wet when I didn’t have a subject in mind.

Instead, I took a tabletop shot. My subject today was a Sarracenia plant. It’s a carnivorous pitcher plant and quite a small one. It feeds on insects that fall into the liquid at the bottom of the funnel shaped ‘leaves’. I had a bigger variety last year that was happy to grow outside, even in winter. It survived temperatures down to -10ºc. Unfortunately the drought in June 2023 was too much for this bog plant. I’m being more careful with this slightly more delicate one.

As usual, the actual photos took about half an hour to take and a couple of hours to process. But I was fairly happy with the result.

Dinner tonight was Potato, Cabbage and Bacon. An old favourite with both of us, of course, Scamp doesn’t eat the bacon. We watched Sing 2 The second in what might become a series of comedy digital cartoons. Not much of a story line, really, but made up for it with the excellent dialogue. I laughed and so did Scamp, so it was a winner.

After dinner I struggled for a good two hours trying to get Word and Excel to speak to each other, but eventually gave up. I think I’ll cancel my free 30 day subscription before it runs out. Even worse, It looks like my old Toshiba laptop may be on its last legs. I got a message tonight ti say that there was a problem with the cooling system and to shut down immediately. Immediately is not a word the Tosh understands. Immediately usually means an arthritic ten minute wait. I’ll leave it to cool down gently tonight and see what can be done about it tomorrow.

No real plans for tomorrow. Scamp is booked for coffee in the morning with Isobel. I’ve got a visit to the nurse in the afternoon to see how my BP is doing now that I’ve reduced my meds a bit. I’ve a set of results ready to bamboozle her with my Excel skills!