Category: A Walk

On the slow train – 20 December 2019

Posted on by Zogman

Today we thought we’d take the slow train to Glasgow, from Greenfaulds. Slower, but with more interesting scenery.

So easy to park at Greenfaulds, compared with Croy with its overcrowded car park. OK, the journey took longer, but we weren’t in a hurry. The journey took almost 25 minutes which is not a lot longer than the time from Croy. Thankfully we didn’t have to get out the train at Springburn and change trains, or as I recall, wait for the train to change tracks and then get back in again.

While Scamp was looking for unspecified articles, I went up to level 3 in JL to look at the toys. Of course, as it was before Christmas, all toys were at premium prices, but it was worthwhile looking to see what might and might not be available much cheaper after Christmas. Of course, I’m not allowed to buy anything else until at least 2030 <wink>. Walked up Sausage Roll Street and had coffee in Costa. It really must only be Cumbersheugh Costa that make such poor coffee. The flat white I had was fine. Back down again and on to George Square where today’s PoD came from. Finally we got the train back again to Greenfaulds.

I knew I had one in the bag, but that didn’t prevent me from taking a walk over to St Mo’s. Just missed two deer, but the light was so low I’d have been hard put to get any decent images. I really need to go further afield these days to get some fresh scenery.

Still having problems with the new ON1 2020, but I uninstalled it and then installed a fresh copy. Now things seem to be running a bit better. However, now my NAS drive is having problems. White light is flashing which generally means that it’s rebuilding its catalog. It may be time to put it out to pasture and get something more dependable. That’s a problem for another day.

Tomorrow we may go out for a walk. Just to be out in the open air without any shops would be a blessing.

A bargain perhaps – 19 December 2019

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One of those days when nothing seemed to happen.

Scamp went out to Tesco in the morning for essentials of the season. Shortbread and wrapping paper and stuff. I went out to B&Q and got a planter for her spring flowering bulbs. While I was out I parked at St Mo’s and went for a quick walk around the loch. The lighting was decent, but nothing great, much like the day. The sun stayed low all day and seemed to be having a problem cutting through the light cloud, resulting in a low amber coloured light. PoD was a trio of trees in silhouette.

Spent about an hour trying to finance Scamp’s game playing with a Google Play gift card, only to find that I’d paid it into the wrong account. Why do they make it so difficult and complicated.

Drove Scamp through the traffic jam of busses and cars taking weans home early from St Mo’s school. Christmas holidays have started in earnest. Scamp was going to Jeanette’s for Afternoon Tea, not High Tea as I described it yesterday. My mistake. I decided to go the long way home partly to avoid the traffic jam round the school and partly to see if there was anything more interesting to photograph. There wasn’t.

Wrapped up some secret stuff while I wouldn’t be disturbed and frittered away some more time on-line. That’s when I noticed an offer from ON1 reducing the price of version 2020 by a tenner. That sounded like my kind of offer. I’d been hoping they’d reduce the price over Christmas and New Year, but wasn’t sure. Paid the money and am now the owner of Photo RAW 2020. Not the “Happy” owner, just the owner. Some of the rough edges of the software are still there. The supposedly non-destructive editing isn’t exactly as it says on the tin. Most things are, but unless I’m missing something, there are elements that are still destructive. It’s certainly faster than the 2019 version. Much fewer ‘spinning beachballs’ and if they stick to their previous plan of removing the rough edges as the year goes on, I’ll forgive them.

Scamp texted to say she was getting a lift home from Annette who, like me is finding her Juke is more thirsty recently than she’d been led to believe. I imagine the cold weather means the car needs to run on ‘choke’ for longer than in the summer. I think we should just do away with winter and have Spring, Summer and Autumn. Returning to Spring after that. I’ll suggest it to Boris and I’m sure he’ll consider it in his next manifesto.

Tomorrow we may go in to Glasgow, just for the fun of it!

Another cold day – 18 December 2019

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Going out to lunch today with Isobel, so trying to be a bit more careful than usual with my food intake in the morning.

It was cold and it was frosty and the bloke next door was scraping his windscreen when I looked out. All three of these indicators told me that it was definitely a breakfast in bed day. Most days in winter are now that we are free to do so.

When I did eventually rise I checked the MBP and it was still working fine. Thank you Carbon Copier – a lifesaver. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the Verbatim drive . The 500GB drive which should have had four partitions was showing one of about 65GB. It also seemed that there was an unformatted area of just over 100GB. Something was wrong with the maths there. After a lot of messing around, I copied the 65GB onto another drive and formatted the blank space which magically reappeared as 350GB. That still leaves nearly 100GB of space unaccounted for. It’s always been a flaky drive, I think this is one flake too many. A quick tap with a claw hammer will repair it in a way that will make sure the data is gone for good and then it will go in a skip at the dump.

Got a phone call from Isobel, just before midday to say she was locked inside her house and would pass us her key through the window. Couldn’t understand how you could be locked INSIDE, but all became clear. She has no keyhole on the inside. Instead she has a turn button. The turn button had come loose and she couldn’t get a screwdriver small enough to loosen the grubscrew that should hold it in place. I had a look and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had a small screwdriver or not, because it was an Allen key fitting. I guarantee the repair man who came to fix it took less that three minutes to change over the lock and test the thing. I reckon he must be on loan from the Ferrari team. Either that or he’s on piece work!

We drove down to the Black Bull for lunch in The Coorie In. The food was ok, but no better than that. Service was very slow, but we were warned that there was a party of 18 before us. It would have been good to have had some heating in the room, considering it was around 5º outside. Isobel and I were freezing, Scamp doesn’t feel the cold. I was really glad to get back to Isobel’s for a cup of coffee. Can’t complain though because it was her treat.

On the walk back to the car I spotted the Morris Minor. I knew I’d found my PoD. Pity I hadn’t taken more time to get a sharper shot.

Maybe going in to Glasgow tomorrow for some last minute prezzies. Scamp has a high tea booked with the Witches.

A day in the toon – 17 December 2019

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Today we and a couple of million others went in to town to do some last minute shopping.

We decided that we’d drive in rather than freeze to death on a cold bus. It was probably the right decision, but it looked like half of Scotland thought the same way. We had to drive up to nose bleed altitude in the Buchanan Galleries car park to get a space. People were queueing everywhere on level 6 to squeeze into a space between a gigantic Land Rover Discovery and something that looked like a well polished Chieftan tank with alloy wheels. Meanwhile on level 7 we got to choose which of the hundred odd spaces we would grace with our presence. We both agreed on a “divide and conquer” approach and went on our separate and secret ways confirming that we would phone when we were finished or fed up, whichever came first.

I can’t remember who cracked first, but I do remember I was on my way to make my only purchase of the day when Scamp asked if I wanted to go to Paesano for lunch. Oh yes, that brightened the day. Actually the weather was quite bright, it was just the crowds of people everywhere that took some of the shine off it. When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded out the door. My face fell as I stood there wondering how long I was willing to wait. Ten minutes? Twenty minutes? Thirty minutes top. Nope, we got taken right away. It seemed that most of those waiting had booked full tables or were waiting for carry-outs. The place was jumping. We had to wait ages for our pizzas, but a bowl of balsamic onions helped stave off the hunger. The pizzas when they came were beautifully well done, mine to the point of charcoal in places. I cannot fault this place. My pizza had a bit too much garlic, but nothing I’d complain about. Scamp got the wrong pizza, but it turned out better than what she had ordered, so she was happy with the extra roast courgettes with her extra rocket and no cheese.

Coffee afterwards in Costa and it was good coffee too. Just goes to show that it’s Cumbernauld Costa that’s at fault. Too little coffee in their coffee I suspect. Scamp had some extra thing to buy, so I went for a walk, taking some photos. Didn’t really like anything I’d done, but I went up to load my single purchase in the car and took some photos from level 7. They were later turned into the PoD by some clever effects in On1.

Back home I struggled to find a way of removing the old HDD from the MacBook Pro and still get it loading. After about five hours of this, I’m back where I started. Tomorrow I’ve a different plan. It might work. All to be able to take it in to get a new battery.

Tomorrow we’ve been invited to lunch in the Village by Isobel. Sounds like a good meal too.

Sun worship again – 15 December 2019

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The sun came out to play today and so did I.

Late rising this morning again because it had been a late night last night again. After talking to Hazy in the morning, and trying to remember details of The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, we had breakfast. All the while the sun was getting higher in the sky and after breakfast I simply had to go out and get some photos.

The LBJ was a bit tired (like me), so I plugged it in to charge and took the E-M1 with a zoom and the old EPL-5 with the fisheye lens and trotted off round St Mo’s. Fed the ducks and grabbed a couple of shots of a goosander and a mallard then went for a walk in the woods.

Found lots of tiny little fungi, smaller than my pinkie nail, but couldn’t quite keep them in focus. Finally moved on and got some shots looking straight up with the fisheye, the reason I’d brought it! Then I noticed the light coming through the trees and took a few of that with the same lens.
Finally headed for home where Scamp had put the coffee maker on! Thank you so much S.

After an initial look through the photos, and assuring myself there was a PoD in there, we drove in to the Byres Road to the Record Factory where music was playing, the DJ was there, but there were no dancers! Eventually Scamp and I filled the floor by ourselves and gradually, very gradually, people started to drift in. The new area for dancing isn’t nearly as big as the one we were used to in the Record Factory, but at least there are no cross-head screws sticking out of the floor! By the time we left there were about 10 people, not ten couples, just people there. Maybe it was the cold tonight, maybe there were Christmas parties on, whatever, there weren’t may people wanting to dance salsa. Plenty of cars parked everywhere, we had been lucky to get a space. Don’t know what the problem is.

Dinner tonight was a plate of soup then custard and prunes. Not a banquet fit for kings and queens, but perfectly adequate which amused JIC when he phoned.

PoD is the shot of the mallard with the lovely reflections.

Tomorrow is Scamp’s Christmas party for Gems, so I’ll probably help with that and then go somewhere quieter.

Down on the boardwalk – 12 December 2019

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Accomplished another ‘out before 11am’ .

Down to the village to pick up Isobel at 10am. Drove her to her pre-op appointment at Monklands. Thought we might go to The Fort for a cup of coffee and then pick her up again later. She reckoned it would take about an hour to get her tests done and speak to the surgeon. The satnav thought it would take about half an hour to get to The Fort from the hospital and that would leave us no time for coffee, so, as we were on the road to Drumpellier, we changed our destination to there. A cup of coffee, a bit of a walk and then check in with Isobel to see if she was ready.

It was a cold, dull day at Coatbridge, but we had the coffee and a scone each then we did go for a walk. In the cafe I snapped the high chairs because I liked the way the light shone on their chrome and the silhouette they made against the window. It would have looked better if the windows had been clean, but it is Coatbridge after all. The fact that the windows are still there is a minor miracle.

On our short walk we passed a bloke with a nice bit Nikon fitted with a long lens.  He also had a spotter scope on an equally expensive looking tripod with a smartphone clipped on to it. The only bird life I could see were a couple of swans, a goosander and about a million seagulls. (By the way, my spellchecker just tried to change ‘goosander’ to ‘goo sander’?!). Back to the bloke. Poor soul looked frozen. I wonder what he was waiting for. Flamingos perhaps? Scarlet Ibis? Spoonbills? We’ll never know. I hope he found them.

Just leaving the park, Scamp phoned Isobel, only to find that she was still waiting in the first queue for the ECG and had another three tests and therefore another three queue lined up before she met the surgeon. She said thanks very much, but she would get the bus home rather than having us wait around. We drove back home via The Fort because Scamp wanted to get some cold remedies from Boots, and because we were out anyway.

Back home I changed into my boots and old cord trousers and went for a walk in St Mo’s. The light was too low for any photography, so I fed the ducks and swans with some bread. Then I noticed the barriers were down at the boardwalk and I decided I’d have a walk on it, just to make sure it worked. It did. It held my weight. I even did a wee selfie as a reminder! Maybe they’ll ask me to cut the ribbon when it’s officially opened!

PoD was the High Chairs.

Tomorrow we may go to Perth for coffee or Larky to order new glasses.

The sun returns – 11 December 2019

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It wasn’t lost after all. I was just having a rest yesterday.

I was out early today to make sure of capturing some of those little photons and storing them away in an SD card. Yes, I was taking foties. Scamp had already been out to the doc’s for her medication check and back again. I went over to St Mo’s and got some good light. Grabbed a PoD which is a low down macro shot of some sphagnum moss strands, looking like miniature evergreens. Got back just in time to go out again to meet Colin and Fred for coffee. Scamp was off again to see what the retail paradise that is the Town Centre had to offer the discerning shopper.

The coffee snobs centred around pubs in Glasgow (a common topic among us), books and the NHS. Given that tomorrow is polling day and Fred is a political animal, it was strange that the merits and demerits of the leading campaigners did not enter into our conversation. Maybe it’s not all that strange. I think we’re all a bit jaded with the whole shebang. It’s become a tactical election. Pick the person you don’t want to win and vote for anyone else. Much like the old Scottish football question:
Question – “Who are you supporting in the World Cup?”
Answer – “Anyone who’s playing England!”
(Notice that Scotland is never mentioned. We don’t do the World Cup.)

Drove home into glaringly blinding sunshine to collect Scamp and take her to the doc’s again, this time to get her flu jag. By the time we were coming home, the sun had set and the day was sliding into evening.

When Scamp had been out earlier, she had bought the makings of Stir Fried Prawns with Singapore Noodles. Sounded great. I volunteered to make it. It tasted as good as it sounds. The sauce that came with it was labelled Soy, Chilli and Ginger, but it smelled like simple Brown Sauce, the stuff that comes out of a square bottle with letters HP at the top. The strange thing was it didn’t taste anything like it! Must have been my cooking skills that transformed it.

The weather has turned back to rain again and it’s forecast to further turn to snow during the early hours of tomorrow morning. We’re booked to take Isobel to Monklands in the morning. Let’s hope the snow has gone by then.

Solar Power – 9 December 2019

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Sometimes I think I am solar powered.

Woke to sunshine this morning. Beautiful sunshine. Got up and dressed, no time to waste on a shower, I’d go dirty! Grabbed two cameras in the big black camera bag and waltzed off to St Mo’s (actually I walked, no dancing was involved) while Scamp was defrosting her car. Nearly fell on my backside when I stepped on a thin slice of ice I hadn’t noticed, but regained my balance and nobody was there to laugh at me.

No time for camera testing today. I’d (partly) mastered the buttons and dials on the LBJ and today was too good to waste on test shots. Got a few shots of interesting fungi in the woods and some backlit leaves, but nothing too special. Nothing that was a contender for PoD. It’s remarkable how quiet the shutter is. Much quieter than any of the Olys. Yes, of course I was still testing and comparing. It’s the way I am!

By the time I got back, Scamp had returned from her shopping trip and she’d put the coffee maker on. Thank you Scamp. She’d been busy because she’d made a pot of soup too and it smelled lovely. She’d also done the hoovering which has been my Monday job for the past few weeks. She just can’t sit still some days.

After lunch and after Gems had gathered I had my Monday talk about all things Art with Margie, I put my boots on again and drove down to Auchinstarry to walk along the canal, across at the plantation then back along the railway. Got a few more shots with both cameras, two of which I knew would be on Flickr and one of which I was sure was destined to be PoD. Saw a poor luckless quad bike rider getting his/her front wheels stuck in a bog, right up to the axles. Don’t know how they were going to get out of that one, but I wasn’t going to help pull it out.

On the way back I paused to just take in the colours and shapes around me. You don’t realise just how beautiful the countryside is until you’ve had a week of rain and leaden skies. Sometimes I think I’m solar powered. I need sunlight to recharge my batteries. Without that dose of vitamin D I just get deeper and deeper down and it’s the sun on my face that lifts me, well that and Scamp’s smile. It can lift me any time. “One smile relieves a heart that grieves” Robert Graves.

Back home it was good news. Jamie Gal was in the driving seat tonight. We went in to see if the beginners class needed any helpers, but two weeks of Shannon had taken its toll and it was a vastly reduced class in the hall. An even class of leaders and followers, so we weren’t needed after all. Our own class was well attended, but the skills of the class were a fair bit below what an Advanced class should be able to demonstrate. Jamie took quite a lot of criticism for his absences and I did feel sorry for him with nobody to stand with him against the class. However it had to be said and now he knows the feelings of the class.

Came home feeling a bit deflated with the loss of two dance classes and nothing to fill the vacuum until the new year. Hopefully a new year will bring new opportunities or am I starting to sound like an astrology page from the Daily Record?

PoD today went to a dried stem of cow parsley with an out of focus background. I liked it. There’s more on Flickr.

Tomorrow we’re expecting rain and Windy Willy. That won’t be fun!

A Mickey Bow! – 8 December 2019

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Another dull, dark, dreary day. Rain from morning until night. However, I did, under Scamp’s careful tutelage make a steak pie for my dinner, she had salmon. After that, I just sat at the computer and moped.

In the afternoon I decided to walk to the shops to get puff pastry for the pie. It gave me a walk, even if it was in the rain and maybe, just maybe a chance to get a photo. You can probably tell from the photo at the top of the page that I was unsuccessful in that respect. I took the LBJ and tried, oh how I tried to get it to focus. It wouldn’t. I think the thing is just stupid. I think as well as the usual CPU it’s got a NUMPTYU. When the CPU gets fed up working it switches over to the NUMPTYU and it does whatever it wants to, as long as it contradicts what I want. Came home empty handed.

Finally I settled on another still life. This time the subject was my new bow tie and, as it’s a Disney bow tie, it’s only fair to call it a Mickey Bow. It tried tying it as usual, round my neck, but it’s not like a normal tie that you can loosen and pull gently over your head, as Number 1 Son used to do. The only way I could get it off was by cutting off my nose and possibly my ears. I felt that was just too much of a sacrifice for a photo, anyway the blood would probably stain the bow tie. I finally applied some maths to the problem.

If my collar size is 16.5”, that is the circumference, “C”, of the circle that is my neck.

C = πD where D is the diameter of the circle

By transposition D = C/π

So, roughly 16/3

Even more roughly 5”

Yet more roughly still, equal to the diameter of the yoghurt maker in the upstairs tools cupboard.

So, I tied the tie round the yoghurt maker, which was a lot easier than I thought, and carefully slipped it off. Voila, a subject for tonight’s PoD.

Tomorrow it’s Gems and they’re rehearsing, so I’m going out. Afterwards, we’re hoping against hope that it’s Jamie G who’s in the chair for salsa, but it looks like it’s the end of the advanced class for us. I think we may be going to a ballroom class instead of salsa on a Monday night. The end of an era.

The end of a beautiful friendship – 4 December 2019

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Almost made the 11am cut-off.

Just after 11am I took a the new little brown job out for a walk in St Mo’s along with a few of my little bayonet fitting pieces of expensive glass. It was a dull day, but I wanted to see how it coped with dull Scottish weather. The answer was, not all that well. The kit lens was fine, but when I put on the macro, it just didn’t want to focus. Couldn’t work out how to set it to manual focus (Don’t worry JIC, almost done with the technospeak) and it has started raining. Didn’t want to get the little brown job wet, because it was going back to JL in the afternoon, so it went back in the bag.

I wanted to see how NLC and their helpers were getting on with the upgrade to the footpath. Work is progressing well on the new boardwalk, but less than half the footpath has been tarmacked so far. Hopefully it’s a temporary setback.

Home just in time to stuff a piece ’n’ bacon in my face before getting ready to drive in to Glasgow.

Michael was in charge today and no sign of Anne Marie. We started off by dancing Over the Rainbow with the ‘expert girls’, then Michael began correcting some of the individual elements. The bane of my life since last week, Spin 4, was amongst them, but his teaching was clear and not all that repetitive. It was going to be ok. Messed up a few of the moves in the new routine, but that was to be expected. Then it was time for waltz.

We made a small mistake at one corner and he started tearing our routine apart. Told us we were doing it all wrong. Told us we’d missed out two steps. Now Scamp is brilliant at getting the counts right and she argued with him that although she’d made a mistake at the corner, the rest was fine. So he took her through some steps we’d never seen before and tried to baffle us with maths. It didn’t work. We both told him that we’d never seen those steps before. He seemed to lose it at that point, shouting “Check your phone. Check your phone.” I told him I didn’t need to check my phone, I knew we were right. (I did check tonight and we WERE right.). Then he switched to Quickstep, but not before he had danced the proper routine, the one we recorded about a year ago, the one I checked tonight, and said that’s how it should be done. He wouldn’t listen to us when we told him that was a different set of steps from the one he’d done, not ten minutes before, but he’d switched on his Rubber Ear by then and was hiding behind it. I don’t know if he realised it was all over by then, but we had.

We walked up through the Christmas Market on George Square and bought two Coconut Buns. Delicious cold, but heavenly when warm.

Back home I got instruction from Scamp on how to make a stir fry and I showed her how to thread the needle on my sewing machine and how to do the basic stuff (all I can do, to be honest).

Sitting watching The Apprentice I started fiddling with the Little Brown Job (it’s got tan coloured leatherette trimming) and found lots of interesting and useful things. Lots more than just manual focusing. It’s a keeper.

PoD was some stacked architecture from Glasgow.

Tomorrow we’re booked for coffee with Crawford & Nancy.