Category: Beasties

Well, that was a hot one – 13 June 2021

Posted on by Zogman

I don’t know how far up the tube the little cylinder of mercury got, but it was quite far.

Not as far, perhaps, as the others in the family who are further south than us. Temperatures there were close to 30º by all accounts. Thankfully we had a cooling breeze to keep us in a more temperate climate. That said, we were still pretty warm and with blue skies and occasional clouds, the world was looking quite good.

We did a bit of gardening maintenance in the afternoon and then we both went for a walk in St Mo’s, but there was little insect activity, probably on account of the strong breeze through which the dragonflies might navigate, but the poor little damselflies would find it a struggle. Scamp and I went one circuit together before she left to do some more gardening with the option of a seat in the sun later. I carried on for another round of the pond.

On that second trip round I did find a Common Blue damselfly sitting quite happily on the boardwalk warming itself in the sun. It was a bit skittish, so I took my time stalking it and grabbed a few shots before I heard heavy footsteps behind me as a young couple passed. That was enough to scare off my Common Blue. Strangely, the girl turned and looked at me as I apologised for almost blocking their path and I’m sure she was a former pupil. She was probably wondering what her old teacher was doing sprawled on the boardwalk. Possibly she would come to the wrong conclusion that I’d been consuming intoxicating liquor! That would come much later in the day.

The common blue was the best shot of the day although I did go further afield in search of something larger, but there were no dragons flying today.

I came home and found Scamp in the back garden, reading, so I made her a Pimms and had a can of lager for myself. I then spent a comfortable half an hour in the sun, listening to my next Audible choice which is book 10 in the Inspector McLean series by James Oswald. Then it was time to get dinner sorted.

Tonight, dinner was Crab and Chilli Linguini. I was being ultra-careful as crab is really quite expensive, but most of the hard work had been done for me because I was using dressed crab that had been in the freezer for a month or so and came from a company JIC had recommended. The dinner was good, but not great. My fault, or my recipe’s fault, certainly not the crab’s. Too dry was the general complaint from both of us. Maybe next time I’ll make a better job of it.

No dancing tonight. Not our fault, but problems with internet connection at the teachers’ end. After a couple of near things, it was declared a no-show and as nobody seemed to have a free evening this week, normal service will hopefully be resumed next Sunday. We did have our own practise in the living room as all the furniture had been organised for the class.

Spoke to JIC and heard about all the trials and tribulations of house hunting down south. They really are finding some strange houses and even stranger sellers. Also we learned that there are swimming pools for dogs down south. Isn’t that what ponds and lakes are for?

Annette is coming to visit tomorrow for lunch. Other than that, nothing planned.

A dull Saturday – 12 June 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Not a day for doing much or going anywhere, although it did brighten up later.

Scamp did a bit of tidying up in the garden and moved some plants around to give them more sun and also to put them in places where they could be seen better. I deadheaded some of the aquilegia plants to, hopefully force them to produce more flowers. Scamp also cut the grass at the front and edged it I am now reminded!

We had the other half of yesterday’s quiche for lunch. I think I prefer it cold, while Scamp definitely prefers it hot. After lunch I took the camera for a walk in St Mo’s. Snapped a few damselflies, but because I hadn’t lifted the macro lens, none of them were acceptably in focus. I walked out behind St Mo’s school and disturbed a big dragonfly. It flew around for a while before almost crashing into me. It seemed to perch in a tree, but when I looked I couldn’t find it. PoD turned out to be a little fragile looking damselfly that seemed to be playing hide and seek with me hiding behind a stem. Every time I moved, it moved too. I took some photos of it and left it to its game.

When I cropped the damselfly photo in Lightroom later, it was really a small image. However, this new Lightroom has the ability to enlarge a photo to four times it original size without losing definition. That’s what I did. The process is called ‘Enhance’ and that’s what it does. It takes a fair bit of processing power to do it and the PoD took almost 30 seconds. The wait was worth it, because the quality is quite amazing.

We walked over to Condorrat tonight to pick up a Golden Bowl dinner we’d ordered. Two Chicken Chop Suey and two Fried Rice. Just as good as it always is. It’s great that some things don’t change in this world.

After dinner, Scamp and I watered the garden, just the front garden and just with watering cans. If the warm dry weather continues we may hose back and front gardens tomorrow night. We had a quick practise later for tomorrow’s class. The routines are a bit rough, but we have most of the steps in the right place.

No plans for tomorrow. We’ll see what the weather brings us.

 

A busy day – 7 June 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp was off to meet her sister. I was head gardener for a while.

Lots of things I could have been doing, but I chose to put my free time to good use and scrubbed out the bird bath then refilled it. My chilli plants have been desperate for more space and some real compost, not the floor sweepings B&Q seem to think they can foist off as ‘peat free’. What is this sudden panic to make everything peat free? Crofters up north have been digging it up, drying it out and burning it in their fireplaces for centuries. Suddenly they are virtually criminals because apparently that peat has been storing carbon and saving the planet. It seems strange to me that all these activists use the same terms like “locking away the carbon”. It’s as if this new jargon explains everything, when in actual fact it’s more like The King’s New Clothes. Everyone seems afraid to ask them what that means in Topsy and Tim language. How does it lock it away? Where does the peat put the carbon? I think it’s all smoke and mirrors, but probably not peat smoke. Anyway, I used some general purpose compost which may or may not have peat in it and the chillies are probably better off in it than in the B&Q floor sweepings. Rant over. After that I soaked the plants in the bird bath, muddying the water and undoing all the good work I’d done there.

Before I started the gardening I’d made a pizza dough and left it to prove in the warm living room. When Scamp came home I’d just finished rolling and stretching some of the dough to a rough circle and put it into the proving oven (the grill that had been preheated for about five minutes) to puff up. It was just a simple tomato base with extra chopped up fresh tomatoes and some grated mozzarella on top. Baked for about fifteen minutes at gas 6 – that was just a reminder for me. It was very successful.

Next Scamp wanted to wash her car, but couldn’t reach the roof, so I did that and then gave it all a bit of a soapy wash while Scamp scrubbed off the sticky sugary stuff that drips from the trees in late spring. Then I set up the hose for her to wash it all off and started on my car. It made sense to just get it all done at the same time. Thank you Bobby Flavell for the use of your outside tap again.

With the cars sparkling in the sun, Scamp decided to water the garden. Easier to use our own water for that, so I fixed up the hose and let her get on with it while I went for a walk in St Mo’s. Not a lot of movement, but one little Common Blue damselfly sat and watched me while I carefully dragged my camera out of the bag and took its picture a few times.

After dinner the Amazon man dropped off a parcel I’d ordered last night. It was a Samyang Lens Station. Basically the 18mm lens I use on the Sony camera is crap at focusing. However, Samyang will sell you a piece of kit that connects your lens through the computer to their website where you can download a new firmware file that will improve the focusing. It’s a neat scam and it certainly works! Thankfully, so did the lens afterwards, because I’d read horror stories on websites to the effect that the software could wreck your lens. Maybe it could, but it only improved mine. I’ll do a field test tomorrow just to make sure.

Finally wrote to my brother. The last email I sent him was in March! So much going on? Not really, just bad time management on my part. Must get better organised.

The last thing to do on a busy day was to have a quick dance practise just to make sure that the muscle memory was working properly. It was, after a false start!

No plans for tomorrow. We’re waiting to see what the weather will be like.

Wall to Wall sunshine – 6 June 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Long may it last, even if we do have to water the garden!

After lunch we went for a walk round St Mo’s pond and stood watching the damselflies. I managed to capture one or two of them, or it could be that I caught the same one once or twice. Who knows with damselflies, they all look the same, don’t they? Well maybe not, because occasionally you can spot slight differences in their wing structure, some also have defects that mark them as different from the rest, just like humans, I suspect. Anyway, I was using the Sony camera and the Sigma macro lens and I did manage to get a PoD.

From St Mo’s we went down to Broadwood Stadium to extend our walk and take in the exercise machines path, then back across the dam through the houses and the underpass before climbing the long steep hill to St Mo’s school and then home. Not a bad walk. Later I wanted to see if any dragonflies had appeared, so I went for a short walk over to the pond, but there was no sign of life and it was getting late in the afternoon, so I headed home, because tonight was a dance class and I didn’t want to be in a rush to get dinner made and get a quick practise in. I needn’t have worried, Scamp was on the ball and had my burger cooking while her scallops were waiting their turn to go in the other pan.

Dance class tonight started with Mambo Marina which is a fairly old sequence dance that we learned months ago, but of course I’d forgotten bits of it. A quick reprise from Scamp and I was good to go. The Foxtrot was going to be next and it was nowhere near as easy as the MM. Lots of little tricky bits to it and we couldn’t agree on the correct footwork, but Jane and Stewart soon ironed out our problems and it was plain sailing after that. Last part of tonight’s lesson was the Cha-Cha. It is such an energy sapping dance. Most of the moves are fine, but it’s that little cha-cha step that has to be done right to keep in the tempo of the dance, that’s the problem. However, we managed to get it completed without too much trouble. We sat in the garden to cool down after that with a couple of beers. It really was a beautiful night.

Spoke to JIC later and got the low down on house hunting in and around Cambridge, Simonne’s run today and how JIC’s ankle injury is doing. Gave him some sage advice from his gran on how to prevent birds from eating all his veg. Black thread was her secret weapon. I imagine it works equally well with English sparrows as it did with Scottish ones! I hope so anyway.

Watched a Crash – Bang, Baku GP. Not driver errors this time, but tyre failures. More like Wacky Races than a GP!

Tomorrow morning Scamp is off to have coffee with June. I’m hoping to finish my epistle to Alex.

Hooray for rain – 5 June 2021

Posted on by Zogman

Out looking for compost and a pot.

Such exciting lives we lead sometimes. What could be a more satisfying thing to do on a Saturday afternoon that taking a trip to the garden centre for a bag of ericaceous compost and a chance to compare the size, shape and price of different plant pots. In the end we did buy the compost, but passed on the pots, judging them no better than the one we’d bought earlier in the week. For once we were totally focused on the task in hand and didn’t really look at the plants on sale, we just bought the compost and went home.

It was a was a warm day and I just knew Scamp would want to get the new rhododendron planted in its slightly acidic compost. I, on the other hand wanted to have a look for some damsels or even some dragons. It was warm enough to wear a pair of shorts instead of jeans and that’s what I did. I walked over to St Mo’s, but there were no damsels or dragons to be seen. I took some photos of hawthorn blossom before I found what would be PoD. It was a little black fly crawling about on a tree trunk. I’m guessing it’s a Wasp Fly of some description, but I was struck by its strange eyes. The compound eye seems to have a simple eye in the middle of it. Since it’s on Flickr, someone will probably be able to ID it for me. Anyway, it got PoD.

Came back and Scamp was putting the final touches to the planting and was trying to water the rhododendron in, but something was blocking the watering can. She cleaned the rose from the watering can but that didn’t help, then she found that something was stuck in the spout. After prodding it with a garden cane, out popped a snail, complete with shell. How it managed to climb into the watering can and get stuck in the spout we’ll never know. I thought it was only Incy Wincy Spider who did things like that!

After dinner we watched a Baku F1 GP qualifying session with more than its fair share of crashes. Everyone seemed to want to throw their million pound race cars into the barriers today … and that was just the qualifying! What will the actual race be like, tomorrow?

Since we had missed last week’s dance practise, we though we should do a walk through of what we’ve learned so far, and we have learned quite a lot. Tonight we walked through two different waltz routines, a rumba, a tango and a cha-cha. We sort of walked through the first part of the foxtrot too, but couldn’t remember or agree on the first five or six steps. Hopefully it will all become clear tomorrow.

My weather app on my phone has been promising rain today for most of the week. It was apparently going to start at 4pm. They got it wrong by almost an hour. Just after 4.45 the first raindrops hit the window. It turned to hail for a time and then went back to rain again. It didn’t last all that long, but it did mean we didn’t have to water the garden, so the snail will be relieved.

Tomorrow seems like a better day and if the weather app is as accurate as it was today we may get out for a walk.

Coffee for three – 4 June 2021

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For the first time in ages we had a quorum when the call went out for coffee.

Scamp was away first to meet Veronica for a walk around Broadwood Loch. I was next, away to meet Val for coffee. We had barely sat down when Colin joined us. I’d missed his reply to my email invitation. For the first time in ages most of us were available. Fred had to call off as he was taking his wife to a hospital appointment. As you can imagine, discussions were wide ranging and interesting but without politics rearing its ugly head. Time just flew by and it was Val who had to leave first to meet his wife to go shopping. That seemed to break the spell and we all left to go our separate ways.

Back home and after lunch, Scamp drove us up to Tesco and we did a bit of shopping. Just essentials today, although I did get a few bottles of beer and Scamp selected a suitable bottle of wine, oh yes, and some ice cream. Like I said, just the essentials.

Back home, I grabbed the Sony with its big, heavy, slow macro lens, put it in a small rucksack and went over to St Mo’s on a damsel-hunt. I couldn’t find anything worth taking the camera out of its bag for, but wandered round the pond and then tried again. Immediately I found a couple of Large Red damselflies sitting on the upstand of the boardwalk. Took a few shots, then went looking for a dragonfly or two, but none were there to be found today. Walked back and found the two damselflies were now joined in the mating position with the male grasping the female at the back of her head. They sat quite patiently and gave me the opportunity to get some detailed photos. The Sigma 105mm may be big, heavy and slow to focus, but it really does resolve a lot of detail when it gets the chance. The mating pair became PoD. The rucksack makes it much easier to carry heavy kit like the Sony/Sigma pair although it is a bit more awkward to get quick access to the camera compared to the black Lowepro sling bag.

Scamp went out to sit and read in the garden later while I made Paella for dinner. It turned out really well although I hadn’t done anything different to what I’d done many times before. It’s probably just an extra gram or two of spice or herbs that tilts the flavour enough to make things taste different.

Tomorrow we may go out to get some more compost for the rhododendron and I may shovel some more earth on the potatoes which are showing their green leaves above the soil again.

An undecided day – 1 June 2021

Posted on by Zogman

It’s wasn’t us who were undecided, it was the weather.

It looked as if it would be another scorching day when we woke, but it never really reached full scorch. It was warm, but not bright all the time. The sun came and went for most of the day.

The first task today was to water the garden. Scamp did the front and I did the back. I think I got the heavy end of the stick, because there are only about a dozen pots of plants at the front and easily, easily thirty at the back. However, it was my choice and it was good just walking about spraying water on the thirsty plants. It also gave me a chance to stand there and admire all the things we’ve grown. Such a variety of flowers, greenery and vegetables.

After we put the hose away and had a coffee we had some admin to do. The boring things like backing up my photos, paying off my debts and also changing providers for house insurance. The problem is there’s no real shortcut to them, but they have to be done. One thing I didn’t have to do today was a sketch. May is over and with it, EDiM. I’ll miss it in some ways, but in others I’m really glad I don’t have to start working on a sketch at 10pm, then trying to get it into the computer and posted on Flickr before I write the blog. As it is, it’s just before 10pm now and I’m already halfway through the blog.

We’d walked down to the shops after lunch and bought what we needed for dinner which was to be a stir fry. On the way back I veered off to walk round St Mo’s, hoping for a chance to snap those dragonflies from yesterday. They seemed to have disappeared. Maybe the lack of constant sun was giving them problems. I think they need the sun to keep their bodies warm. I did almost capture a little red damselfly and a Jenny Long Legs, but it was a couple of Wolf Spiders that took most of my attention. The one of the female trailing her egg sac got PoD. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but anyway, they like to bask in the sun with their load because the heat helps the eggs to hatch. It looks such an uncomfortable existence. Almost as uncomfortable as a woman in the last weeks of pregnancy. The swelling is proportionally the same.

It sounds like most of our time was spent being active or doing work, but that’s only half the story. Although it wasn’t exactly wall to wall sunshine today it was still warm enough to sit in the garden with a beer and that’s what we did for the odd hour or two, just reading or daydreaming.

Dinner tonight, as I said, was a stir fry. Scamp made hers with rice as the base and I used noodles for mine. Hers looked a lot better than mine, but mine tasted good. I’d do that again. Maybe even without the tuition from my wife next time!

So, photos are in Flickr and the blog is just about to be posted and it’s just after 10pm. That must be a record … if it all works out.

While some of Scotland went down to level 1 today, most of the Central Belt were fated to remain in level 2. It’s not a big benefit for us really. More people from more households could meet indoors and soft play centres could open again, but neither of these would affect us. It appears that Covid cases are on the rise again across the Central Belt and this is a preventative measure. Better to be safe than sorry, I suppose.

Tomorrow we may be going east to look at some flowers.

Another dull day – 26 May 2021

Posted on by Zogman

However, brighter days are on the horizon, we’re told.

Scamp was off to Calder’s for lunch with Annette and I was left to my own devices. Always a dangerous thing to do. As it happened I didn’t really do much damage today. I hoovered the painting room because there was a lot of those sticky covers from the buds on the trees. They stick to you shoes and then transfer to the carpet later to be ground in. Luckily the Dyson knows how to deal with them. Didn’t do much else with my freedom, other than try to find a way to partition an NTFS drive on a Mac. Apparently it can’t be done without a lot of work and I wasn’t going to waste more time on trying.

Just before Scamp returned, I gave up and took the car out for a run with two cameras in the boot. I was hoping to give the Sony with the Sigma macro a chance to show what it could do with the new damselflies, except there didn’t seem to be any of the flying creatures around today. There were lots of Wolf Spiders wandering along the boardwalk. I chose to annoy them instead. Saw a spider on spider fight that was as good as anything Hollywood has to offer and probably more violent than is allowed on the BBC. These guys, and it was guys, were throwing everything into this battle. They actually rolled across the upstand of the boardwalk and fell off into the water of the pond. Can spiders swim? I hope so, or at least I hope they are quick learners. Soon more arrived to fill their place. It was mating time again I think. One lateral shot of a female wolf got PoD. Not the prettiest face I’ve seen, but beauty they say is in the eye of the spider who won the fight and learned to swim.

After the photo session I drove to Kilsyth, more exactly I drove to Lidl. Bought a lemon to replace the mouldy one at home. Then a host of more fattening things that took my eye. The lemon along with its other three yellow buddies is going to make Limoncello. Sugar, Vodka and the best lemons you can find. That’s all there is to it, that and a fair bit of work. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start the manufacturing process. It worked the last time and I’ve just finished the last bottle, so it’s time to start again.

Today’s prompt was Something You Collected Outside. I couldn’t think what to draw, but then I remembered I used to pick up old empty snail shells, especially small ones. They are so fine and delicate and to think that some creature creates this shelter for itself. What does it create it from? How does it form it? Probably, like so many things these days, the answer is but a click away. I’m talking here about land based snails, not cockles or winkles or any of the sea snails. Their heavy thick walled shells didn’t interest me.

Tomorrow we may go out for a run. Tesco are delivering tomorrow night, so we can’t be away too long. Of course, all of this is dependent on the weather fairies getting things right!

Dull, dull, dull – 13 May 2021

Posted on by Zogman

White sky this morning. No texture in the clouds, just milky white

At least it was dry and it remained so all day. The furthest we got was a walk down to the shops and back. Apart from the ‘messages’, Scamp got some Bizzy Lizzies for her Wanderella planter that hangs by the back door. She did get some last week too, but they turned out to be too big for the holes in the planter and were used up elsewhere. These ones were much smaller and fitted perfectly. I got some chocolate limes to which I’m addicted. Tonight I divided them up into bags of five. When I go out for a walk I allow myself one bag. When they’re done, that’s it until the next day. If I put ten in the bag, I’d just eat them all without thinking about it, that’s why I limit myself to five. Not much chance of a walk in St Mo’s today though.

Last night I found a tick. First one for ages. Today I found another. That’s the walk in the woods at St Mo’s off the list until the first hard frost, because the ticks don’t seem to like the cold. Neither do I, but I hate ticks and that makes the cold bearable.

<Technospeak>
Apart from slapping Germoline and TCP on the tick bites, I found time to delve into the old NAS drive’s hard drive. I found that if I booted from a Linux distro (a live Linux installation on a USB stick) on the Mac, I could access the drive. All the files are still there on the hard drive, but the drive is formatted to Linux and can’t be read on a Mac or PC. What I didn’t know was that I could drag the files from the old NAS drive on to an NTFS (PC) formatted memory stick and load them on to the Mac. I wanted Office 11 for Mac and that was in the downloads I’d stored on the old NAS. It worked! Well, it almost worked. The new Mac is running Catalina and it doesn’t allow you to open any 32 bit apps. Office 11 is a 32 bit app. Game Over. Apparently I can still get Office for free by connecting to iCloud. A bit cumbersome, but it might work.
</Technospeak>

In the afternoon I did a bit of photography in the garden and that’s where today’s PoD came from. It’s a Strawberry & Cream Aquilegia with a Spirea bush behind. That was in the hour or so of sunshine we had today. I managed to get a few shots of plants just coming in to flower. Good to see it.

Today’s sketch was to be A Close Up View of Something. I chose the pliers of the multi-tool I drew earlier in the week. Lots of lovely detail in the mechanics of the tool which allows the jaws to open and close, but to fold away again when you’re finished. Cleverly designed.

I forgot to post a photo of the Challah bread I made. As you can see we really needed to test it, even before I could get the photo taken. It’s just as nice today.

No plans for tomorrow. Scamp and Veronica are out in the morning, so I might get some painting done.

 

Another cold day – 6 April 2021

Posted on by Zogman

What has happened to spring this year? We seem to be back in winter.

Another lovely day … as long as you were in the house with the heating on. Once you stepped out, you found out what the Arctic feels like. Of course, I speak from experience. We both stepped out, but only as far as the car. We drove up to Tesco and while Scamp waited in the queue for the chemist to get her meds, I wandered round Tesco picking up the makings of lunch and dinner. Then it was a drive home through a snowstorm. I kid you not, this weather has only got worse since Donald Trump was chucked out of the White House. Bring back DT, Make Weather Great Again.

After lunch we agreed that we should go out again, but this time we’d be walking. Twice round St Mo’s pond without a photo being taken. Then to lengthen the walk we followed the path down in the general direction of the shops, but turned left before we got there. Walked down to the underpass that would take us to Broadwood Loch, but again turned left and went back up to the house. While Scamp was admiring a Magnolia bush, I was looking at some yellow flowers nearby. I took some photos, but they didn’t make PoD.

After a coffee and while Scamp was reading, I went for a walk in St Mo’s. Yes, it was cold, but not too cold, especially if you were out of the wind and in the sun, which I was for a while taking photos of Larch flowers, the aptly named Larch Pineapples. I named them that, you won’t find that description in Wikipedia. Even they didn’t make the grade for PoD.

I walked across what is usually a swampy mess past a small pond. Today with my new waterproof boots on, it wasn’t really all that wet, but it did give me a chance to test the grip from the Vibram soles, and they did get a bit wet. I felt better. They now looked ‘lived in’. Found my little ladybird still sleeping away the cold weather in its little crevice in the ash tree and grabbed the best photos yet of the insect.

<Technospeak>
Back home I squirted all the photos into Lightroom and decided the ladybird and the larch pineapple were the best of the bunch, so I used a new processing app on the iMac to do an auto adjust of the two shots. The results were interesting. The larch pineapple was worse after its dunking in the auto adjust bath. Highlights blown out colour just not right. The ladybird looked a lot better after its magic processing. I can’t explain it. It must be something to do with the basic colours of the subject and the browns and oranges of the ladybird pic work well with the algorithm for tuning the adjustments. Finally decided that the ladybird got PoD and used the new Capture One processing, but processed the larch pineapple with Lightroom.
</Technospeak>

Watched a BBC 2 programme we’d recorded last week about a Scottish painter James Morrison who painted wonderful landscapes from the North East of Scotland. Beautiful enormous watercolours and oils. If you have the time and inclination, watch “Eye of the Storm” on iPlayer. Quite stunning work and a great old man who died soon after the film was made, aged 88 I think. I have to thank Fred for telling me about it.

Tomorrow, Scamp is hoping to go for a walk with Veronica and I’m hoping to bake something interesting for her to come back to.