Blog

Last day of October – 31 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Not only the final day of October, but also Halloween and the last day of Inktober 2022.

It didn’t start well. At 7:30am our next door neighbour started banging nails into his wall, which is also our wall. I think he got a new hammer for his birthday and wanted to see how it worked. No point in complaining. He trained as a lawyer and became a taxi driver, or that’s the impression he gives.

It was hot last night, I was actually sweating in bed, in October. That’s just not natural. All the news reports are telling us that this weather is not normal for the time of year. Excuse me, but some of us have lived in this country for a few years now and know how hot or cold it should be, we don’t need some teenager to tell us. Y’see that’s what happens when I get woken up early by a hammer wielding ex-lawyer who’s banging nails into his wall. I just end up grumpy for the rest of the day.

Lunch was roast beef with garlic and coriander. It sounds awful, but usually it tastes really good. Not so today. The smell was starting to make me sick, but luckily I didn’t go through with it. I did chuck the offending remainder in the bin.

<Technospeak>
On the first of each month I back up my photos for that month onto a big 2TB or 4TB external hard drive. Today I thought it would be a good idea to check that everything was working after the upgrade of the OS. It wasn’t. The problem was I couldn’t see the external drive on the computer. I read about lots of different ways to circumvent the problem, but none of them worked. About an hour and a half later I found the solution. The drives were made by Seagate, and with no fanfare, I stumbled upon a patch on the Seagate site. Installed it then restarted the machine. It worked a treat. Both my external drives worked perfectly. It’s just another case of Apple wanting you to use their external drives and putting blocks in the way of you when you try to use PC hardware.
</Technospeak>

Later in the afternoon I went for a walk in St Mo’s, partly to clear my head and partly to get a PoD. The PoD was easy. I found a patch of Candle Snuffer fungi on my way to the park. Another name for it is Stags Horn fungus, (Xylaria hypoxylon). I can almost see the Stags Horns, but have no idea what a candle snuffer looks like. Anyway, PoD found. I also got a very wide angle shot of a tree with a carpet of leaves beneath it. Look on Flickr for it.

When I got back I wasn’t feeling great. Sore back, a bit tired and aching. I took a couple of paracetamol with a cup of tea and didn’t feel much better.

It being Monday, dinner was pasta with tomato sauce and some bacon for extra flavour. Best I’ve made for ages, and I was beginning to feel better after that. Maybe the heat during the night, maybe the dodgy roast beef or maybe just being a bit cold coming home in the gloaming. I’ll take another couple of paracetamol before I go to bed.

So this is the last day of Inktober 2022. I’ll miss it. I always do, but it’s not been the same this year. Too many folk just dumping their paintings and photographs into Inktober and thinking they’ll get away with it. They won’t. They didn’t. Some complained and some just shrugged their shoulders and went to find the next new group. This is the first time, or maybe the second that I’ve had to ban someone from Inktober. I did it with mixed feelings, but they knew the rules when they joined.
Anyway, today’s sketch was of Matilda the tractor driving hen. There a nice wee nonsense story about her on the Inktober 2022 page on Flickr.

Some tidying up of photos and stuff tomorrow. Some messages to get at the shops. That’s about it. Not a lot, but enough to keep us both busy.

Summer has officially ended – 30 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

At 2am the clocks went back. I never saw them do it, but I’m happy to believe they did.

We got an extra hour in bed, sleeping through that amazing happening at 2am. However, in my sleep I must have been worrying through the Continuous Hover Cross, so much so that I wanted to see if I could manage to get through it solo. I did the count that Jane had done and lo and behold it worked. Not the first time, nor the second, but by the fourth or fifth attempt the steps worked. Now all I had to do was fit it into the routine that Scamp was doing, because unlike most ballroom routines, the Lead and the Follower are doing completely different steps, while almost being joined at the hip. Again, not at the first attempt, but at the third or fourth we were dancing the CHC. Hooray! A milestone had been reached! On to the Telemark Turn.

We spent some more time dissecting the next part of the routine and that’s where iMovie came to the rescue again. In that clumsy bit of software it is possible to speed up or slow down a video. We did the slowing down to about 70% normal speed. The really clever part is that you can force the pitch of music or speech to stay the same and not slow down with the visuals. That gave us another weapon to use in the final part of the ‘back end’ of the Foxtrot.

We needed something for tonight’s dinner, so once the rain had stopped we put the computer away and walked down to the shops. We came home with a chicken, some veg and a pudding plus other odds and sods that would do for lunch during the week. We wouldn’t starve.

When we got back, I grabbed a camera and went for a walk in St Mo’s.  According to my weather app, there was a one hour window before the next rain shower blew in and we’d already used up about half an hour of that walking down to the shops and back! There wasn’t much to see over the road, but there was just occasionally some sunshine through the trees. The sun gave a bit of back lighting to a leaf that had become entangled in some weeds. That made PoD after some restorative work in a couple of post-processing apps. Yes, the weather fairies had it down perfectly.  I was back in the house about ten minutes when the first raindrops met the window.

Dinner was roast chicken with baked potatoes and roasted veg. All done in the oven. The kitchen was toasty hot for the rest of the day as a result.

Spoke to Jamie later and found out about his forthcoming work trip to Switzerland, famous of course for it’s clocks and WATCHES.  DId I say WATCHES?  But of course he wouldn’t be interested in such things, would he?  Sounds like they were getting some much needed rain these past few days.

The prompt for today was ‘Gear’. Would I do meshing gear wheels? Nah! The thought of drawing all those gear teeth with involutes and pitch circles. No chance. I thought of drawing camera gear, but somebody had already drawn that. I settled, finally, on my painting gear and that’s what you see here. I thought it was only right and proper to give them a chance in the limelight.

No plans for tomorrow. Possibly another practise of the Gershwin Foxtrot. I don’t think Alex is fit enough for a photo walk yet.

Dance Class – 29 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Today being Saturday we were off to Brookfield for dance class.

Sometimes the class goes well, sometimes I have a few problems, but this class was an utter disaster for me today. I seemed to be able to do nothing right. We were dancing Foxtrot. Well, the rest of the class were dancing foxtrot, I was staggering around the floor for most of the time. I just couldn’t get one part of it right. The part is called the Continuous Hover Cross and it was indeed making me cross. I’d practised it in class last week and after following Stewart with the rest of the leaders, I could do it. When I tried dancing it with Scamp, it didn’t work. We also practised it last night and after a few mistakes, it fell into place. Today it just fell. I had to admit defeat after a while. Gave up and thankfully could manage the Tango we did after the (bloody) Foxtrot.

Driving home was a bit of a slog. Even using my shortcut through the Clyde Tunnel, we were still locked into a long queue of slow moving traffic. In retrospect, I think the problem was a weekend rail strike, meaning that those folk wanting to get to the football had to drive there. Whatever it was, it meant an extra half an hour added to our journey.

The clouds that we’d seen beginning to break as we left Brookfield were joining together the nearer we got to Cumbersheugh and they’d invited all their cloud pals along too. So much so that it felt like evening was coming by about 3pm.

I did manage to get one or two photos of a beautiful rose flowering for the second time this year in the garden. It’s called Simply The Best and it’s living up to its name. It became PoD.

The prompt for today was “Uh-Oh”. So my interpretation of that was a broken egg. There is a saying that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Sometimes I can’t make anything without an egg catastrophe!

I remember reading somewhere “You always get a second chance. It’s called Tomorrow.” We have no plans for Sunday.

Out to lunch – Out in the wilds – 28 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp was going out to lunch today. I was going out into the wilds.

The clouds were rolling in when Scamp set out on the trek to Brodens in Condorrat. I stayed at home to see if the rain was going to come to anything or if the clouds would clear. In the meantime I got a needle and thread and sewed a necklace of my red chillies. I’d watch part of a Gardeners World program where a woman was stitching a chain of chillies. I didn’t see exactly what she was doing, but I got the gist of it and now I have two strings of chillies drying in the back room.

By the time I’d finished the weather looked a lot more settled to sunshine. I drove up to the back of Fannyside Moor and watched the light scud across the landscape as the clouds were broken up and blown about by a strong westerly wind. When I was sure that the light was getting better, I took my camera bag and walked along the road that leads to a farm. I didn’t actually go as far as the farm, because it was the walk back to the car, into the wind, but also in to the more photogenic landscape. It’s just a few hundred metres of straight road, but in that time the light on the hills and woods was changing all the time. PoD turned out to be a view down the road I’d driven up with the light coming from the right, through the trees. Of course the image has been ‘fiddled with’ just a bit, but it is certainly improved by my digital interventions.

On the way home I stopped at the shops to get tonight’s dinner which was a ‘bake at home’ deep pan pizza. Not the healthiest of meals, but fairly tasty and very filling. I was only home for about five minutes when Scamp arrived from her lunch. I think we may wander along the road to Brodens this week for a Pensioner’s Lunch. It sounds just the job.

Scamp was determined to plant up her pansies today when she came home. They are now sitting on the back step settling in to their new home. Tomorrow they get the airlift to their true place on the fence. The snowdrops have already been planted in a trough by the back step.

While the pizza was in the oven I was trying to get the new OS backed up on a spare section of another SSD, without success. The OS copied perfectly, but it wasn’t bootable. I was on my third try and it was just after dinner, that the work “Legacy” popped into my head. You don’t need to know what it is or how it works, but if I’m ever looking for a way to make a bootable OS copy, remind me the key word it “Legacy”. When this revelation appeared, I had just started making a sort of OS copy from the original ‘spinning rust’ hard disk. When I stopped it and put it out of its misery it was telling me is still had five hours to go. The Legacy OS took 25 minutes to do the same thing … and it worked.

The prompt today was ‘Camping’.
We used to do a fair bit of camping when we were younger, but the world was a different place then. I’m not sure I’d want to go camping in the wilderness in 2022. Having said that, we still have a tent somewhere in the house, just in case we get that sudden urge to spend a night or two in the great outdoors … in the rain.

Tomorrow it looks like the dance class is ready to go ahead and we’ve had a bit of a practise tonight to make sure we know the rudiments at least. Other than that, we have no plans. It looks wet again.

Plant hunting – 27 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp wanted pansies and snowdrops today.

Pansies to replant the trough that hangs on the fence and snowdrops to plant around the garden. So it would be a drive to a garden centre. We chose Calders. It was the nearest one and would probably have what she wanted. Aha, but before that there was coffee to make for both of us and both Wordle and Spelling Bee to solve for both of us.

After lunch we drove to Calders. Pansies were no problem, loads of them. Scamp found a tray full that seemed to suit her, but no snowdrops were to be found. However, there were lots of snowmen, elves, reindeer (both illuminated and not), snow dogs and even Frank Sinatra singing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and other jolly songs. I hate Xmas. Not Christmas, that’s alright, but Xmas is just tinsel and fairy lights and spend, spend, spend. Bah Humbug!

We came home via Tesco and there Scamp found the snowdrops. She got two boxes. She also found the Good Food Christmas (see what I mean) magazine with the free calendar we couldn’t find anywhere last year. This year we’re ahead of the game. When we were driving in to the car park Scamp noticed the old fashioned Tunnock’s delivery van and that made PoD. I had my camera in the car, but my phone in my pocket. The best phone in the world is the one you have in your pocket. It’s a true saying.

Of course the phone couldn’t take a picture like the PoD. That took Lightroom and Photoshop to do that. Lightroom and Photoshop and a couple of hours poring over a computer screen. I was quite happy with the result, although if I’d thought about it a bit more and planned it better I might have been happier with the result, but I didn’t and it wasn’t. It’s still PoD.

The prompt today was ‘Snack’. I drew a Piece.
A sandwich in Scotland is a ‘piece’. This one consists of a layer of buttered bread. A layer of fried pork sausages slathered in tomato sauce. A layer of bread buttered on both sides. A layer of lettuce (one of your ‘five a day’). A layer of buttered bread. Squash down and slice with a sharp knife. Please note:

  1. The bread must be from a Scottish plain loaf
  2. The jury is still out on whether tomato sauce constitutes one of your ‘five a day’.

Tomorrow Scamp is out for lunch with The Witches. I might go in to Glasgow for a wander.

A wild morning – 26 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

A wild morning and a computing afternoon with a walk in the late afternoon.

Heavy rain in the morning, but by the time Scamp was driving to meet her sister, the worst of the rain had passed and the sun was beginning to shine on the hills. Scamp had put some towels in the washing machine and once they had run their cycle I was in two minds whether to hang them up on the whirly to dry in the breeze. I finally decided to just do it because although the clouds were still massing, the breaks were getting bigger.

I planted a pot of basil after the washing had been hung out. It cost virtually nothing, just a couple of quid for a packet of seeds. There is always some compost in the greenhouse, enough to plant the seeds in and lots of plastic pots. The seeds should germinate in about a week’s time and once they have their second set of leaves they can be divided up into individual pots. They seem to like to live on the window sills of the bedrooms. Not too warm, but plenty of light. Let’s hope they grow well.

<Technospeak>
With that done, I started to carve up the SSD that holds the new operating system for the iMac. I’d initially set up the SSD almost a year ago, before I knew what the APFS was all about and it ended up a confused mixture of partition and APFS filing systems. To get it cleaned out I had to be careful and take one piece out at a time and in the correct order, or I risked screwing the whole 1TB drive. Long story short, after about two hours I had the ‘easy’ stuff done. The next chunk of data was about 250GB in size and I was copying it off to an old spinning disk (scathing called “Spinning Rust by the SSD fanboys). The copy would take about an hour according to the info box. That left time for lunch with Scamp who had just arrived home.
</Technospeak>

After a plate of Scamp’s Just Soup I put a pair of boots on and went out for a walk around St Mo’s for the first time in about a week. Deep in the woods I found some delicate looking fungi growing out of a fallen tree branch. They made PoD. I’d made some changes to the colour balance in the A7 last night, but clean forgot to leave myself a note as to what I’d done. Whatever it was it seemed to have cleared away a green cast that had appeared on everything yesterday. Easily changed in post-processing, but better if it’s done in the camera instead.

Back home the backup was complete and I could continue with the last part of the clean up. I wasn’t entirely sure if the next bit would work, but was pretty sure the Mac would tell me if danger threatened. It went very smoothly in the end. I shut the machine down, then powered it up again and the operating system operated and it now had twice as much space as it had last night. Phew!

Dinner was Carrot & Lentil Curry and Scamp was chef. It was very good, but I just know it will be even better tomorrow. Curries are like that.

Prompt for today was another vague “Ego”. Now, in Latin, Ego means “I” or “Me”. That gave me the germ of an idea. After I looked through Google Images the germ became a reality, this is my interpretation of “Ego”.

No plans for tomorrow, but it looks wet … again.

The day dawned dry and clear – 25 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Not quite sunny when we woke, but dry and clear was good enough for us to pack a pair of boots and head off to Japan.

Before we went, we had one more thing to do and that was to photograph the eclipse. Everyone was raving about having to wear eclipse glasses. Being a photographer, I had a couple of polarising filters. If you orient them with the glasses at 90º to each other, they cut out about 95% of visible light. I did that and took a few photos of the sun with a bite out of it! Then we were on our way.

We drove over the ‘Clacks’ bridge to Clackmannanshire, then over to Dollar. Took a wrong turning there and got stuck behind a slow moving jeep pulling a trailer then up a long, steep, twisting, single track road, only to find a bin lorry coming the opposite way. Luckily I’d just passed a house about 100m back and was able to reverse down into their drive to let the bin lorry through. Thankfully no more vehicles on the road, but we seemed to be at the back of beyond and no sights of anything that could be construed as Japanese. We were looking for somewhere to stop when I saw an elegant open wrought iron gate. That looked like the place. We parked and walked to the cabin to pay for our walk in a garden.

A Japanese garden. Honestly you would never know this place existed if you hadn’t been looking for it. The photo, which became PoD, was the first view we got of this place. It’s laid out like a Japanese garden, but not in a tacky, tawdry way, but one that you just know was designed by someone who knew what they were doing. It was utterly stunning. The weather was trying its best to make it look even more beautiful. The sun, which had survived its fight with the moon, was cutting holes in the clouds and spreading some light on the trees, the pond and the little shelters. Everything was meticulously clean and tidy. Not a spot of litter. We spent about two hours walking round the place. We even found a “Christie Path” that led into the trees! I could rant on for ages telling you what we saw. It would be better have a look here and see for yourself:
https://cowdengarden.com/

Drove home by a different route, taking our time. After a cup of coffee Scamp decided it was time to cut the front grass. When she was finished I hauled the ‘grass hoover’ into the back garden and cut the back grass. It’s not perfect, but given the dampness underfoot, I think we did a fairly good job. It’s like a bad haircut, in a fortnight it will look fine. We also put up another set of lights. Little stars this time that hopefully will fare better than the last ones did. They’re shining brightly as I’m typing this.

Today’s prompt was ‘Tempting’.  I thought of that bag of four doughnuts I’d bought the other day.  There was only one left, so I sketched the bag and the doughnut.  One doughnut left?  It’s always a temptation to just eat it.  You know you shouldn’t. You know you should share it, so that’s what I did.  No I didn’t! I ate it!!

Tomorrow Scamp has been asked out for coffee by June. I’ve got more computer stuff to fix. Always got more computer stuff to fix!

An invitation – 24 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp and I were watching the US F1 GP this morning when my phone rang and I got an invitation.

Fred was heading to Tesco in half an hour and did I fancy meeting him for coffee. Of course I did! Got myself organised with the books I’d borrowed from him and hadn’t got round to returning then drove over to Tesco where I was also instructed to bring back a loaf, pancakes and a bottle of milk.

I met Fred in the car park and after I dumped my bag of books in the boot of his car, we went to the cafe. He was buying and I had a cappuccino which I realised too late was coming from what looked like a Costa machine. That meant it was more of a Babyccino than a Cappuccino. Next time I’ll get a flat white. I let him peruse my Inktober sketch book that I’d brought with me and for once he was less than critical. It must have been good, because he usually finds something to criticise. But that’s good. He’s always fair with his crits. Eventually, now that it had been all but confirmed that Sunak was to be the new PM, he turned the conversation to politics, that and the gormless council being his two pet subjects. He’s really suffering with his leg now, especially his knee and is having a hard time of it trying to keep moving. It’s worrying that of the six of us that are left from the Auld Guys. Three of us need walking sticks just to get around. We are an ageing group now.

After we’d drunk our warm milk and set the world to rights, we went to do our shopping, vowing to meet up again soon. I managed to get the three items that were on my list and added in a packet of doughnuts just for the fun of it.

Lunch for Scamp and I was Just Soup, then we needed to get ready to go and visit Margie. I dropped Scamp off at the entrance to Monklands and then went to park the car. I gave up on the car park after about fifteen minutes of driving round and round and round. The galling part about it was that I’d driven past a space and ignored it. Of course, it was long gone when I went back for a look. I remembered parking at the roadside down a quiet cul-de-sac. Maybe I’d be lucky again. I was. A space just the right size for the wee blue car. Perfect.

Walking back to the hospital, I saw today’s PoD lighting up in front of me and grabbed a few shots with my phone camera, not having a ‘real’ camera with me. I could never have achieved that quality with my old phone camera. Sat and talked to Margie and showed her my sketches so far in Inktober. Again, Margie is quite a critical sketcher and doesn’t give praise lightly. I’m so glad she liked my efforts.

Drove home through the awkward road junctions in Airdrie and found there were no spaces in our car park either. I did find a space further on. Dinner tonight was a rather good Pasta Carbonara. Finally got round to writing to Alex and asking where we were going this week for a photo walk.

Today’s prompt was ‘Fairy’. This happy wee fairy lives in our bedroom. She’s always smiling and wears a pretty pink dress with matching bright red boots. I do believe she enjoyed being a model for a day.

Well, Sunak did get the PM job. A poisoned chalice if ever there was one. I hope he’s better than the last two inhabitants of No10. I just wonder what Larry the Cat thinks about all the comings and goings in his house!

We’re waiting to see what the weather is going to do tomorrow before we make any rash decisions. Maybe East, maybe West. Who knows.

Making the most of the morning – 23 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

This morning there was light cloud, but the weather report looked gloomy.

We decided that it would be best to go for a walk in the morning while it was still dry, if not bright. Boots on for both of us, because it was going to be wet underfoot, wherever we went.

It wasn’t a long walk. Just down to Broadwood Loch, over the dam past the exercise machines and back past the shops. Around 6000 steps all told. We didn’t hang around much and I only took two photos, that’s how dull it was. We did stop at the shops to get some veg for dinner and a very nice piece of rump steak for my dinner. Scamp was having salmon instead of meat. By the time we reached home it felt like there was rain in the wind and just after lunch it was definitely raining. I’m glad we decided to go out while it was still dry.

Just before it got too heavy I went out and took a few shots of the fuchsia plants that hang in a basket on the fence. There was just enough sunlight to pick out the raindrops on the flowers. That became PoD.

I spent a while fiddling with the settings on the SSD that was now taking the place of the internal hard disk drive of the iMac. I did one upgrade that brought the version number up from 11.68 to 11.7. That seemed to make a big difference to the stability of the drive. The speed difference from using the hard drive is immense. Lightroom takes between 3 and 4 minutes to boot from the hard drive. Today it took 14 seconds. That’s over a ten fold speed increase. There are lots of other areas where things are working a lot smoother too. Still not totally settled on the new technology, but it’s working well for now.

Today’s prompt was ‘Boogers’.
As another sketcher with the nickname “Mydoghasnno.se” says, different places have different words for the mucus that must be removed from our nostrils. In the US they may be Boogers, but in Scotland they are Bogles and the more liquid varieties are Snotters. The bloke I drew is obviously an expert Bogle hunter.

Spoke to Jamie and heard about the cost of repairing a roof in a listed building. It’s a lot more than I’d have thought, but Jamie seemed to accept it as a reasonable price and with winter coming, it has to be done. Glad to hear they are getting some much needed rain.

I’ve never been much of a political animal, but the events of last week with Liz Truss resigning after 45 days as PM and Boris attempting a comeback are the stuff of pantomime. Unfortunately, it’s real.

Tomorrow we may go and visit Margie … in hospital.

Back in the old routine – 22 October 2022

Posted on by Zogman

We were off to Brookfield again after a three week layoff.

Dull foggy morning with the threat of rain, but we were off to dance class, and that lifted our spirits, even mine. According to the messages that were crossing and recrossing the ether last night it appeared that there would only be about four couples coming to the class. That’s a nice number, but it means there’s nowhere to hide!

The road was unusually busy this morning and the fog that had faded out as we reached Glasgow thickened again as we drove out of the city again. The land is fairly low lying there and we could see pockets of fog all around. Strange weather.

We were first into the hall and we saw the teachers final practise for what was to come in a week or two. There were four couples to start with, then another arrive and another. So it wasn’t as small a class after all. We started with what was a new sequence dance for me, but not for Scamp, the Blue Angel Rumba. It seemed it was new for quite a few folk and took a while for everyone to get to grips with it. Next was the Foxtrot which we knew quite well, at least the first half of it we knew quite well. The second half, the back end as the teachers called it, was cloaked in mystery for me. We did, however make a decent fist of the first half. That dance took up almost an hour of our allotted time. We finished off with a couple of relatively easy sequence dances. Then it was time to head home into the rain that had developed from the fog. As we got nearer Cumbersheugh the rain tailed off and, I’d like to say it was a lovely day after that, but it wasn’t. It was just dull and miserable. Dreich was how one of the ladies in the class described it, and if fitted perfectly.

PoD was a quick photo of a rose in the garden that’s just starting to produce its second flush of buds, Lady of Shalott. Taken in the rain, if you look closely you can see the streaks of the falling rain drops.

Prompt for today was ‘Heist’. It was getting late when I started it and it’s not as glamorous as an American heist with guns blazing and tyres screaming. This is a more sedate British heist.

No plans for tomorrow.