Category: A Walk

Hospitals, Doctors and a Horse Shoe – 13 June 2022

Posted on by Zogman

All are here, but not in that order.

An easy start to the day. Wordle completed (Scamp got 4, I got 5). Sudoku completed and an early lunch was a piece ’n’ banana, delicious. Then we were off!

I drove Scamp over to Hairmyres this afternoon to get her eyes checked, the optician had spotted an irregularity in a scan she had in Larkhall, a month or so ago and she was referred for a further scan at Monklands a few weeks ago. Then Monklands referred her for yet another scan at Hairmyres. Turns out there is a thinning of her retina in her left eye which is something to do with her extreme shortsightedness, but there’s nothing that needs to be done about it just now.

While Scamp was at the outpatients, I took myself off for a walk round Calderglen park in East Kibride and got some photos. There’s a neat wee horseshoe shaped waterfall not far from the car park and I though it might make a decent slow shutter shot. Of course I’d left the tripod in the car and I’d also forgotten the ND filters, so it was hand held at 1/5th sec. Using the silent shutter feature I shot off 15 frames rapid, then blended them in Photoshop tonight. Quite impressed with the result, except that the image was a 2.72GB file! It was impressive, but not THAT impressive. However, it was good enough to get PoD.

When I was walking back to the car, Scamp phoned to say that she was finished and was having a coffee. I drove to meet her and had one too. When we got back to the house it was my turn to go to see the doc. I had been to see the triage nurse week before last because I’ve had a nasty looking rash on my leg. She said it might be dermatitis but thought there was a wee fungal infection there too. She gave me a couple of meds that seem to be working, but asked how my general health was and I told her ok, but I have an off and on problem with my waterworks. She sorted me out with an appointment with one of the docs for today. He suspected it might have something to do with my prostate, but after a ‘digital’ (nothing to do with computers!!) examination, gave me the all clear. After I’d wiped the tears from my eyes I thanked him and made my exit!

I think that was enough excitement for one day. We’re now looking more closely at the arrangements that will be needed for our holiday. It appears we will need a negative Lateral Flow test no more than 24 hours from when we depart. We also need to have proof of all the vaccinations we’ve had. I think we’re ok with that, but we’ll check with the dance teachers on Saturday as they’re at present in Cyprus and have up to date details. Just to check if the NHS Scotland app is enough evidence, or do we need a printout. We might have a word with you too, Jamie and Simonne as you’re not long back from Germany.

Maybe going looking for a new phone tomorrow in Glasgow. Hopefully a brighter day than today.

More rain, more wind – 12 June 2022

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Is this really ‘Flaming’ June, I ask?

One of those days for relaxing and looking out at the weather, but you can’t always be sitting on your bum. You sometimes have to force yourself to go out and do things, to move is enough some times. Today, Scamp was cutting flowers and tidying up in the garden. My part in it was staking the Honey Bells that are all in full flower and providing a great feeding ground for the bees. Unfortunately the wind is bending their stems into weird shapes. This makes the flower heads bob about even more and causes the bees problems as they are coming in to land. A few bamboo canes and some garden twine gave them the support to keep the stems vertical while still allowing a bit of movement.

After lunch I was mooching around the house again and needed to get out and find a photo. I drove up to Fannyside and found my parking space empty this time. I had a walk up the road towards a farm. I’d brought two cameras with me. The A6000 had a Sigma 10-20mm very wide angle lens and the A7iii had the massive Sigma 105mm macro. Two Sigma lenses separated by about 15 years. Both exceptional in their own fields. However, it was the 105mm that got both of todays ‘keeper’ shots, and PoD went to a landscape shot of some stunted trees with the Campsie Fells in the background.

Dinner tonight was a lightly smoked salmon fillet with broccoli and crushed baby potatoes and chives. Light and lovely. This from a man who says he doesn’t really like salmon!

We watched the Azerbaijan GP. It was a race full of failures for the Ferrari powered cars, I lost count of how many failed to finish. Not a good day for the leaping horses!

Spoke to Jamie in the evening and heard more about bat surveys, and their cost. Scamp and I were really impressed by Simonne’s photos from the garden. Some beautiful flowers there, well done the pair of you.

The winds died down in the evening as they have done for the past week, let’s hope they don’t return tomorrow.

I’m taking Scamp to hospital tomorrow to discuss a little problem with her eyes. Apparently it’s been there for a long time, but the cataract surgery has brought it to the optician’s attention. I’ve got a doc’s appointment for a check up in the late afternoon. Twice in a fortnight! I’m getting my money’s worth from the NHS now.

We shall go to the ball – 11 June 2022

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And the balcony too!

Scamp was on the computer first thing this morning. Her flying fingers quickly netted us a week (hopefully) in the sun, sailing round the Adriatic again. What a clever girl she is. I know I couldn’t have done that in such a short time. A wee while to wait, but that’s sometimes a good thing. No rush, and time to look forward to the experience.

With the technical and financial details completed, we sat back and dug deep into our memories of strange sounding names of places far away. We did notice the rain falling, but felt obliged to ignore it, because it looks like we’ll be going abroad this year after a long wait.

Ah, but back to reality. It was raining. The wind was blowing a hoolie, and we didn’t have anything planned for dinner. Scamp had hung some washing out to dry (or blow away) and we walked down to the shops to get some chicken for the dinner which would be Butter Chicken from an easy cook-in sauce mix. Back home we had judged it perfectly, because within half an hour it was bucketing with rain. We got the clothes in just before the rain started. Then Scamp made the marinade for the chicken and started ironing while I made some flat bread for the dinner. After that I made myself scarce and took the Sony A7 with the big macro lens to St Mo’s to annoy some insects.

Found a bit fat spider on a thistle and a lot of little flies on grass flowers, then got PoD, a plantain, not a Caribbean plantain, but a little weed you see every day, but don’t realise is a wild flower. I also found a wild orchid. Not as pretty perhaps as the ones we saw on Skye, but nicely detailed. Both are on Flickr.

Watched Maleficent which we both thought we’d seen before, but agreed we hadn’t after the first fifteen minutes. It might have been Maleficent2 or 3 or however many there have been. Anyway, it filled in an hour and a half of innocent fun with a few ‘funnies’ thrown in to lighten the dark gloom of the story.

The Butter Chicken was disappointing, we both agreed. No real flavour in the chicken sauce, despite being marinaded. Not a kit we’d use again. The flatbreads too, fell rather flat. ‘Could do better’ was the comment from both of us.

Well done to Scamp this morning for knowing when and how much to push!

No plans for tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a less windy and drier day.

 

A Busy Day – 9 June 2022

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This was always going to be a busy day. The question was ‘How Busy?’

I was first out. I was driving Scamp’s wee Red car down to Jim Dickson’s garage to get its exhaust fixed. It was a hairy drive with the exhaust banging and clanging all the way there and once I got to the village, I had the speed bumps to contend with. I was praying that the exhaust would hold on until we reached the garage. It did. I got it booked in and left to meet Scamp, who was driving the Blue car and had picked up Shona.

We swapped over drivers at the village and I drove the rest of the way to the hospital just outside Falkirk. Shona was going there for an X-ray to check that her broken arm was healing properly. With her dropped off, we drove to Torwood garden centre for a cup of coffee and a cake each. Then we walked round the plants. We were really looking for some bark to put on the plant pots to retain some moisture in them and also to dissuade the slugs from eating them. Apparently slugs don’t like crawling over bark. By the way, bark has now been renamed “Woof!” in the house. Oh! the fun we’ve had with that 🤨. We did find some bags of bark which would actually fit into the car and dumped one in a shopping trolley.

Of course we had a look at some of the plants too. Both of us have been looking for a plant called Snow in Summer. It used to be very common, but we couldn’t find it anywhere. Today Scamp found what looked like a pot of it. I checked the name on my phone and it was indeed correct. We got two pots of it, one small one to go in with the alpines and another to go into the general garden. Pelargonium Grandiflorum was our other purchase. Lovely colourful big flowers.  I found a part of the garden centre I’d not seen before.  It’s laid out as a sort of zoo enclosure with resin cast animals in it.  Some quite realistic, some not so much.  I took a couple of photos on the better examples.  They’re up on Flickr.

We loaded them all into the car boot and sat for a few minutes before Shona phoned to say she was ready to go. She had offered to buy lunch for us, so we drove to Broadwood Farm and had a taste of their carvery lunch. Scamp had turkey, Shona knew the server 😉 and got turkey, ham and beef. I had ham and beef. There was mash, carrot and turnip, peas, stuffing and gravy to hand and I think I had all of them except the mash. A very enjoyable lunch.

After lunch we went back to our house for Shona to see the wedding photos from two weeks ago. Halfway through the show I got a phone call to say the car was ready. When the show was finally over we drove Shona home, then down to the garage where we swapped over again and Scamp drove home while I settled the bill and followed her home.

There was a rain shower just as I was going out to get some photos, this time with the A6000. I’d taken a few shots earlier and although they looked good on the camera, I wanted a few more just to be sure. This time I used the 55-210mm lens, but the gusty wind made it a hit or a miss. In the end it was a shot of some daisies waking from the rain that got PoD.

I drove Scamp up to the Link in the evening to get her Pneumonia jag. It’s a once-only jag for over 65s.

That was a busy day with so many changes and things done. However, the wee Red car is back in business. Now all we need to do is save up enough money to put some petrol in its tank!

Tomorrow there is talk of going somewhere, possibly for lunch.

 

The day that the rains came down – 8 June 2022

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And stayed all day.

I decided that I’d let the day simmer along and hopefully the rain would stop or maybe I’d find something useful to do. The latter came first, but ultimately the former happened.

I had at least half a dozen boxes of bread ingredients that have been sitting on a unit in the living room for, well, ages. I picked the bottom one and started mixing up a loaf. The actual loaf was a Swiss Farmer’s Loaf and it started out as a sticky dough and ended up looking nothing like the picture in the booklet said it would. I think this is only the second failure I’ve had. I say failure, but it was perfectly edible, it just didn’t look like the book said. Probably my fault more than theirs. It was a good way to while away an hour or so of a day when I’d no intention of going out anyway, so no real loss.

After lunch it began to look as if the sun might just make an appearance, but there were no guarantees. Scamp had started making a couple of sultana cakes. She was halfway through the process when the mixer made a strange noise. When we let it cool for a while and tried again, the problem was still there. Another one with no user serviceable parts inside, so it was down to hand beating the mixture. Of course, I couldn’t do that, so Scamp did it all by herself. Probably better really. I’d just have made a mess.

I went out for a walk in the drizzle with the Sony. Thankfully the rain soon dried up and left behind clouds of little flies that got in my eyes up my nose and into my mouth when I was walking. I did get a photo of a much less invasive fly. It just sat on top of a desiccated weed and allowed me to photograph it. It also gave me a chance to use some of the more esoteric functions of the camera. Only available if the correct buttons are pressed in the correct order. That’s the Sony way! The fly became PoD. It was really tiny, about 3mm long. Got home to find Scamp’s bread coming out of the oven, smelling lovely.

Dinner tonight was Fish ’n’ Oven Chips. So much easier than deep frying and almost as good.

It was really dull for most of the day, but tomorrow looks a bit better. Hopefully I’m taking Scamp’s wee red car down to the village to get a new exhaust, then we’re booked for taking Shona to Falkirk. That’s where the planning ends. We’ll see what happens.

Visiting Margie – 7 June 2022

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I had the morning to myself and grabbed it with both hands.

Scamp was out for coffee with Annette, which meant I had some time to myself. I’d really meant to pot up my basil plants, but when you’ve got a good book, it’s difficult to put it down. Today’s good book is Bad Actors by Mick Herron, the eighth, and most recent of his Slough House series. That was a good way to use my free time, I thought.

When Scamp came home, and after lunch, we drove up to Margie’s strange wee split level house. She doesn’t get out much now and really seems to enjoy the company. The stories she tells are an entertainment in themselves and time simply flies when we’re there. Two and a bit hours just disappeared today amid stories of drinking Prosecco in the afternoon and dodgy, trouble making family members. We left her to rest before her son came in to make her dinner and keep her company in the evening.

We drove through more roadworks. There seems to be a rash of them these days. It’s like March, when all the excess funding has to be used up before the end of the financial year. But this is June and more needless work is still being done. There must be a reason for it, but it evades me. I got a shock when we went up to Tesco to get petrol and the price at the pump was £1.82 per litre. Last week it was around £1.76! I got enough to do us for the next few days and will shop around for our next fill up.

I still hadn’t a photo for PoD, so after we parked, I took the Sony out for a walk round the pond. Found a spider on its web looking translucent in the afternoon sun. With a bit of jiggery pokery in Lightroom it glowed nicely. Not a lot of insect activity, except from the bees which seemed to be enjoying the afternoon sun. Maybe they’d heard the weather reports, predicting wild weather with high winds and rain that are on the cards for the next few days and are making honey while the sun shines.

Scamp was chef tonight and she made a lovely stir-fry. I can never get the mixture right when I’m making it, but she seems to do it without thinking and gets it right every time. It’s a skill.

Tomorrow the weather starts to turn wet. I may make a loaf from one of my bread kits.

 

Maybe one more good day – 6 June 2022

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We went for the messages and I posted a parcel. Those were the highlights of another sunny, warm day.

I phoned Jim Dickson’s garage first thing this morning and Scamp’s wee red car goes in to the car hospital on Thursday to have its rear box replaced. No, that’s not a euphemism, it’s the last part of the exhaust system. The bit furthest from the engine. It’s hanging on by a thread at present, so hopefully after Thursday it will be a quieter wee red car.

With that done we drove to Tesco to get the messages. Just the usual things plus a bottle of wine and a bottle of gin. While Scamp was filling the trolley, I paid for, and posted a parcel to Hazy. We piled all the messages into the boot of my car and drove off to Calders garden centre to get some compost. We were also going to get some chopped bark to act as a mulch on the plant pots. The bark forms a layer that stops the water evaporating in the warm sun we’re expecting to stay with us for months, well, weeks. Or to be more realistic, a few days. It didn’t matter, anyway, because they only had a massive bale of the stuff. We bought the compost and left the bark.

Back home and after lunch Scamp was working in the garden and I went out in the car to get some photos up on Fannyside Moor. Unfortunately my parking space had been taken over by two workies lorries because they were repairing a damaged power line. It looked as if they were going to be there all day, so I changed my destination to the Luggie, but I’d forgotten that part of the road was being resurfaced and there was a diversion. As usual with NLC there was one sign pointing left before the roadworks with a bit sign “DIVERSION”. After that, nothing. No indication of how to get where you wanted to go. No more diversion signs. They should have put up one big one that said

YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN NOW MATE!!

Finally found my way to the station car park at Greenfaulds, got parked and went for a walk along the Luggie Water. Every year at this time some trees beside the water get covered in creepy looking webs, not spider webs, but ones created by Ermine Moth caterpillars. I remember that name because when I used to fish on the Clyde and a hatch of Ermine Moths came on, the fish wouldn’t look at anything other than that particular insect. The Netherburn folk used to call them Herman Mofs. More like Herman Munster!

It wasn’t the caterpillars that got PoD, it was a quick shot of a couple of ants crawling over an unlucky Water Avens wildflower. It’s the wild version of a Geum.

The other remarkable thing was a bright red railway engine, stuck at a signal just before Greenfaulds Station. It had a nameplate that read “Christine” and a message “Hans-Georg Werner – Thank you & Good Luck” After some research I found out that this was a retrial present for Hans-Georg after he left his post as CEO of DB Cargo UK, and Christine is his wife. The engine was covered in pictures of gliders, apparently he is a glider pilot in his spare time. It’s amazing what you find after one chance photo.

I suggested we water the garden because it was such a warm day and the flowers, especially, need the extra moisture. It’s quite a relaxing thing to do on a warm evening.

Tonight we had a traditional Monday dinner of pasta with tomato sauce. I had the basic pasta dinner, but Scamp had some salmon left over from yesterday, so she used that with the pasta. I had some anchovies with just a little bit of Scamp’s salmon.

Maybe we’ll manage just one more warm day before the weather breaks. Scamp is booked for coffee tomorrow morning and we’re both visiting Margie for more of her stories in the afternoon.

Maybe the last sunny day – 5 June 2022

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A bit of a lazy, sunny Sunday, but it looks like it’s downhill for the weather now.

Spoke to Hazy in the morning and caught up on all that was happening with them and the extended family. Neither of them feeling fully fit yet, but that’s to be expected. Sometime you just have to take things a bit easier and let the world turn at its rate.

We started out doing a bit of gentle garden work under a warm sun, but with a cool breeze. For me, today’s work meant pruning away seed heads on the aquilegia just to make sure they don’t seed everywhere as they did last year, dead heading the lupins, and checking that we hadn’t lost any peas, kale or leeks over the past couple of days. It looks to me as if I’ve already lost a pea plant, but there was no sign of slug trails, so maybe it was one of the hungry birds that had done the dirty on me. I’ll maybe do my mum’s trick and stretch some black cotton thread across the raised bed. Scares the living daylights out of the birds! Scamp, of course was right in there in the front garden, digging out weeds and cutting down excess growth in the bushes.

Soon it was lunch time and after that, Scamp went walking down to the shops to get some stuff for tonight’s dinner while I prepared mine. Today I was cooking some diced pork I’d bought months ago. Neither of us had any experience of cooking it, so I stuck fairly close to a recipe I’d downloaded from BBC Food. Basically you fried off the meat to start with and put it in a slow cooker, then it was the turn of some bacon to be fried and added to the slow cooker next the veg was cooked and added with an uncooked peeled, cored and chopped apple. Finally, in went about half a bottle of cider, some herbs and some water and half a chicken stock cube. Put the lid on and cook on low for six hours, it said. I didn’t have six hours, so I cooked it on auto for about four hours and the meat was falling off the fork when it came out.

While Scamp rested I went out with a macro lens on the camera hoping to see that dragonfly again. My backup was some yellow flag irises that I reckoned would be in flower by now. No dragonfly to be seen, but the irises were beautiful. They got PoD I also found that the newly sown grass football park behind St Mo’s school has some lovely wee red poppies in with the grass seed.

Spoke to Jamie later and heard all about bat investigations and preparations for exiting his present employment to head for pastures new. Never easy, although I must say that it’s a very long time since I had to do that. Some time around 1980 I believe!

Tomorrow I think I’m taking the wee Red car down to the village to see about a new exhaust.

Flash dance class – 4 June 2022

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We got a message today to say that due to the small numbers in today’s class, the time would be reduced from 90 minutes to 60 minutes.

I was delighted. Sometimes the dance class goes on for too long and an hour seemed just about right, but by the time we were finishing up, I could have happily worked on for another 30 minutes. However the teachers are the bosses here and we’d added a new Cha-Cha to our dance list. The Charnwood Cha-Cha uses a lot of moves we’ve learned already with just a few differences. I wouldn’t say we had it off pat, but most of it was there. The other dance we did was the ‘Baby Waltz”. So called because it’s a shortened routine. Most of the time I got it right, but towards the end my brain was lagging a bit and I kept making the same mistake, time after time. Eventually we agreed. I was over-thinking it and when I just went with the flow it worked again.

I wanted some stuff in Cass Art in Glasgow and Scamp suggested we go for lunch in Doppio Malto, an Italian restaurant and beer shop. We’d been there before and the focaccia was the best we’d had anywhere. Today Scamp had a Bean Burger with chips and peppers. I had Supreme of Chicken. Not quite the supreme of chicken that I’d had last week at Laura and Ross’s wedding, just a bit more rustic. With grilled aubergine slices, courgette and peppers and served with hand cut skin on chips. And of course we had that super focaccia with rosemary and salt. Just as good, if not better than the last time.

We went to Cass Art but they didn’t have what I was looking for. When we were walking back to the car, Scamp suggested that we go to Hobbycraft as it’s almost on the way. We did, and they had what I was looking for. Also they had dark chocolate chips which I wanted to try making Cantucci (little hard Italian biscuits) what my uncle Jimmy White would have called Hard Tack!

Back home it was really warm but with a gentle breeze to cool things down. I put on my shorts and a tee shirt and took the Sony for a walk in St Mo’s. There I got today’s PoD which was a Green Orb-Weaver Spider, sometimes known as a Cucumber Green Spider.

When I got back, Scamp was already ensconced in the back garden, reading but only with a soda water and lime. I joined her and we had a beer each. I’m now reading Bad Actors because I finished Under Pressure by Robert Pobi. Brilliant book.

Another setback Hazy. The post office in Tesco was closed today because of a strike by postal workers. You couldn’t write this! I might be quicker driving down and handing you the memory stick! I’ll try again tomorrow.

No plans for tomorrow, except to try to post a parcel to Chessington!

 

Finally getting my hands dirty – 3 June 2022

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About time too!

Went out this morning to get some bread from Tesco and hopefully post some photos to Hazy. The bread was no problem, but the post office was shut, as was the local one in Condorrat. Don’t blame me, blame Mrs McQueen and her Platignum Jubbly holiday. Ok, if I’d posted the parcel yesterday it wouldn’t have been a problem, but I didn’t. I still blame Mrs McQueen for it. If not her, then Boris. That’s the obvious fall back, Blame Boris.

Came home with the beautifully wrapped parcel and a loaf plus a couple of bars of chocolate for being a good boy. With that done, and not done, we started in the garden. I found a single pea had germinated from the five I’d planted in the raised bed, so I carefully dug it out and put it aside. Then I added some compost to the raised bed to replace all the stuff I’d dug out since the end of last years growing season. After that, this year’s planting could begin.

I planted four peas, plus the pea I’d recovered earlier in the back row of the raised bed. Next line was four curly kale plants. While I was planting them, I found what looked like another kale plant left over from last year. It turned out to be a piece of kale stem with a little green leaf sprouting from the middle of it. There was no sign of any root on what you might call a cutting, but the leaf looked healthy. Just for luck, I planted it with the rest of the kale. Next line was four leeks and that was the raised bed about full.

I’d five leeks left, so I emptied out last year’s plant pot that held about six leeks. Chucked half of the compost away and all the leek roots. Mixed what was left with some fresh composts and refilled the pot, then planted the remaining five leeks in the pot. Watered everything in as all the gardening programmes say you should and left then to sink or swim. Meanwhile, Scamp was potting up her new hydrangea and rearranging other plants to give them a better chance of catching some sunshine.

At that point, I felt I’d done more than enough gardening, so I grabbed a camera and a 105mm macro and went over to St Mo’s hoping to see a dragonfly I’d seen yesterday. I didn’t find it, but what I did find was a lazy Large Red damselfly which was compliant enough to sit there while I took a few photos of it. One of them made PoD.

Dinner tonight was a pizza we bought in Sainsbury’s yesterday and very nice it was too. Sainsbury’s always have produced good pizzas.

We may be dancing tomorrow or we may not. It seems there are only two couples definitely going to class. Hopefully we’ll find out in the morning. Mrs McQueen has a lot to answer for, I’ll tell you that, her and her Platignum Jubbly celebration.