Category: A Walk

Dancin’ and Singin’ – 12 November 2022

Posted on by Zogman

As usual on a Saturday we were off to Brookfield for dance class.

Very small class today only four couples and one single woman. Apart from the single woman, they all have nicknames, none of them particularly complementary and none of them will be used here!

First dance was a Melody Foxtrot which did have a musical Melody attached, but no discernible Foxtrot steps. Some knew it, some didn’t, some did ‘kind of’ know it. I’m talking about individual members of the pairs here. I was in the ‘kind of’ category while Scamp was in the ‘know it’ one. It took us all about half an hour of staggering around the hall to get more or less adept at this fairly simple sequence dance.

Next was the main lesson, The Cameron Quickstep which, although danced as a sequence because it finished at a point where the dance could start again. We’d danced it for the first time last week at Perth and it looked and felt just like a normal quickstep. We’ve not had much chance to dance quickstep and this looked like a great introduction. We’d practised it a bit at home, but a living room is not anything like a dance floor. Today gave us a much better chance to work on the dance and of course we had expert help at hand. Unfortunately the teachers are off watching rugby next Saturday, so we’ll have to wait a fortnight before we get to have a real practise, although there is the chance of a tea dance later this coming week. A couple of sequence dances rounded off the day and we were back on the road home.

I did actually get out this afternoon to take some photos in the sunshine that had lasted all day. PoD went to a view through the trees to the setting sun. Nice to get an outside photo without too much fakery, or post-processing as photogs call it.

We drove over to Larky later. Me to have a jam session with Crawford and Scamp to go with Nancy and Jacquelyn to a concert in Strathaven. I wasn’t really looking forward to jamming with Crawford. I don’t practise playing guitar, relying on what I did way back in the late ’60s, but my fingers were far more supple then and could reach all those hard to fret strings. However we did cover some weel kent songs and had settled down to a blether by the time the girls returned. Another cup of white tea for Scamp and some arrangements for a return visit to us in December and we headed home and actually found a parking place just after 11pm.

Watched a confusing Brazilian GP with Kevin Magnussen in first place and Mick Schumacher in last place. Both drivers from the Haas team! Unfortunately Magnussen couldn’t hold on to that lead after the sprint race.

Tomorrow the weather looks good again. Two days in a row, is that too much to ask? I’m hoping to tell you tomorrow.

A host of fillings today – 10 November 2022

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I’ve had two fillings come out recently. I was hoping this was third time lucky.

I expected she would complete the fillings over two days, but I was wrong. One filling and about half a dozen caps. It’s early days yet, I know, but they feel fine for now. I’ve been warned only to eat soft food for the next two days. So, does that mean chocolate and ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner for me? I hope so.

I think evening began about 2pm today. Black clouds were rolling around and the threat of rain was always there, plus the wind had been gusting all day. I went for a walk. I wanted a photo to become PoD and it wasn’t going to be flowers, anything but flowers. The light in St Mo’s wasn’t really any better than back home, but at least there was standing water there that I could use. It was a water based photo that made PoD. It was the outfall from the pond without any ducks for a change. The ducks, mainly mallards seem to get good feeding near the outfall.

After that I walked down to the shops and got some of that aforementioned chocolate, although I realised soup and pudding was a more reasonable alternative. The rain never really came, but the clouds got thicker and lower all the time. So different from yesterday when rain showers and sunshine took it in turns to change the landscape.

We got a message from Neil to say that he had a good night, although the pain got worse after breakfast but was still bearable. He was intending to rest for the remainder of the day. That sounds like a plan.

Tomorrow Scamp has FitSteps in the morning and I have a meeting with the nurse tomorrow afternoon.

No Soup Today – 8 November 2022

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We went as far as the shops today.

Today was wet when I got up, and it stayed wet for most of the day. We did go out in the early afternoon to get some veg to make soup and also some chicken to make paella for dinner.

Spoke to Hazy for a while and heard more about Neil’s op. Probably more than we really wanted to hear. I don’t envy you the surgery, Neil, but I hope it brings you the relief you’re looking for.

No chicken breasts or thighs to be had in M&S, but plenty next door in Lidl. Are M&S chickens that much better quality than Lidl? I don’t think so. Tiny wee turnips in M&S for 95p each. Big turnips in Lidl for 65p. Ok, maybe the chickens in M&S come from better farms, but a turnip is a turnip. It smacks of food snobbery. That’s my moan for the day. I used the chicken and did make paella, but the soup will have to wait until tomorrow.

After we walked home we went out to look at the garden and drain some of the pots. The entire back garden is simply waterlogged just now. Maybe if I’d pulled up one of my leeks I’d have remembered to make the soup, but I didn’t. Instead I took the smaller A6000 out for a walk in St Mo’s. I got a few shots, all landscapes, but they all seemed to be dark and underexposed. It took a while to tease a decent photo out of the morass, but I was quite pleased with today’s PoD, taken from the boardwalk and looking right into the sun.

Back home the paella was a bit dry, but I was using a new pan and this is the first time I’ve made paella for ages. That’s my excuse.

That was about it for a day that started wet, stayed dry for an hour or two in the late afternoon and returned with more rain later in the evening. The garden will be even more waterlogged. Actually, we have mushrooms growing in the front garden! We saw them today.

Tomorrow looks a better day. We may go out somewhere.

Coffee – 7 November 2022

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Well, not really coffee because this was a Costa hot milk drink to paraphrase an american lady I heard once in Dubrovnik.

I joked three weeks ago about Crunchy Nut Cornflakes breaking my tooth. That’s exactly what happened this morning.  A crunch and the filling came out in two pieces. It was due to be replaced this week anyway. It will have to be now and I will have to apologise to the dentist for breaking a second filling.  Having said that, it couldn’t have bonded properly to the tooth in the first place, so not all My or the Crunch Nut’s fault!

Scamp was meeting Isobel and I was meeting Val at Costa. I’d forgotten that Val was using two walking sticks now. We talked for a long time about his plans for their new bathroom and possible remodelling of their kitchen. Of course we talked about tech too. Val’s Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of memory, but after that he lost me in the tech. Also, Val is an experimenter who loves making things that look like a box of wires, but act just like a desktop computer does. I like the idea of that, but will it run Lightroom? Will it turn on every time I want it to? Great fun to play with, but it’s not a fully fledged computer yet, at least not for me, besides, it runs on Linux which is like black magic to me. But the Raspberry Pi  is very, very clever and so is he!

We discussed my experimentation with running MacOS 11.7 from an SSD and the next stage I want to take it to once I get the actual process settled in my head. We even talked about changing the washer inside our kitchen mixer tap. Sometimes you just have to come down to the basics! When we were done talking Val left to meet his wife and I went to find mine. We’d agreed that we’d try to get everyone together for a coffee before Christmas.

Scamp and I drove to Tesco and bought a trolley full of messages, plus a couple of bottles of wine. After lunch I took a camera out to St Mo’s. Just one camera and one lens. Not a lot of light and I’d no idea what I was going to photograph. In the middle of winter I like to rest a camera on the ice and photograph the weeds poking through the ice with a macro lens. I tried the same thing today but without actually resting the camera on the surface of the water! I got a similar effect and after running it through noise reduction software it looked perfectly clean and tidy. That was PoD.

Pasta Carbonara looked and tasted more like scrambled eggs tonight.  Over cooked the sauce, not for the first time.  Must try harder.

No plans, and no meetings set for tomorrow. We’ll see what transpires.

 

On our way home – 6 November 2022

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Up and out for breakfast after a good night’s sleep, then more dancing.

For myself, I’d have been perfectly happy to leave after breakfast, but Scamp wanted one more waltz around the floor. It looked like half last night’s dancers though the same way as her. We had a very pleasant hour of dancing and even got invited by Stewart to dance to a salsa track. Others were up on the floor as well as us, but none of them danced as well as us! They were dancing ballroom salsa while we were dancing Cuban. Then, suddenly, after a Midnight Jive that had been renamed the Midday Jive, it was all over. We said our goodbyes to Stewart and Jane and to the folk who were left from our table and left. I was really glad we’d stayed for that extra hour. It closed off the weekend so well.

We found the car, used the half price ticket we got from the hotel and were on our way south. Driving through an almost deserted Perth on a dull Sunday morning, was quite depressing. Scamp said it was the remains of the endorphins leaving our system that brought our spirits down, and I think there’s some truth in that. A fairly easy run home, but the weather was nowhere near as grand as when we were driving north.

We needed bacon for tonight’s Macaroni Cheese and we also got some pancakes, but really we were just going for the walk. As sometimes happens, I left Scamp to carry the bag home while I went for a circuit of St Mo’s. That’s where today’s PoD came from. It’s the seedhead of a cow parsley plant taken with the Lensbaby Sweet50 which gives that wee bit of controllable blur.

Spoke to Jamie in the evening and found out about his flying visit to Switzerland.

Tomorrow Scamp is meeting Isobel and I’m meeting Val for coffee, in the same Costa but not at the same table!

A full day – 5 November 2022

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It started about 9am. I’d slept fitfully because I’d galloping heartburn. Must have been that chilli!

I took a Nexium tablet to help with the heartburn and we went down to breakfast. Then I did one of those stupid things. I had a full breakfast. Egg, bacon, sausage and tomato, on top of a Nexium tablet that was fighting with my heartburn. Duh!

After that it was dance shoes on, new dance shoes. A short hour long class to break them in. Stewart and Jane demo’d the routine we were going to learn. It was a Quickstep sequence dance called Cameron Quickstep! Then we were all called on to the floorRoughly 80 people converged on the dance floor and attempted the first few steps. Surprisingly it was a Car Crash. Not the brightest idea Stewart. Sense prevailed though and he split the class into two sections and called one half on to the floor at a time, then the second half. I think it was then it dawned on him that it was going to take twice as long as normal to get through this, for us at least, complicated set of steps. Soooo instead of taking twice the time, he just taught it quicker! Well, what else would you do with a quickstep? The car crash became a shambles and after the hour that had been allocated, we knew the first section and very little else. We weren’t alone. There were a few mumbled voices about ‘not knowing what we were doing’, and ‘just not getting this.’ I was glad when the hour came to an end and we were released into the wide, wet world for the afternoon.

We went for a walk into the town. I was looking for two things.

  1. Coltsfoot Rock from a wee health shop.
  2. Coffee from The Bean Shop.

We set off to find what was available. Unfortunately the jar of Coltsfoot Rock in the shop was empty. It looks like the Coltsfoot Rock lorry had had a puncture or some other mishap. On the plus side, The Bean Shop was open and it had amongst its coffees, Cuba Turquino beans! Yes, two bags please and some tea and a bag of Christmas blend coffee beans.

I went off to put the coffee and tea into the boot of the car while Scamp went shopping. Back from storing the coffee I went shopping too and then we had lunch in the cafe of the recently refurbished Perth Theatre. It was quite noisy inside with teenager ‘lovies’ shouting and carrying on upstairs. The coffee in the cafe was a bit tasteless, worse than Costa and if that’s not damning enough, it also took ages to come. It’s an interesting place. Much more modern than it was, but it did take more than two years to complete the makeover. My final thought about it was “Style over Substance”.

Our lunch had given time for the rain to stop and now the clouds were clearing and it looked like we might actually get a walk, either in the gardens across the river or through the park. We chose the gardens after Scamp bought four sherry glasses in a charity shop for three quid. A real bargain. They went into the bag with the coffee in the boot of the car for safe keeping while we went for our walk. I took a few photos from the road bridge over the Tay, then we crossed the road and took the long slope down into the gardens. Too many junkies and ‘wideos’ hanging around under the bridge, so we went the other way and bumped into another bunch of dancers out for a walk who were also complaining about the lesson this morning. We walked on and they went the other way. We crossed back over the Smeaton’s Bridge where today’s PoD came from. From there it was a short walk to the Salutation Hotel.

Tonight was a ‘Black Tie’ event and we’d come prepared. We were cutting it fine for the drinks reception, but the food tonight was much better than yesterday. Scamp didn’t have a starter, but her main was Salmon and dessert was Cheesecake. I had Mackerel Pate to start then Chicken followed by ice cream, trying to put my stomach under less stress than last night. Dancing was good, but constant and exhausting with a break in the middle for two semi-professionals to strut their stuff to the amazement of all. That’s when you realise you’re only playing at this dancing thing. The ones who devote themselves to it are on a different plane.

We finally gave up about fifteen minutes from the end. I don’t think our feet could take much more. Tomorrow we have another ‘free’ hour’s dancing in the morning before we all head home.

 

Heading North – 4 November 2022

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A busy morning, then we’re off to Perth.

Scamp was out in the morning to her FitSteps class and I began my organisation. That meant I laid out the clothes I was taking, made sure I had all the camera gear I wanted and tried on my new dancing shoes for the first time. They fitted. That was a bonus!

Fairly clear in my head that I had everything sorted, I took the Sony A7 out for a walk in St Mo’s. Just for fun I took the Lensbaby 50mm lens and it did prove useful today. There was blue sky and the sun was shining. PoD became a low level shot of a couple of mushrooms poking through the larch needles.

By the time I got back Scamp had returned from her exercise class and we had lunch and got on our way. It was a beautiful day for a change with bright sunshine all the way up to Perth. Parked in the same place we used last year and booked in. Since we were on the third floor, the top floor, we took the lift. It sounded arthritic as it staggered its way down from the top and even worse on the way back up. I fully expected a pre-recorded voice to say “One at a time please!”. However it did get us to the top floor and thankfully our room was just across the corridor. Last year we almost needed a map to get from the stairs to the room and we found there was more than one way to get there. A bigger room than last year, but much the same quality of fixtures and fittings. But we didn’t come here for the view or the attractions of the room, we came to dance.

Tonight had a ‘smart casual’ dress code. We found our table and met our fellow dancers for the weekend, gave our names and instantly forgot theirs as I’m sure they did with ours. Four couples to a table, three of whom knew each other so we were left a bit out in the cold. This was going well!

Just as the food was being served, a lady at table 13 collapsed. The medics arrived promptly and although she was declared ok, she was taken to hospital for a full checkup. The food was ok, just ok, I thought. It was supposed to be a carvery, but ended up a ‘servery’. There were three items on the menu: Roast Pork, Pollock and Veg Chilli. Unfortunately when I got to the front of the queue, the roast pork had gone, one slice of the pollock was left, so it was veg chilli for us. I’d have chosen anything but veg chilli having had it three days this week already.

The dance floor was mobbed after the dinner tables and the serving areas had been cleared. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dance floor so full of folk determined to stake their claim on their square metre of wood. Too many people or too small a floor. After the first dance the floor got a bit less congested and we had our money’s worth of the dancing time. Ballroom, Latin and Sequence. I think we tried everything except Quickstep which we just haven’t mastered yet.

With sore feet we made our way up the wooden mountain to bed and slept like logs.

Tomorrow there will be a lesson or two and more dancing.

‘A’ listed ruin – 3 November 2022

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I was off this afternoon with my brother to see a ruin.

In the morning I thought we’d made a bit mistake. There was sunshine early in the morning, but that didn’t last and the clouds started rolling in. Were we even going to any light on the building? Maybe not. Then, just after lunchtime the clouds began to thin and the sun was trying to get out. It might just work after all.

I picked up my brother just before 2pm and we drove to Wishaw. We had both checked when the light was in the best position for photographs of this ruin using The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) and Photopills both confirmed that the sun would be in the best position between 3pm and 4pm and we were heading directly at that time.

We parked at a burger van car park and walked down a private road. We couldn’t drive along it, but it was a sunny day and we had agreed that we’d go for a photoWALK today, so we walked. We walked for half a mile downhill and found Cambusnethan Priory sitting there. No barricades, no chain link fence, nothing to stop us wandering around this 19th century ruin. Halfway up one wall of the entrance there is a small sign warning you not to enter the building. That is the preventative measure. We wandered round taking pictures all the time. Of course, neither of us went into the building itself, because we’d read that small notice. The good light had gone behind a cloud now, it might have seen us coming down that long hill. It didn’t stop us taking photos. I don’t know how many my brother took, but my total was 54 photos taken of which 6 were rejected, so 48 keepers. The PoD turned out to be a view of the front of the building reflected in a very dirty, very big puddle. A ‘Puddle Pic’ my brother called it.

Now, what goes down must go up again. We packed our bags and climbed that big hill, and it was a big hill. We stopped once to look at a hole in a telegraph pole or maybe it was a power cable it was carrying. It was a wooden pole with a neat oval hole about three or four metres up from the ground. The hole was about 10cm high by about 5cm at its widest. It was neatly chiselled out probably by a beak. I’m glad I saw it, because it gave me an excuse for a rest. When we turned around the sun was shining brightly again and we both wanted to go back down and have another chance of some better lit photos, but we knew that wily sun was watching us and it would hide behind a cloud as we reached the building. We walked on and were on the longer, straighter part of the walk. This time I made it a request that we stop to get my breath back. That’s what’s wrong with St Mo’s. It’s a great place to wander round, but there’s not nearly enough hard climbing. I might go out every day, but I’m just doing easy climbs. Must try harder (climbs!). We walked on after watching the colours change on the trees.

I was glad when we were back on the level, potholed, puddled path again and even happier when we were on our way back into Motherwell. Dropped my brother off and we agreed we needed another day at Cambusnethan Priory.

Drove home to find that Scamp was making Prawn & Pea Risotto for dinner. All the chopping had been done and she was waiting for me to arrive so the cooking could begin. That was lovely risotto. Best I’ve tasted for ages.

Tomorrow were on the road again.

A calmer day – 2 November 2022

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Thank goodness for that.

A day that stared with a message just after 9am telling me to phone the doctors’ surgery. I had an appointment with the phlebotomist who wanted my blood. I guessed that appointment was going to be cancelled, but when I phoned the surgery I was told that they thought they’d have to cancel the appointment because of lack of staff, but now staff had been found and the appointment would go ahead. An hour later I got a phone call from the surgery to say that although they had initially thought they’d need to cancel my appointment, now it would go ahead. A pause, then she said “Oh, did I speak to you earlier?” When I said “Yes”, she apologised and told me the place was just in chaos today, but to come at the arranged time. Good to know that it was someone else’s turn to have ‘One of those days!’

It was a damp start to the day. Drizzle that gradually turned into proper rain. When I was leaving the surgery after my blood donation, it was torrential and it stayed at that level for a good couple of hours. I went to Tesco to get some messages. Lunch for me was a Ginster’s Cornish pasty while Scamp had requested a Macaroni Pie. The pasty was lovely, but the pie was a decided let-down. It wasn’t a patch on the Greggs style pie she was expecting. Bummer.

It took until about 3pm for the rain clouds to move on and for light to break through the gloom. I didn’t wait for an invitation, but got my boots on and went for a walk in St Mo’s. Hoping that patch of blue above my head would widen and that’s what happened, for once. PoD was a picture looking up a path on my way to St Mo’s. That torrential rain in the morning and most of the afternoon had produced a mini ‘river’ where yesterday there had been a path through the trees. I’m always taken by the random paths water makes through the leaves. I took three images and focus stacked them to get the full depth of field this picture deserved. In St Mo’s I found a wee Christmas Tree, a fir of some kind less than 2m high, growing in the wilderness behind the main path. It had a wee ‘Toorie’, a Tassel sitting on top. It also looked a bit like a thistle. Loved those blue needles. I took its picture.

Today’s dinner was yesterday’s chilli, reheated and with the three ingredients I’d forgotten to add yesterday which added that chilli taste. Cumin, Oregano and Basil were the missing ingredients. The chilli itself had thickened up nicely since yesterday and it tasted much better today.

I’m hoping to get a chance to photograph Cambusnethan Priory tomorrow with Alex. According to the weather fairies the day looks reasonable.

Last day of October – 31 October 2022

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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.