Another really cold morning – 4 January 2026

The temperature when we woke this morning was -5.7ºc which is brrrrr very cold!

We decided we’d wait a wee bit before we began taking down the decorations and lights, just to make sure everything was packed away before Twelfth Night which will be on Monday. It’s deemed unlucky to have your decorations up after then. But first, there was coffee to make and puzzles to complete and anyway, we weren’t in a hurry because we weren’t going anywhere special.

Once Scamp started to remove the decorations, I followed suit and volunteered to remove the outside lights on the fence and Jamie’s Tree. Both of them had performed really well in the freezing cold weather of the past week. The next task was to remove the indoor lights and sort the batteries into ‘Still Good’ and ’Not Worth Keeping’. Meanwhile Scamp was in charge of dismantling the Christmas Tree and packing it away for another year, and my next task was untangling the cables for the inside and outside lights. By lunch time we were almost there. I’m glad I wrote this because I just realised I’d left out a wee Christmas Tree Scamp gave me a few years before I retired. Couldn’t leave the poor wee thing out. It’s safely tucked away in a drawer in my room.

I got today’s PoD in the garden. The water buckets were full and now frozen solid, and yesterday I thought I might bring Katy back and give her a chance to do some skating on the frozen ice of the buckets. She performed perfectly and still looks good!

I went for a walk after lunch, just my usual tramp across St Mo’s and back again. However I wondered if I could get a shot of that damselfly shuck I found yesterday. I knew it was a needle in a haystack and didn’t really think I’d ever find it among the withered wind flower husks, but there it was! I took some photos and recorded the GPS position of it just in case I chance to go looking for it again.

Dinner was a rather tough beef stew for me and finely sliced potatoes and fennel bulb baked in the oven with cream and cheese for Scamp. It sounded wonderful and the smell from it was equally good, but Scamp wasn’t impressed with the outcome. I think she may attempt it again fairly soon.

Spoke to Jamie and heard all about their working fortnight in Trinidad, securing Jaime’s house and getting money sorted out for when the house goes onto the renting market. It all sounds like a nightmare, but it looks like the hard work has been done. I hope so for everyone’s sake.

Tomorrow I’m off to the dentist to have an impression of one my teeth taken for a crown. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Finding my feet again – 3 January 2026

Today was more like ‘normal’ whatever that is.

In the morning we de-iced the car and drove to Tesco to get some food to put in the new freezer. Oops, I forgot to tell you about the new acquisition. Last Tuesday Scamp sat me down and together we went through all the different combinations of under-counter freezers. Although we have a fairly big fridge-freezer, it doesn’t hold as much as we’d hoped, so we’d each of us mumbled about needing more storage. That problem was solved today. We ordered a medium priced under-counter freezer from John Lewis. Everything done, sight unseen, online. It was delivered yesterday, Friday. It’s so hard to keep track of days, what with Christmas, New Year, Twelfth Night and stuff.

The freezer had to sit for four hours for the refrigerant to settle in the complex of pipes, then it had to be plugged in and told to freeze, as an afterthought, we could just have left it outside, it was plenty cold there!

Today Scamp gave it some fish, prawns and ice cream to work its subzero magic on them. It’s very quiet and fits in perfectly. Not a snore or a grunt from it at all. I think I have been allocated the bottom drawer for my meat and coffee beans.

I went for a walk in the afternoon. It was really cold, just above zero, but not by much. PoD was a Knapweed plant just about ready to release its seeds to the four winds. Also if you have good eyesight, you might catch a glimpse of the skin (or Shuck) of a damsel fly up close to the head of the main flower.

Dinner tonight was Fish Fingers, Egg and Spaghetti. A firm favourite at this time of year.

We have no plans for tomorrow.

It worked – 2 January 2026

Sometimes you have to rely on someone else telling you how to get things done.

The two people whose explanations about rebuilding the catalog in Lightroom I was reading last night were exactly what I needed. I made the changes they suggested and then imported the first two sets of photos from 2026 and they appeared exactly where they should, in the Lightroom catalog.

After the first run through and after checking it was working. I closed the computer down and counted to ten and powered the Mac on again. A suggestion from Val from many years ago. Count to ten before you do anything else. That allows the capacitors in the computer time to discharge. Actually a half hour wait is better, but I didn’t have the time.

Immediately after I turned it on chaos reigned. Lightroom started by itself and began loading all the images on the computer. I paused it and turned it off again. Another ten second count and I turned it on again for a second time. This time everything was normal. I’d changed a lot of things the night before and all that chaos was it arranging things. Another bit of reading clarified that. It’s amazing the number of folk on the net who help you. The others are usually the ones who shout at you and who play music then shout at you again. They are no help at all.

So long story short, everything is working so far. I described it to Scamp as walking on egg shells.

I should be able to get images into the correct places now and start taking photos again.

That’s enough nonsense for today. Sorry Jamie, I should have prefaced this with the traditional <Technospeak> warning.

PoD is a frozen St Mo’s pond.  Most of the white stuff is frost, but with just a scraping of fine snow on top.

Hopefully tomorrow we will return to normal, fingers crossed.

We were promised snow (and photos!) – 1 January 2026

The forecasters were terrifying us with threats of snow, but none appeared. I don’t know what the reason was, none was given. You can never tell with weather forecasters. I think they are taught to lie.

I did go out for a walk in the afternoon and came back with a few photos. Mostly taken with an old, ancient even, Olympus E-PL5 with a Panasonic 30mm f2.8 macro lens. The photos this combination managed to produce were excellent. It just shows that an old guy with an even older camera/lens combo can produce the goods when he needs to.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to see those pictures, because I was trying to get Lightroom to work with me and release its grip on last year’s catalog without breaking everything in the process.

Finally just before midnight I read two articles that explained how to achieve this trick. It was much simpler than I thought. I may try it tomorrow. I’m off to bed now.

I think I’ve seen the future … and it works!