Category: A Walk

Blue skies and sunshine – 26 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Also rain, sleet and hail in varying quantities, because it’s Scotland.

It was raining when we woke and it had been the same during the night, so there was no rush to get up and go out. However, later in the morning the clouds part, the sky was blue and the sun was shining. We went shopping.

We went via St Mo’s so I could get some photos. Today I was toting only the 18mm very wide angle. For once it was the right lens to have. There were some lovely cloudscapes over St Mo’s pond and I grabbed a few until the camera reported “Disk Full”. Aha, but I’d come prepared with a spare 32GB card. Plugged it in and we were in business again. One of those shots became PoD. Hardly any editing needed, almost straight out of the camera.

We walked out of the park and across the road, then down the way we’d walked on Wednesday and I’d walked yesterday, but still no deer. That didn’t matter, I was sure I had a PoD and that’s more important than the flighty deer. Walked round to the shops, just as the school was coming out for lunchtime. Thankfully they are at half capacity until after the Easter Holidays, when the whole contingent will be invited to return to lessons. That’s not to say they will all come back. I don’t see some of them ever returning after almost a year’s freedom. Feral, that’s what they’ll be. The new cavemen and women.

Got what we went for at the shops and came home for lunch. I took a few close up shots of some alstroemeria flowers, just to bolster the collectio. Later in the afternoon I got itchy feet and went out for a late walk in St Mo’s and saw a skein of geese heading north. Then as one, they turned and flew west, losing altitude all the time. They were heading for a large open field near Moodiesburn where they often break their journey north in autumn and south in spring. Another photo opportunity.

Came home to the news that Alex Salmond has announced that he’s standing for the Holyrood elections with a new party he’s created called something pretending to be Gaelic. What a Wally! It’s so transparent what he’s trying to do – to screw up Nic the Chick’s plans for world domination. Who would vote for that eejit? Then I think, but what about Trump? Millions voted for him. Maybe … No, that’s unthinkable. Isn’t it??

The remains of the Carrot & Lentil Curry for dinner but the panna cotta was finished as were the tuiles. Never mind. Hopefully there will be more some day.

Tomorrow the weather looks much the same as today, probably even worse. We may get out for a walk.

Today was dull, just dull – 25 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Not the most interesting of days. Dull grey morning with the promise of rain later.

Spent most of the morning searching for a paintbrush. Arty paintbrush, I don’t bother much with the decorating ones these days. Eventually found it in the last place I’d look, where it should be with a load of other brushes in a cup on the wardrobe. That’s the thing about putting stuff away after you’ve used it, you have to remember where ‘away’ is.

I eventually dragged myself out for a walk to the shops. Instead of going the direct route, I walked down the path Scamp and I had walked yesterday, hoping to get another view of the deer. Unfortunately the deer had other places to go today. What I did find was a whole tree’s worth of catkins. I’ve never seen so many all out together. A small section of that made PoD.

Back home I began baking. Yesterday we had panna cotta for pudding. It was meant to have a tuile on top. A round wafer thin biscuit curved into a cylinder. Tuiles need to be very thin, so I’d watched folk making them on Monsterchef and they scrape the mixture over a template to get the initial round biscuit batter onto the greaseproof paper. In the morning I’d made these templates. Now I was going to see if they worked. Surprisingly they did and although the baking process was a bit hit and miss, we had a tuile each with tonight’s panna cotta. I’ve learned what my mistakes were from Scamp and will try again soon. Ingredients were:
Soft Butter
Icing Sugar
Plain Flour
The whites of two eggs (sorry Hazy)
All the above in 50g quantities and mixed in that order. Bake for 4mins or so at 180ºc, just in case you fancy trying it.

Scamp had spent the afternoon and some of the morning making Carrot & Lentil Curry. It was very good too. We both agreed it was quite spicy hot, but Scamp was adamant that no chilli powder had been added, just Garam Masala which isn’t spicy. A mystery.

Spent the evening trying to work out how to get a video to play using chapter marks in any of Win 10’s video players. Eventually gave up, installed VLC which, although clumsy, did work. I hate Windoze.

It’s raining quite heavily now, but it’s forecast to be clear tomorrow for a while. We may go somewhere for a walk. If we leave it too late there is the chance of ‘wintry showers’. Brrrr!

Happy Birthday, Birthday Girl – 24 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Up and out fairly early.

Had to get up and go out to get the makings of today’s dinner which would be Cod and Prawns with Fennel and White Wine. Sounds really posh, but is fairly easy to do, successfully. However, it does require Cod and Prawns as main constituents and I’d forgotten to get them yesterday. Also, pudding would be Panna cotta which really needs double cream and whole milk, also on the ‘forgotten’ list. So a quick run up to Tesco was in order. Because the ‘birthday girl’ enjoys the odd glass of Kraken dark rum, and because of a price reduction of the same in Tesco, it seemed the right thing to do to add a bottle to the list. Managed to curb my spending to those essentials, and drove home.

After a light lunch and with the panna cotta cooling, we headed off for a walk round the Broadwood Stadium, route, because the clouds were gathering and it would have been pushing our luck to go the full Broadwood Loch path. On the way there, we saw a young deer buck happily grazing by the side of the path. I grabbed half a dozen shots of it before it loped off a few yards than stood in open ground staring at us and looked like it was saying “are you still there?” Spoke to a couple who were walking the opposite direction and agreed that the animals seem to be less frightened of us humans. Probably a side effect of Covid because a lot more of us humans are invading the animals’ space. Not only heavy cloud, but also a cold wind when you were exposed to it might have encouraged us to walk that little bit faster round the Broadwood paths.

When we got home I thought I might have just enough time to go round St Mo’s a couple of times to augment my deer photos. I visited the ladybirds still hibernating in the woods and grabbed a few shots just to remind me of when I’d last seen them, because they will be leaving soon. Nothing else interesting poked its head out to see me.

Back home it was full tilt into prep for dinner. One thing I’ve learned from Scamp and from my one day at cookery school is mise en place, or ‘setting up’. I’ve tried to use it more and more in my recent cookery. Just getting everything at least ready, if not measured before I start. It saves time when the gas is turned on!

Starter tonight was Pizza Bread Bruschetta. Main was Cod and Prawns with Fennel and White Wine. Pudding was Panna Cotta with Raspberries. All worked out well and were deemed a success.

Hazel and Neil had organised a Zoom call tonight with Jamie and Simonne for the Birthday Girl. We had an enjoyable hour talking to them all. What a wonderful idea Zoom is. Not quite as good as face to face meeting, but better than a simple phone call. Great catchup you people. Thanks for organising it.

Well, that was a busy day. PoD was a photo I took of blossom on a fruit tree near Broadwood Stadium. Those who are observant will notice that the blog is now HTTPS after I eventually set up my security properly. I don’t think it will make any difference to your connection, but if it does, drop me a line. Tomorrow, relaxing I hope!

A dull day – 23 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

After all those lovely sunny days it was a bit of a downer to have a couple of dull days. Not to worry, the sun might come back tomorrow.

Scamp went on a raiding party to Tesco in the morning while I went on a fruitless search for a very old Mac installation disk. Found lots of disks, most of them junk, but some that we’d been looking for last week, but no sign of the iLife disk. However I did find a small app on the App Store that did what I needed to do, which if you’re interested, was to put markers on a video so we could quickly go to different sections. Very useful for the dance teachers instruction videos. By that time Scamp had returned with only one bag of shopping. Very restrained for her!

A couple of parcels arrived for Scamp just before lunch. One remains unopened as yet, we’ll reveal all the secrets tomorrow.

After lunch we went for a walk round St Mo’s. It was a bit cold, and the weather, although promising great things, remained firmly grey. We watched one of the resident swans chasing away some hoping to be resident geese. It all got a bit fiery for a while, then calmed down again. Twice round the pond sufficed for Scamp, but I had business to do at the shops, so I left her to return home by herself while I went off on a secret mission.

When I returned, dinner was being prepared. Mince ’n’ tatties with beetroot for me and veg sausage and tatties with beans for Scamp. After dinner I had some more secret stuff to do upstairs and that took up most of the evening.

PoD went to a shot of flowers on the whin bushes at the back of St Mo’s.

Mojave seems to be behaving itself. It had a wee hissy fit last night, but eventually cooled down. Lightroom seems to be clashing with it a bit, but we’ll get by that in due course.

Tomorrow is Scamp’s big day. Lots of work for me.

Deep breath and here we go – 22 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Today I left Sierra behind and found Mojave.

I’ve been running Sierra on the iMac since I bought it about four years ago. It’s been getting slower and slower all that time. Finally, today, after making another backup and filing away some important passwords, I ran the Mojave installer and went to have my lunch. I fidgeted and paced the floor like a dafty on and off for about half an hour after that. Actually, the time scale the installer gave was almost correct and after an hour I had a new, responsive operating system. I’m quite impressed with it and have learned a lot in the process. The main thing I’ve learned is to let the computer and the code I’m injecting get on with things and don’t poke about in it. I’ll try to remember that when things go wrong as they did about half an hour ago when my memory usage was red-lining and one app was taking up twice as much physical memory as I have installed. Don’t ask me how that’s possible, I don’t know, but it just is.

It was a dull day, so I suppose it was the perfect day to do this kind of messing around. It didn’t actually rain, but it looked like it wanted to. Scamp was busy doing housework while I was pacing the floor and swearing at anything that got in my way. Eventually, I closed the computer down, grabbed my camera and went for a walk in St Mo’s. For the last week the weather has been really like spring, but today it was as if we’d returned to winter. Cold wind, grey sky and not a lot of light. However I was out. I did two circuits of the pond and then came home with a few photos, two of which got red spots, which means they were good enough to post on Flickr. PoD went to the photo of the red flower with the zig-zag stem. I also took a few shots of desiccated weeds. The structure of weeds is really interesting. As someone who used to make a living drawing structural steelwork, these featherlight vertical structures are amazing. They can sway in the breeze and not break. They have evolved to cope with wind, rain, snow, sun and ice. If you study them, they are incredibly strong for their light weight. Anyway, as I photographed some weeds a line from a George Gerdes song popped into my head, “Seeds that I’ve sown were all a bunch of weeds”. When I got back home I searched for George Gerdes and found that he had died of a brain aneurysm on January 1st this year. He was 72. We heard him sing at a Loudon Wainwright concert in Glasgow away back around 1974. RIP George. I loved the humour of your songs.

We had a quick attempt at the figure we learned yesterday, The Five Step, but after Scamp trod on my toe and I trod on hers, both by accident, we decided to call it a day and try agin tomorrow.

There will be some worried faces in the SNP party tonight since Nicola Sturgeon was cleared of ‘breaching the ministerial code’, which is legalese for ”She didnae dae it!” That means all those who had their daggers drawn ready to take her down will be keeping a low profile for some time to come. I’m not saying she’s vindictive, oh no, I didn’t say that. I’ve always said she was the best leader we’ve ever had. Ahem, I think I got away with that.

Tomorrow looks reasonable weather wise, but we may get some of the wet stuff.

 

 

Lovely to look at but baby it’s cold outside – 21 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

It was one of those days that looked inviting with blue skies and bright sun, but when you were out you felt the cold of the westerly wind.

I must admit that after lunch I was tempted to go out, it looked so sharp and clear with the blue sky and the sun. Eventually I gave in and grabbed the Sony fitted with the macro lens (unused today) and a Samyang 18mm in the bag. Almost immediately after parking at the station car park I changed the lenses round. The 18mm was going to be more useful today.

I walked along almost the Cumbersheugh length of the Luggie Water, an insignificant stream that used to hold some good sized trout, but is now so overfished that there is very little sport to be had. Carried on, crossing the road and walking down towards Condorrat, but couldn’t find much to interest me, or even to take the camera out of the bag. Turned and walked back and found a couple of paving stones that gave me access to a little drainage pond that empties out into the Luggie. Grabbed a very low viewpoint shot across the pond to a line of trees almost hiding the view of some houses. Seemed like that was one in the bag. I backtracked a bit and managed another low down shot of the Luggie itself with the railway bridge, poetically named Bridge SCM3 132/676, in the background. The 18mm is not the easiest lens to achieve spot on autofocus with, but it does take very good and very wide-angle photos for an economy price. Two in the bag. Of course, I took a lot more, because you can never be sure about photos. What looks good in the viewfinder may not turn out the way you’d hoped. It’s alway better to take a second (or third of fourth …) shot. So I did.

Back home it was Sea Bream with potatoes and carrots. Scamp thought the skin was underdone, but I disagreed. It smelled and tasted of the sea and the partly mashed carrots were brilliant!

In the dance class tonight we demonstrated just how badly we can dance rumba. Both of us made mistakes, me more than Scamp, of course. Then it was on to Tango with more opportunities for disasters and I did manage to provide them. I knew at the end of one ‘figure’, I should be pointing my left foot, but it just didn’t want to point. It’s a very well brought up foot and knows it’s rude to point. The right foot, however, is always ready to point, kick and tramp on any other feet in the vicinity and it gave me a proper showing up. In the end, the left foot got the idea and danced with pointed perfection.

Spoke to JIC on the phone later and he commiserated, knowing full well the problems with Tango. It’s a complete contrast to all the other dances we do. Not smooth, more staccato. Not a case of sliding your foot across the floor, more like stamping. It’s a nightmare. Well, it is for now!

PoD went to Bridge SCM3 132/676, but the little drainage pond got its day in the sun, literally. Both are on Flickr.

Tomorrow we have no plans, but we need bread and something for lunch, so a trip to the shops is not out of the question.

 

A taste of Japan – 20 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Have you ever had one of those days when you wake up feeling that something’s just not right and it follows you all day? I had one of those days today.

Oh dear, milky white sky, but the clouds were low too. The Campsie Fells were covered to about halfway down, but from the cloud line down they were in beautiful sunshine. Very strange indeed.

The clouds seemed to take a long time to lift and disperse, in fact it wasn’t until after lunch that things began to clear and we felt able to go out for a walk, but still that strange feeling irritated me for most of the afternoon. Scamp tried her best to lift it, and eventually a walk round Broadwood Loch and her constant chipping away at it finally broke through and the sun shone. From then on life returned to normal. We walked round the loch, but didn’t venture into the woods because I was pretty sure the path would be flooded and that would be no fun. Instead we walked clockwise against the flow of anticlockwise walkers with their dogs, around the edge of the loch. Then it was up the gentle but continuous climb past the exercise machines and on to the shops.

I suggested to Scamp today that we should perhaps declare Friday and Saturday to be no-cook or easy-cook days. When you’re retired you don’t have weekends. Heavens, many people who are working from home during this pandemic don’t have weekends either. So, to give us something to look forward to and to give the week a structure we should treat dinner at the weekend as a stay-home restaurant meal. Sometimes we should get a take-away delivered or walk over to the food outlets in Condorrat to collect a meal, or like today, we could get an easy-cook meal from M&S. Today’s meal was a Japanese food box with Chicken and Teriyaki sauce, Katsu Chicken Curry, Chicken Miso with noodles and a well named Firecracker Chicken. All served with rice. Sounds complicated, but basically you pierce the film on all the trays and bung the lot into a pre-heated oven for 20mins or thereabouts while you relax with a nice glass of red. Pudding was Bramley apple sponge from the same shop. That worked for me.

Between returning from the shops and cooking this complicated meal, I went over to St Mo’s to see what happens when two tribes go to war, and also to get some photos. Lots of rubber-men and rubber-girls staggering around but nobody seemed to be wearing any warpaint, so I presume:

  1. Peace had been declared.
    Or
  2. The batteries had run out on the ghetto blaster.

Perhaps even both. The woods were silent. The woods I went to were at any rate. Earlier I’d photographed some Flowering Currant bushes (Ribes sanguineum) almost exactly a year after my last Flickr picture of them. I also found some larch pollen buds just opening with a nice bit of side lighting and that was the shot that got PoD.

Altogether, my day was a bit like the weather. It started off cloudy but soon the sun shone and drove the clouds away. Thankfully Scamp has that effect.

Maybe a walk down the Luggie tomorrow. Haven’t been there this year I think!

Another lovely spring day – 18 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

A bit of scattered cloud in the morning, but that soon burned off.

It was a lazy start to the day for me, but Scamp had done a load of washing ready for hanging it out to dry. I was just messing around with the iMac. It’s getting to the time when I have to upgrade the OS. There are fewer and fewer updates for my apps that will work on Sierra which I’ve been running since I got this computer. I think I’m ready now in my head for a jump up to Mojave. It’s a big jump because even the format of the hard drive will change. I think tomorrow may be the day.

Scamp was going out with Veronica for a walk around Broadwood are, but no all the way round the loch. I was staying in. I was intending starting a painting, but instead I began finding out what was causing two of Scamp’s light balls to stop working. The light balls are roughly spherical shapes made from a spiral of steel with a line of tiny white LEDs wound round them. They are connected to a solar cell which should power them during the day and turn them on at night, except they are not turning on. The first one was easy. The NiCad battery in it was dead. I thought we had a spare, but couldn’t find one. I fitted a standard Duracell and it worked fine, so the ‘tronics were ok. We just need to get a couple of cheap NiCad batteries somewhere. The second ball was different. It had a similar type of battery, but in a smaller size. I did have a spare for that. The problem with this light was water ingress. Scamp reckons it’s due to all that snow in January. I replaced the battery and the light winked of then wouldn’t light again. Getting a bit of external light on the problem and with a magnifier I discovered the problem. A small chip had come loose from the circuit board. I guessed I could solder it back on until I found that the metal conduction tracks were coming away from the fibre substrate. In technical terms it was gubbed. No point in wasting any time on it. Put it in the bin.

By then I’d found two problems and solved none. I went out for a walk to Condorrat to get chicken for dinner which would be Neil’s Italian Chicken. So called because it’s got the colours of the Italian flag, Green, White and Red. Green is Pesto. White is Mozzarella. Red is Marinara sauce. It’s Neil’s because he was the first one to cook it for us. Got the chicken, some mince and some beef olives at the butchers. Put them in the freezer and went out to get photos.

Bumped into Scamp on the way to St Mo’s, then carried on to see what photo opportunities were in the park. There were lots of ‘tribes’ wandering round the pond. Some of the male persuasion and some of the female. All dressed for the warm weather and all with their ghetto blasters (yes, we still have them up here in the north) turned up to the max. They were out celebrating the start of the Easter holidays, although:

  1. The holidays don’t actually start for another week and a half.
  2. They haven’t been to school for months now.

Still, any excuse for a party and a battle with another ‘tribe’.

PoD turned out to be a pretty wee pink flower. I must try to find out what it is. It looked as if it was just unwrapping itself in the sunshine and the out of focus ’bokeh’ in the background was a bonus.

Back home Scamp and I put our heads together and decided what changes need to made to the back garden. Just now it’s a bit of a mess. We are in agreement that we need to have a clear out of old and failing plants and that creates space for new ones. We start tomorrow with the first stages of that.

So, if tomorrow is as good as today, a day in the garden is called for.

Ravenscraig Revisited – 17 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Yes, we went back to the capital city again.

Picked up Shona and drove to the big stack of aluminium dominoes that was the Ravenscraig Regional Sports Facility, but is now the vaccination centre for North Lanarkshire.

This must be the ugliest building in Scotland. It really does look like a stack of giant metal boxes that have started to fall down. Got parked fairly easily but were amazed at the number of cars there. Although we were just observers, and not actively involved in the process, just looking at the crowds milling around outside the centre controlled by blokes with clipboards, brought me in mind of herding cattle. No social distancing, nobody telling folk where to wait or how long it would take. According to Shona that was a fair description of the process. It was dry today, but I dread to think what it would be like in the rain or what it might have been a couple of weeks ago with snow falling because there didn’t appear to be any shelter. I don’t suppose a giant gym would need shelter, but where people are queueing outside for a vaccination, a bit of shelter would be useful. But then again, this is North Lanarkshire, so normal rules do not apply. With all the foregoing said, we were both surprised when only about half an hour later Shona opened the car door and got in. Drove back to Cumbersheugh for her to go for her messages, then we two drove home for lunch.

I’d taken a few photos of flowers in the front garden before we left, and took some more when we returned, but really needed some more and a walk in St Mo’s, in the sun would possibly fill up the memory card with more useful images. Well, it did provide some, but when I lifted up one of Scamp’s planters with its host of crocuses, I saw the PoD right there. Got the folding table we use in the garden which raised the planter up enough to catch the sun and shot off another group of photos. The one you see here was about the best of the lot. I liked it. I also like the moody one of the snowdrops.

We’d got a phone number for a joiner from one of the neighbours. We’ve been talking about getting the fence between us and Angela next door replaced and Scamp wants it done before the apple trees and roses put on their spring growth. The bloke came later in the afternoon and measured up. Now we have to wait to hear his price.

Fred texted me about a new painting programme Landscape Artist of the Year (Canada). We watched the first episode tonight and it was really quite refreshing. Not as ‘po faced’ as the UK version, but I think our presenters are better than the Canadians. Some wild and woolly takes on a pastoral scene, and some standard paintings too, with lots of ‘interesting’ takes on the scenery in between. Set it to record now.

Tomorrow, Scamp is meeting Veronica for a walk down past Broadwood Stadium. Inspired by tonight’s LAotY(C), I might just paint. Nothing to do with the fact that I saw a girl sitting watercolour painting in St Mo’s this afternoon.  Brave soul!

Out for a walk – 16 March 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Another beautiful day with a wraparound blue sky to boot.

Far too good a day to lie in bed, or even to stay in the house. We had to get out … somewhere.

The ‘somewhere’ turned out to be Chatelherault in Hamilton. Now technically, that’s outside our region, but is still in Lanarkshire, so as far as I was concerned we were within our rights to go there. We got there fairly early, just after 11am and trotted off round the high level path going clockwise. We had no definite destination in mind, but I thought The Green Bridge would give us a good walk. We could always cut it short if we needed to. We passed a lot of folk who were walking anticlockwise. There will always be a few who want to do it “the wrong way.” We also passed and were passed by other walkers doing it the right way, clockwise. The path was fairly mucky in places and that was when we realised we’d left the walking poles in the car. They would have been especially useful when we were on the final descent to the Green Bridge down the slippery, mucky steps. We were warned by a couple of ladies that the last time they had walked it, they found that the path was flooded at the bottom and they had to detour over a fence into a field. Today it was flooded again, but some kind souls had built a raised path through the water and we managed to keep our feet dry.

I thought that we’d be able to take an easier path along the side of the Avon Water back to the visitor centre, but I realise now I was getting the green bridge and the white bridge mixed up. We had to cross the green bridge and climb up the path on the other side that would eventually take us along to the Cadzow Oaks and over the Duke’s Bridge, back to the car park. It was a long walk. Much longer that we’d anticipated, but really good on such a wonderful spring day.

On the green bridge itself, I was talking to a woman who came from Larkhall and sharing our memories of it- My mum used to take Alex and I down there. I think we used to get the bus down to Millheugh and we’d walk along the side of the river to Maryhoses where the green bridge is. It was a steel bridge then and it was painted green. These days it’s wooden and unpainted. It used to have drainage holes in the floor where you could drop stones through. A bloke on a bike cycled past while we were talking and on the sandy bank of the river set up a hammock to rest his weary legs … and look ‘cool’. Another cyclist was trying to cross over onto an island, lost his footing and ended up in the river. We passed him later on the path, looking muckier that ever. A long walk, but most enjoyable.

Back home we did a sort of check over the garden. What was growing and what wasn’t. Overall, it looks as if a lot of the plants have survived the vicious winter. Some work still to be done, but not as much as I’d feared.

PoD was a shot of the Duke’s Bridge just as we were setting off.

Tomorrow we are booked to take Shona for her jag in Motherwell.