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Windy & Bright – 22 September 2016

Posted on by Zogman

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Sitting in the Coffin House in Skye. Having coffee, eating a brownie and gazing at a wide, wide landscape. Scamp is eating something unpronounceable (Pear and Almond Streusel I’m reliably informed!) with coffee. What a place to build your house! Just imagine waking to this view every morning!

At least, that’s where we were. Now we’re in Cafe Arriba in Portree. Globetrotters that’s us.

Or at least we were.  Now the big hand’s almost at 6 and the little hand is heading rapidly towards 12, that’s 12pm!  It’s been a lovely day and I’m trying to catalog it before it becomes tomorrow.

22-sept

After we left the Coffin House or Turf House to give it its proper name  and to be absolutely perjinct, the house is called the Turf House, but we were in the adjoining coffee shop and its proper name is Single Track.  It’s in Kilmaluig on Skye.  It was Murd who christened it the Coffin House because of the elongated hexagonal plan view of the house itself, although the coffee shop is actually in what is the studio of the house, not the house itself.  They tried to name it Turf House, but to the locals it will always be the Coffin House.  Inside the cafe it’s warm and quite spacious with that wonderful view out to the sea.  I went there hoping to see some of Wil Freeborn’s watercolour paintings, but they were almost all sold.  Only one left and priced at £90 was outwith my pocket money.  I wasn’t all that impressed with it either.  The two ladies who run the cafe were very forthcoming about Wil and told me that the paintings had almost sold out within a week of opening.  His stuff is good, well, I like it.

After Coffin Coffee we went on a run to Aird.  We’d been there in March?  The last time we’d been on the island anyway and found a fairly sheltered parking place out of the worst of the wind and sat there watching the world go by.  Scamp wanted to go there again today and we spent another hour and a big bit watching the world go by again.  I got a fairly decent watercolour done of the wee white house in the mosaic above.  I’d painted it the last time we were there too and I don’t think today’s effort was better.  Only had one interruption by a bloke wanting to get directions to Flodigarry.  We sent him in roughly the right direction, hoping he’d bump into someone who would give him a more accurate road.

When we left Aird, we headed south to Portree for more high jinx trying to second guess what the stupid motorists would do before they did it.  You can never tell when some people want to drive at 10mph through the town, signal left then go right while others are trying to perform a 93 point turn in the middle of the main street with a camper van.  I really do despair of the intelligence of these drivers.  I’m sure they’re the ones who voted Out at the EU referendum.

Lunch was at Café Arriba in Portree and I’m suffering for it tonight.  I don’t want to tell you how many times I’ve been to the toilet.  Maybe the last time for this lunch venue.

After lunch we went to Braes which is out on a headland just south of Portree.  We managed to go on another new road!  Got some photos and came back by a really dodgy under maintained road.  Not very funny at all.  However, we didn’t meet any of the stupids this time … thankfully.

Coming back north we stopped at Storr Lochs and grabbed a few more shots before dropping Scamp off at Burnside and heading down to the shore to get the last few shots of the day.  Saw a strange looking lorry down at the slip with a wide door in the side and what looked like a stage or a catwalk extending from it.  A mobile theatre perhaps?  On Skye??  Got a few shots of Staffin Island and then the rain came on, right on the forecast time.

Tomorrow looks like rain all day.

A road less travelled – 21 September 2016

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We woke to a beautiful morning with good colour in the sky and a sprinkling of clouds.  According to the weather forecast, rain was on the way in the afternoon, so we needed to get out fairly early.  I must admit it was me who was tardy in rising and greeting the day, so there you go, blame me.

We drove up the road to Uig to visit our niece Jac who has just started work in a boutique hostel.  I think we were both quite intrigued by the descriptions we’d heard from her mother, another Jac, and Murd.  We met more than our usual lot of crazies going the other way.  Mother Jac (I think Jac the mum, we’ll call Jac1 – seniority!  Our niece will be Jac2. – There, that’s much simpler … I think).  So Jac1 had warned us about the amount of crazies driving on the single track roads and the arrogance of them.  Today we met them.  They seem to think they own the road.  They really have to understand that they are only visitors to this island.  There are other road users, people who live on the island and then there’s me and I DO own the road.  Yes, I did get it when I bought the motor!  However, we reached Uig in one piece.  The next warning we’d had from both Murd and Jac1 was about the road from Uig to the Cow Shed where Jac2 works.  I’m glad she did.  It reminded me of a road from Clydeside up to Craignethan Castle, except on that road there are warning signs.  On this wee road there are no sign.  Suddenly the road rises up right in front of you and continues to rise through three hairpin bends on a single track road.  Thankfully there were no crazies coming the other way this time.  Also, this achieved today’s goal to travel on a road we hadn’t been on in Skye.

The Cow Shed itself is very luxurious.  Calling this a hostel is a real misnomer.  This is a luxurious place.  The only ‘hostel part of it is the bunk beds in the dormitories.  And what a view!  From the lounge there is an uninterrupted view right across Uig bay.  Scamp was determined to get a look at the ‘pods’ and we did get a look in one.  Clever design and environmentally sound.  Good thinking too with mini pods for dogs on holiday with their owners.  I think we may be paying for a night in one of the pods the next time we are in Skye, but not one with a dogpod!

From Uig we drove over to Waternish and down to Stein and parked next to the loch.   That was when the rain came on.  In Skye when the rain comes on, it sometimes forgets to go off.  We headed back to Sligachan and from there to Portree.  The rain thinned a bit, but always came back with a vengence.  Got myself a shirt in Skye Batiks, another one, a purple one.  We drove back to Staffin and had a cream tea in Columba and a natter with Jac1.  After that we drove down to Staffin beach and the roads were in just as bad state as Murd and Jac1 had warned us about.

Headed back to Burnside and dinner which was boiled ham, cabbage and potatoes, my second old favourite.  Best favourite being mince and tatties!

Don’t know what we’re doing or where we’re going tomorrow.  It’s in the lap of the weather gods.  Looks good, but you never know on Skye.

There Jac1 you got a mention!  Don’t know if Jac2 reads this, but if you do, you got a mention too.

On the Isle – 20 September 2016

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20-septHere we are on Skye after a 240(ish) mile journey which took the nominal 7 hours which equates to around 34 mph average.  Of course that doesn’t take into account stops to take on food and water or to ahem, remove the byproducts from the system.  Real average speed was nearer 45 mph.  That’s still slow by today’s standard, but given the traffic and the roads we were travelling on, was quite good going.

It was a beautiful morning when we left home and pointed the car roughly north, and the weather stayed that way all the way to Skye.  We’d been warned that there were a lot of visitors on the island, but we weren’t really ready for the amount of tour buses and mobile homes we encountered on the journey.  In Sligachan campsite alone, we counted 15 of these pantechnicons cluttering up the place.  Really, people do you NEED to take absolutely everything with you when you go on hols?  My brother-in-law was an HGV driver and was telling us tonight that he had to sit a second test to be able to drive heavy lorries, yes most of these ugly homes-on-wheels are driven by amateurs with the road sense of a chimpanzee.  I’m sure most of the vehicles are capable of speeds in excess of 70mph, but the trained chimps seem to be determined to make the most of first and second gear to the exclusion of all others.  “Fifteen miles an hour is good enough for anyone” seems to be their mantra.  I hate them.  They are almost as bad as caravans.  Don’t get me started on caravans.

Despite the moving road blocks that are houses on wheels, we had a great run up.  Weather was good.  Company was good.  Music was good.  Chocolate Limes were in plentiful supply.  What (apart from the obvious) was not to like?  Stupid tourists, that’s the answer.  We stopped at the Commando memorial at Spean Bridge for coffee and lunch.  With what is usually a lovely view of the mountains to look at.  Unfortunately, some refugees from a bus tour stood in a group eating icecream and watching us.  Maybe they were jealous that we were eating real food and drinking coffee when all they had was rapidly melting icecream.  I took their photo, just so they wouldn’t feel left out.  It was like watching sad old zoo animals.  I felt sorry for them when they were herded back into their bus to be taken somewhere else.  I’ll post the picture tomorrow.

Once we got to Burnside, we felt refreshed, as we always do.  Good food, banter and a wee dram or two helped as it always does.

Don’t know where we’re going tomorrow, but probably we’ll try to go on at least one new road.  That’s the plan.

Setting the world to rights and macros – 19 September 2016

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Met Fred and Val and sorted the world out again over a couple of coffees. It’s so easy, repairing all the wrongs of the world. If they’d only ask us, we could fix all the problems in no time.

After that went for a drive round the outskirts of our wonderful town looking for something to photograph and found a few things.

  • A Ladybird.
  • Some Cladonia lichen
  • Cow Hair on a barbed wire fence.

They don’t sound interesting, but when it’s a sunny day and you’re just out taking your time and enjoying the scenery, they are interesting things to photograph.

The Ladybird was orange with white spots and apparently it is rare in Scotland, but quite widespread in England and Wales. Also, it feeds on fungus rather than on insects like aphids.

Cladonia lichen or ‘Grey Trumpets’, also known as ‘Golf Tees lichen have fascinated me since I started taking macro photographs. They look so alien.

The Cow Hair needs some explanation. I was wandering around looking for something to photograph when I disturbed a black bodied dragonfly it buzzed round me a couple of times and then flew off, but I could still hear its wings clattering. (They sound like cellophane being crumpled. Strange description, but that’s what it sounds like to me.) The next thing I knew, it landed on my shoulder. Now what I should have done was take a ‘selfie’ with my phone. “Here’s me with my mate, the black dragonfly!”, but what did I do? I swiped at it and it flew away. Numpty. Then I saw it again sitting on a barbed wire fence, just across the road. As I cautiously approached it, it didn’t move, which is quite strange behaviour for inquisitive creatures like dragonflies. You get the feeling they are watching you when you are watching them. It was only when I got closer, I noticed that my ‘dragonfly’ was a tuft of black cow hair caught on one of the barbs. Despite my disappointment, I photographed it and quite liked the finished result from the fisheye lens.

Salsa tonight was energetic and a great deal of fun. I was dreading Scamp wanting to go to the next class which was ’styling’. Not my idea of fun at all. However, I acquiesced to her suggestion that we “give it half an hour”. We did and it was indeed good fun, interesting and taxing with its concentration on footwork. I can see us being hooked on this in the future.

Tomorrow looks as if it’s set fair but cooler which is a decent forecast for the time of year.

Flooers again – 18 September 2016

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18-septThere’s not a lot I can say about today. It started off sunny then clouded over before raining in the afternoon which was a bit of a downer.

We went to the Sunday Social which was energising as usual.

Dinner was a re-heated curry and it was very good.

We watched a ‘really exciting’ Singapore GP.

Some days are like that. You can’t always have sunshine and great photo opportunities.

Coffee with Val and Fred tomorrow. The world needs fixing again and we’re the boys to do it.

The End of Summer – 17 September 2016

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Wandering around my own favourite wilderness and noticing the skies are empty of swallows. If it takes more than one swallow to make a summer, does a lack of them mean the end? I think it does. Then I spot a dragon. Is that the contradiction?We had intended going to Embra today, but it looked like being a nice day and I didn’t want to spend the day in a train or wandering around the shops. Too good a day for that and if the first paragraph is correct, we should make the most of the good days now. The upshot was that as usual, Scamp was in the garden and I did a wee bit of painting and grubbing around in WordPress without any great success in either. Eventually, I decided that the weather was settled enough for shorts and tee shirt cycling and went out to get some photos and also some brambles if there were any left.There were brambles a-plenty and I got just over 600g which is not too bad. Just over a pound in old money, or is that me mixing my metaphors or something? The sun was warm and although there were no swallows, there was a dragon later in the afternoon. I got some photos, but knew that if I went closer, my shadow would encroach on the insect and it would fly away. Dragonflies seem to be very sensitive to changes in light, or maybe they just don’t want anyone stealing their sun. I also grabbed a few shots of spiders, sorry arachnophobes, look away now. It’s the transparency of the body that I like about spiders, especially contré jour. I just had to experiment a bit more with the pinhole effect and got a shot of the Three Amigos with the camera sitting on a fencepost. The last shot was as I was coming home and the light was warming up. It took me some time to find the best VP for the shot of the hay bales, but I’m happy with this one. There was a fair bit of post-processing done to get it just the way I wanted it, balancing the light and dark areas of the photo without falsifying it too much.Came home and dinner was courtesy of Bombay Dreams. Great online ordering system and way too much for one meal. The rest for lunch on Sunday.Weather on the turn for Sunday with lots of widespread rain forecast.

[]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ztf/

A day at the seaside – 16 September 2016

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We went to Ayr today on the bus, well, on two buses. We were out just after 9.30 to get the X3 to Glasgow. As usual it stopped at every stop all the way through Moodiesburn and Muirhead and this is called an Express service. The only Express part is where it wheezes on to the motorway for about three miles from Stepps to Glasgow. It’s a disgrace to call this an Express service. The only reason we use it is because it’s the ONLY service. Once in Glasgow we ran round the bus station and just caught the X77 to Ayr. ‘X’ means Express on this service because it enters the M77 motorway in Glasgow and doesn’t leave it until it reaches Prestwick Airport. Do you know, it takes almost exactly the same time to go from Glasgow to Ayr (37miles) as it does from Cumbersheugh to Glasgow (14miles). Arrived in Ayr to sunshine and blue sky.

Walked around the dilapidated town centre of Ayr, had a coffee then went for a walk along the beach. There was a cool breeze from the sea, but it was much warmer than the seasonal average. The tide was in and that’s where we saw the bear in the photo above. Really the only worthwhile shot I got today. It wasn’t until we were back in the town I realised that the lens had been set to maximum aperture. Never a good thing to do unless you have a really expensive bit of glass. I didn’t. It works well when stopped down to about f10 or so, but wide open it’s a bit cloudy and not very sharp. A bit like the way I’ve been feeling for the last day or so.

After lunch at Wetherspoons we headed home on the X77 then just managed to catch the Cumbersheugh bus in Glasgow. An ok day, but the weather was good and so was the company.

Tomorrow looks good on paper. Don’t know where we’re going, but the lens will definitely be stopped down.

It’s a small world – 15 September 2016

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Went in to Glasgow on the bus this morning to get my locks shorn.  It was really well overdue.  There are only two barbers in the shop I go to, both of whom have different topics of conversation.  The young one is the radical who follows the Russian news channel on the Internet and says they tell fewer lies than the BBC.  Not that they are more honest, just that they tell fewer lies.  There’s a subtle difference in the semantics I think.  The older man is more careworn and sarcastic.  He’s on his third marriage I think, which probably explains my description of him.  He was in charge of remodelling my coiffure today.  Topics ranged from the usual Scottish start: The Weather to remembering Strathclyde Loch being created.  It was after we talked about how the loch used to be just a fishing pond at the south end of Motherwell that he made the startling announcement “‘course I’m not from Motherwell, I’m from Larkhall.” “You’re kidding!” I said.  We exchanged information about areas of Larky, then streets and realised that we lived about half a mile from each other.  His father had been Mr Smart the headmaster at my primary school.  Well, not exactly mine, more like my brother’s.  I had Mr Crombie as my headmaster.  We never called them ‘heidies’ then, we were much better brought up in Larky.  It was only when I went into teaching that ‘heidies’ became synonymous with authority.  We talked about places we both knew and inevitably pubs.  A normal topic of discussion in a town with the greatest number of public houses per head of population in Scotland.  I’ve been going to this barbers’ shop for more years than I care to recall and had my hair cut by this man for most of them, only to find out today the he too came from ‘The Town Behind the Wall.’  Maybe I’ll explain that sometime.  A small world indeed.

Walked out into the sunshine and went down Bucky Street and out into Exchange Square or Royal Exchange Square to give it its full title, although the royal part of the name ceased to have any meaning when Glasgow Council acquired  the Royal Bank of Scotland building which dominates it in the late ‘40s.  See, you learn stuff on this blog.  Now the grand building houses the Gallery of Modern Art (the GoMA) and is home to all human life … and a few indeterminate other forms of almost sentient beings.  “Though I never perfected the simian stroll.” could have been written for this area.  Good hunting ground for photos too.  The central photo in the above mosaic, with judicious cropping gave the photos at the bottom and the middle left.  The other two were just a couple of quick grab shots.  They took about 5 minutes total to compose and shoot.  Given half an hour here on a reasonably sunny day you could fill an SD card easily.

That was it for the photography for the day.  Wandered round the centre of town, but didn’t see anything else to tempt me into digging the camera out of my pocket.  Got the bus home and found Scamp happily digging plants out, planting others and generally tidying up the garden.  To each his and her own.

Looks like the warm weather is gone for the time being and it’s back to more seasonal temperatures for the next day or so.  I blame getting the air-con fixed!

Wallflower – 14 September 2016

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Sitting it out at Salsa because there are too many men in the second class which is an unusual state of affairs. It’s not a problem really as the sweat is running off me as we’ve just completed our second advanced class of the week. I did think of joining Colin’s class, but I’m never sure what it is he’s teaching. Sometimes it’s definitely salsa, sometimes it’s more like bachata, sometimes it’s almost certainly quickstep or tango or something else ballroom and there are times when it’s something entirely different. It’s difficult to see where they blend together. I did do his warm-up which is always a challenge, just keeping up. Tonight was no exception. That probably explains why I’ve reached melting point.

We had intended going to Kirkcaldy on the bus, but lethargy got in the way.  It’s been postponed until another day, a sunny day, because sunny it was not today. After we had dithered around for a while, we decided to go for lunch instead and then went for garden stuff at B&Q.

I had a go at a couple of  small watercolours and finished off an acrylic that’s been languishing against the wall for too long. I may frame it up and see if I’m happy with it. I’ve decided that even for sketching and wash, it’s far, far better to use watercolour paper, even cheap stuff.

I did manage a quick visit to St Mo’s later in the afternoon and was thinking that with the warm, damp weather we should be getting to the season for toadstools and mushrooms when I chanced upon a neat little creamy white umbrella, right in front of me. To get the shot, I wanted a low point of view (POV). That meant I couldn’t check focus through the viewfinder, but one of the Oly designers had considered this eventuality and made the back screen articulate so you can turn it horizontal. Even better, you can set the touch screen to activate the shutter. So clever.

As I mentioned, it was a dull, damp day. I’m hoping tomorrow will be better.

Too much time on my hands – 13 September 2016

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combo-cameras2It was a wet morning and it didn’t clear up until about 5pm, for an hour, then the dry spell was over and the rain came back. That’s my excuse for making it an indoor day today.

For a long time I’ve been following the exploits of one of my Flickr contacts, Jiffy Cat, presumably not their real name. For years now, Jiffy Cat has been experimenting with pinhole camera photography, and has recently been producing some interesting images. I believe the method JC uses is analog, ie. film, paper, developer and fixer with all the smelly mess that accompanies this process. I’ve had my time doing developing and fixing and I don’t want to go back to the mess or the stained fingers which made me look like a 20-a-day smoker. No, technology has moved on. I decided to make use of one of my older M43 cameras and make a real body cap lens for it. I cannibalised an equally old body cap, drilled an 1/8” hole in the centre, covered the hole with thick aluminium foil and punched a hole in it with a needle. That was it as far as the construction went. The only difficulty was estimating an exposure. It was all trial and error, but at least I could see immediately how successful or otherwise each shot had been and make corrections accordingly. The best shot I got was with ISO 100 and ‘shutter speed’ of 60 seconds. The top one took the bottom picture and vice versa.

While this was going on, I made a live backup of El Cap on to an external HDD using the excellent Carbon Copier. It took a little over 4 hours to complete the copy which is a long time, but that was both of the internal HDDs and the hidden recovery sectors too. Hopefully this will allow me to boot from the external HDD and reinstall El Cap if the need arises. I’ve used this method before when I added the SSD to the Mac and it was faultless, so I’m fairly confident about using it again. Sorry JIC, that was just gobbledegook to you, wasn’t it? 😉

Dull, but drier day forecast for tomorrow. Don’t know if it will be worthwhile going anywhere, but we live in hope.