Category: Birds

The Fort and The Phone – 7 September 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp was looking for a bag. I wanted to look at a phone.

Armed with a measuring tape we went looking for a bag, a paper bag that would be big enough to hold another bag which would hold a yellow bag. She was also looking for a birthday card for her sister. She found a really funny one. Maybe she does have a sense of humour after all.

Meanwhile I went to EE to look at a prospective phone. The assistant asked me how she could help and I told her I was looking for a new phone because I was reaching the end of my contract. With the words “… end of my contract.” I saw her shutters come down. I’m guessing that there is far less kudos attached to an Upgrade than there is to a New Customer. She did show me the phone I was looking for, but it was a bolted down dummy with a picture of the screen glued on the front. She apologised and said if I wanted to see a “Live” phone, I could go next door to O2 where they had live ones that actually worked. I noticed that she didn’t say “Then you can come back and we can work out the details of what you need.” It was more like “We don’t do upgrades. Goodbye.”
I did go to O2. I did see the phone working, but nobody there was interested in getting my business. Maybe they are just fed up with punters coming in from EE to play with their phones!

Lunch was a nuked roll ’n’ sausage for me and a nuked chicken wrap for Scamp with a coffee each in Costa. Which apparently doubles as a creche judging by the number of prams parked in the aisles.

Back home, Scamp was going to do some ironing. I grabbed both cameras and took them for a photo walk in Fannyside Moor. No insect life today, but lots of birds massing on the telephone lines (they still have telephone lines in these rural areas). I think the majority of the birds were swallows. It must be getting close to the time for them to fly back down south for the winter. I always try to record the day when I see the first swallow every year, but it’s much more difficult to set the date you saw the last swallow! A landscape shot of the cloudscape at Fannyside got PoD.

On my way home I went to see what Tesco Mobile had to offer and managed to muddy the water, because they didn’t have the phone I was ogling in O2, but did have a newer and allegedly better, but cheaper model. Now I’m going to spend waste another day comparing and contrasting both the phones and the providers!

Dinner tonight was Fish Fingers, Egg and Chips with Tinned Spaghetti on the side. A fall back when you can’t decide what you fancy for dinner and a common occurrence in this house.

Tomorrow we’re driving what Scamp calls “That awful road” because we’re hoping to go dancing!

An Explanation.
Later in the evening when I was writing this blog, I inadvertently clicked the wrong button on the menu and wiped today’s entire blog. Despite my best efforts searching for the text, it had gone. I know it’s not really gone, all the app has done is remove the header from it and the bulk of the writing is still there, but this morning I did a deeper search and eventually rewrote it.

 

 

Old Friends – 29 August 2022

Posted on by Zogman

We didn’t do much in the morning, but the afternoon was full.

In the morning I saw the “Washing machine is ready to go” message when I went down to make the breakfast, so I switched it on. After breakfast Scamp wanted to go out for messages and I wanted to give my bike the once over, because I’m intending taking it out on Friday with a little bit of luck. The tyres are flat, but what state the inner tubes will be in, I don’t know. I might get round to that tomorrow, but today Scamp returned and saved me from getting my hands dirty.

After lunch I suggested we go for a walk. My offerings were Drumpellier, Auchinstarry for the Forth and Clyde canal or a more gentle Colzium. Drumpellier was our choice, so off we went.

As usual we walked anti-clockwise round the loch, then into the woods, taking it in turns to decide which road to take at each split in the path. It was a really warm day with a bit of cloud cover. We were just coming out of the woods when I saw a woman pushing an older woman in a wheelchair and recognised her voice. It was Morag from school and the older woman was her mum. We met up with her husband just a bit further along the road. We must have stood there for easily three quarters of an hour, just catching up and talking about folk we’d worked with. Funnily enough John and I had done exactly the same thing on Friday night. Morag has gone back to teaching again for half a week after having retired! I don’t know why people do that. Surely they are just taking jobs away from up and coming teachers who really need a job. I’m perfectly happy being retired and being able to live my own life. I’m sure Scamp would say the same thing, even if I do get in the way a lot of the time. We eventually said our “goodbyes” and we strode off, because the ice cream van was beckoning!

Just after getting the cones, I saw the opportunities of a photo with the swans. I handed my cone to Scamp and took a couple of photos of the birds. They weren’t too happy to see me and started hissing, as swans do, probably because I’d woken them up from their afternoon snooze. Two shots was all I risked, then caught up with Scamp again and we scoffed the ice cream, then drove home.

Two photos isn’t really enough for me. I kept my walking boots on and took the A7 out for a walk in St Mo’s where I got another sleepy dragonfly and back in the garden, a bi-coloured dahlia. Strange thing. Most of the flowers on the plant are pale pink, spotted with dark red. Some are plain red, but this one was half and half. Some sort of throwback perhaps. All are available on Flickr, but the swans got PoD.

While I was out, Scamp had been cutting the back garden grass. Hopefully that will be her finished for the year. Depending on the weather, the grass might need one more cut, but equally it might be good enough as it is,

Rather a good Pasta Carbonara tonight using Val’s Italian recipe with two full eggs and one extra yolk, but no cream. Apparently that’s how carbonara should be made.

Tomorrow we’re booked for coffee with Isobel in the morning. The rest of the day is our own.

Unsupervised – 29 July 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp was out all morning and I was left to my own devices.

More likely, I was left with my own devices. It meant I could read my Kindle, do Wordle and Spelling Bee when and if I wanted to. As it happened, I chose to tidy up the back bedroom after yesterday’s setup for Flickr Friday. I was quite pleased with the final result, but it did involve a lot of setting up and now today was tearing down day. Always a delight to tear down something that had been built, but was now just gathering dust.

It was round about there the desire for more clearing and organising came to a halt. Also, Scamp returned from her FitSteps class. We discussed options for what was left of the day and what was up for grabs for dinner. The former was already sorted as far as I was concerned. It was either banana on bread or cold meat on bread. The second option won, not because Scamp had chosen the banana piece, but because I wanted to test out the thermal strength of some Nduja paste we’d bought. ‘Nduja’, just in case you don’t know is a spreadable spicy pork sausage from Calabria in Italy. It varies in strength and this one wasn’t too hot. It went well with cooked ham and some pickled peppers (not necessarily the Pickled Peppers that Peter Piper Picked, though). With lunch done and dusted. What was for dinner?

We settled on pizza. Stuffed crust bake at home pizza. I was intending going out anyway to get some more critical tests done on the new lens, so continuing my walk down to the shops wasn’t a real hardship. On my return I Scamp was reading in the sunshine in the garden. I joined her with a bottle of beer and a rum ’n’ coke for Scamp. Read for a while and got the nudge from my watch to go and complete the final 250 steps in the hour. This I did and that gave me my first ‘8 active hours’ of the week.

Pizza turned out ok, but not really the meat ‘feast’ it promised. Sliced Pepperoni, little squares of Ham and reconstituted chicken is no my idea of a feast. I much prefer the Chicken and Bacon that we usually have. Iceland didn’t have any this time.

PoD was four little sparrows lined up on a fence while the fifth was having dinner from the bird feeder. They were very patient and arguments only erupted when one of them tried to jump the queue.

I’d been fascinated yesterday with the amount of gunge that had accumulated in the radiators, so this morning I thought I’d give the stairs a go with the new flexible brush.  While I was destroying ancient spider webs in places where we didn’t even know we had places, I thought I heard a rustle from one of the unhitherto unaccessible void areas underneath the upstairs floor.  I eventually teased it out and it turned out to be, not a fat bundle of tenners wrapped up with string, but an empty packet of Monster Munch.  I immediately thought that one of my two regular readers might shine some light on the subject, but then I noticed the advert on the back for an offer that closed on the 31st March 1984.  So you pair are in the clear, because we didn’t move to this house until 1986!  Pity, I’d have liked it to have been a bundle of tenners tied up with string!

Tomorrow looks wet … all day wet. We’ll hope the weather fairies have got it wrong.

Walking in the woods – 10 July 2022

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Another lovely day with wall to wall sunshine in the morning.

Scamp’s suggestion for today was a walk round Broadwood with the extension through the woods. It suited me too because it meant I didn’t have to drive. Just for the sake of it, we went anticlockwise as opposed to our usual clockwise walk. I didn’t think there would be much to photograph and I was right. We did see a pair of crested grebes on Broadwood Loch, but they were too far away. I think it was just the feeling of being out with shorts and tee shirt in the sunshine that made the walk interesting. Also, for me, not lugging a camera and a couple of lenses, just one small camera with one lens made the walk more enjoyable. An as yet unnamed butterfly followed us on our Sunday morning walk through the woods at Broadwood, stopping occasionally, but never long enough for me to get close. Finally, I thought I knew where it had landed, but then couldn’t see the insect. Purely by accident I triggered the shutter button and took a photo of a butterfly I couldn’t see! Almost perfect camouflage. That photo of the butterfly became PoD.

Back home for lunch and then I volunteered to walk down to the shops to get some salad veg for dinner and a carton of milk. No wee man to offer me a Mivvi today, but after I got home I thought I should really have bought a packet of them just to stick in the freezer.

While I was out, Scamp was hacking into the blackcurrant bush and doing a great job of cutting it back while opening it out to remove all the criss cross of branches in the centre of it, Those are the ones that limit the light getting in to the bush.

I was on dinner duty today and it was quiche. It’s a while since I’ve made quiche and I had to stick to Scamp and Jackie’s quantities and techniques to get the pastry made and then the filling added. Two quiches as it happened, one with broccoli, smoked salmon and tomatoes. One with cheese and tomatoes. We ate half of each and have the other half ready for tomorrow.

After dinner we sat out in the sun for a short while before deciding to water the garden. It really needed the water with the temperature reaching 25ºc which is positively tropical for Scotland. Later when Jamie phoned, we found that they could beat us with a 31ºc, but that’s becoming the norm for those in the Deep South. Who knows what the temperature was in London.

We watched an almost interesting Austrian GP with a commentator nearly bursting a blood vessel trying to make it sound like the earth shattering race it simply wasn’t. Nice try, pal. Hope the blood pressure is back to normal now.

Now here’s a strange thing. I just checked and the title of the blog one year ago in the 10th of July 2021 was … “Walking in the woods”. Maybe I’m becoming predictable. Hope not!

Tomorrow we may go out for a drive. Not been out driving for ages.

Posted today – 24 April 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Hopefully this blog will be posted the same day it was written. That will make it the first since April 13th. Here goes!

I spent most of the morning and some the afternoon writing the last few blog posts, posting them and also posting photos on Flickr. I always start off with good intentions on days when we’re on holiday, but I never quite manage to stick to those intentions. After all, I’m on holiday and blog writing, which can sometimes be good fun to do, can also be a terrible drag. Anyway, the backlog is gone for now.

After lunch we went for a walk round Broadwood stadium, the long way round. Over to the boardwalk and over that wibbly, wobbly way to dry land. Who in their right mind makes a boardwalk from plastic. Halfway along the boardwalk it feels like it’s ready to tip you into the loch it crosses. Typical NLC cost cutting. Some day it’s just going to collapse and then an investigation will begin and ‘Lessons will be learned’. After that they will replace it with another cheapo plastic boardwalk until the same thing happens again.
Well, we survived the boardwalk today, but it’s in a far worse state than it was in the last time we crossed it. We walked on over the dam then up past the exercise machines stopping on the dam to take a photo of a herring gull at the outfall from the loch. I never knew there were herrings in Broadwood Loch. We also got a good laugh at a Crested Grebe with its bad hair do. Unfortunately, the Sony 55-210mm lens wasn’t in a focusing mood today, so I don’t have a record of it.

We were sorted for dinner, so didn’t need to stop at the shops on the way home and I reckoned I had at least one decent shot from the birdwatching at the dam, so I didn’t need a walk over to St Mo’s.

Scamp watered the back garden using a watering can. I preferred to use the hose and watered the front garden. It will be so much easier if we get an outside tap fitted, but the tap adaptor worked for today. Also, as Carlyn, next door had watered our plants while we were away down south, I watered her’s today.

Dinner was steak for me and salmon for Scamp with a side of salad in the style of Simonne, but really nothing like as good as hers. I must practise that culinary skill.

Spoke to Jamie and heard about his plans for the coming week, jetting off to the US again to cause more mayhem by pouring oil on troubled waters. Good luck with pleasing all of the people all of the time, Jamie.

PoD was the herring-less gull.

Tomorrow I may plant my sort-of cow parsley, some in pots and some in the ground. I also need to get my hair cut soon as May is approaching fast. At least my kilt fits, I tried it on yesterday.

Motherwell – 11 April 2022

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Off to Tesco first for expensive alcohol. Petrol type alcohol.

A lazy start to the day, but then off to Tesco for food and petrol, except everyone else wanted petrol too. I was heading to Motherwell in the afternoon and I knew I’d also need some later in the week, but all the pumps were full and queued too, so with the milk and bread and a bottle of wine or two, we headed home, feeling sure that I’d get some later.

After lunch I loaded the car with what I was taking to my brother’s which was really parcels for Ollie, and went back to Tesco. Slightly better, but the only pumps I could get near were out of E10 and I had to use the E5 or risk being late getting to Motherwell. The price of E5 is really prohibitive now. I thought E10 was bad! Anyway, I needed the fuel, so needs must. Put in £20 worth and told the Blue car to make the most of the posh petrol. It may be a while before it gets any more.

Drove up to my brother’s and after consoling Carol on her really sore looking new knee, Alex and I had a good blether about lenses and cameras. It’s one of those situations when you talk to each other using letters and numbers but actual words are few and far between. He does have a lovely set of lenses, but he doesn’t have a LensBaby. Well, not yet anyway. I took a few random shots with some of his hardware just so I could pixel-peep when I came home. They really were as good as they looked. Every one sharp right across the frame and even down to the corners. That’s the place you must look with a lens. The corner is the farthest point from the centre. The centre is always the sharpest, the edges annd the corners are the weakest. Not so with these lenses. Well chosen glass, Alex.

We agreed that we’d go out for a photo walk soon, hopefully next week and also that we’d all go to visit the Kelpies too, but only once Carol’s leg has healed. Drove home and thought about using a vase of cut flowers for today’s PoD. I didn’t want to go over to St Mo’s today. I need a break from it although I might have got another shot of that duck with the chestnut brown head, which is definitely a Widgeon. Maybe just passing through, because I don’t think it stayed long last year.

I wish now I’d taken the shots when the sun was higher in the afternoon, but I left it until after dinner and by then the light was fading, but the LensBaby did a good job of blurring out the edges of the frame and creating the nice soft image I was looking for. One of those tabletop shots got PoD.

That was about it for the day. A trip to Motherwell, expensive petrol and ‘flooers’ again.

No plans for tomorrow, apart from a bit of forward planning.

The man who worked in the garden – 10 April 2022

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Well, more likely, the man who makes a mess when he tries to help the lady who actually does work in the garden.

We were gardeners today. I was planting potatoes in potato bags. Three potatoes in each of the two bags. Maris Peers. We’d planted them last year and they had produced a good yield. They have been chitting on the window sill upstairs, light but cool. The spell checker thinks they’ve been ‘chatting’ which they might well have been, but they were actually firming up their sprouting shoots in a process known as ‘chitting’. Any chatting was purely accidental. While I was doing that, Scamp was pottering around the garden, filling watering cans, emptying bins and refilling them and pruning, always pruning. We did a quick survey of the garden and I found to my surprise that the Shooting Star which I feared was dead was showing signs of decent growth. Hooray! Also a plant we got brought back from Cambo gardens in St Andrews and had recently planted in the bed outside the back window was also showing signs of shoots as was another plant whose name neither of us can remember but is planted near the Cambo. Almost everything in the garden was rosy!

After lunch I put a decent pair of boots on, not gardening boots, and went for a walk in St Mo’s. With me today I took my old Tamron long zoom and the big, heavy Sigma macro lens. In addition I took a bag of slugs. There were loads of them clambering all over the compost heap and I just wanted rid of them and the eggs they’d be laying, so I put on a pair of disposable vinyl gloves and filled a plastic bag with them, then took them for a walk in St Mo’s. I dumped them in the woods. I hate killing creatures just because I don’t like them, so re-housing them is ok. If I call it re-wilding the countryside I’ll probably get a medal for it. I got today’s PoD in St Mo’s.  It was a coot sitting on its nest, floating among the stooks of last year’s horse tails.

I messed up a setting on the Sony and ended up with three photos for each one I meant to take. Don’t ask for details, just accept that it wasn’t what I intended to do and the excess have now been dumped in the bin.
Saw a duck that I thought was a Potchard, but turned out to be a Widgeon. I remember photographing it last year and being confused about its name then too.

Dinner tonight was the leftover curries from last night and it was fine. Watched a quite interesting F1 GP where Verstappen ran into car trouble and Le Clerc won the race. Unfortunately Hamilton could only manage fourth ;-).

Spoke to Jamie later and heard about all the troubles and tribulations Simonne was having in Trinidad with catching Covid and the aftermath. Also heard the exorbitant price her flight home would have cost if she hadn’t had travel insurance.

Maybe dropping off a present for Olly at his gran and papa’s tomorrow.

 

A walk in the wilds – 7 March 2022

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My first walk in and around Fannyside for a while.

Scamp was out to lunch with The Witches and I was like a knotless thread. It was another beautiful day and I didn’t want to spend it in the house. Nor did I fancy sitting in a car going somewhere, only to find I had half an hour there before driving back home. I chose to go to Fannyside Moor. Lots of big sky and silence. Not total silence, you understand. No, there was the soughing of wind in the pine trees and the distant sound of cars and vans on the single track road across the moor itself. There were sheep bleating somewhere and most joyous of all, I listened to a lark ascending. Not the Vaughan Williams piece, but a real lark, really ascending into a clear blue sky.

I’d parked at my usual place, on a rough bit of earth by a gate, but not blocking the gate and between two stands of Scots Pines. It’s on a ninety degree corner, but off the road. Just as well, because this is a single track road, just wide enough for a van or a tractor, but not nearly wide enough for two cars to pass without one or other losing a wing mirror. My kit for today was Sony A7iii with 105mm macro lens (just in case), kit lens and 18mm super wide. Actually that’s almost all my lenses. I’ve got others, but they are mainly mounted on adapters and that’s more to carry, too much.

I walked roughly east first almost as far as the farm, but not quite. Farms = dogs = trouble. Best avoided if possible. Halfway along the road I met a grumpy looking woman driving what an old Australian pen pal called a Ute. A four wheel drive go anywhere beefed up jeep. A utility vehicle. I climbed the verge to let her through, but she didn’t acknowledge me at all. I think she thought she owned Fannyside. Maybe she did. She slowed right down to have a good look at the Blue car, then drove on for a bit and stopped again. I think now she was checking that I wasn’t dumping rubbish, fly tipping. I hadn’t. I walked on, she drove on. I got some photos of lichen that covered some of the old fence posts. I also took some landscape shots. Then another car came the other way. Another Ute, another woman driver, but this one gave me a cheery wave as she passed. I’d walked as far as I wanted. Took some sheep photos then walked back.

Turned 90º and walked south until the cold north west breeze got a bit of an edge to it and I walked back to the car. Not far from it I spotted what looked like a pebble on a fence post and examination showed it to be a ladybird, a dark brown one with white spots. I remembered seeing one here before. I tried a few shots, but there was nothing to lean on or to give me some support. A walk back to the car brought a tripod. The flexible Benbo. Hated by many, but loved by those who persevere with its idiosyncrasies. It’s a steep learning curve getting the best out of it, but it’s a great bit of kit. Almost rock solid on most surfaces, todays thick matted grass was a challenge. Eventually I used it as a monopod and got the shots.

Back home, Scamp had returned from the lunch. I decided it was time the Blue car had a wash and as the day was still warm out of the wind, I took brush and bucket and got rid of the road muck from the last few weeks. I even gave Scamp’s wee red car a scrub too.

Fired up the computer and got the shots processed. At first I thought I’d captured images of a Cream Spot Ladybird, but then after a bit more investigation it turned out it was. Striped Ladybird (Myzia oblongoguttata). It was more a maroon colour than brown and it’s fairly clear to see that they are indeed stripes and not spots. Something new learned today.

Scamp didn’t need any dinner, but I baked the second Fougasse so she could try it while I had the leftover stew from yesterday. Unfortunately, on her second bite she cracked another part of her damaged tooth. Tomorrow she’s going to bend the truth a bit and get the dentist to fix it. Something he should have done months ago. If he won’t do it, I think we might go private again. It’s the way the country is going these days.

I was quite please with my ladybird photos and it was one of them that made PoD.

Tomorrow after we hopefully resolve the dental problem we may go out for a walk.

Down the Green – 14 February 2022

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Someone brought a dog into the house next door and it was practising its barking this morning.

So, after breakfast, I drove up to Tesco to post a parcel and get away from the racket. Actually, Tesco at about 9am is quite doable. No big queues and not a lot of people. The biggest groups were men musing about which oversized bunch of red roses to buy for someone they fancied, or had forgotten to send a Valentine card to. The same men were to be seen later striding across the car park looking sheepish and pretending they weren’t carrying a bouquet.

Back home (and without a bouquet) it seemed a shame to waste a good day and Scamp had previous said she fancied a walk down Glasgow Green, so that’s where we went. It seems a bit strange that Glasgow Council provide tour buses that visit the People’s Palace but the building remains closed. Apparently due to ”essential building maintenance works to the building interior” according to Glasgow Life who own the building. If there is work being done to the building, you’d expect there to be builders’ vans and lorries outside, and the sound of essential building maintenance being done, but there is total silence. Strange that. We walked past what used to be a fine building and on down to the McLennan Arch then back past the old Boathouse which is being renovated to make a community hub and here there IS work being done with plenty of folk working on site. The work here is under the umbrella of Glasgow Building Preservation Trust and not anything to do with Glasgow Life, thankfully.

We walked further up river and crossed the Clyde to Richmond Park. Half the park has been sold to developers who are presumably building houses on the site. The park itself has been left to rack and ruin, literally. The boating pond is still there, but it’s been a long time since much boating has been done on it. It gets really depressing when you see the damage Glasgow Council had done to the green places in the city. They have closed so many buildings and failed to maintain others. They should be ashamed.

Yesterday’s prompt was Chantilly Lace. I listened to that song for as long as I could stand and this was my abiding memory, the telephone he kept answering. Why didn’t he just put her on hold like any sensible person would?
I should have posted it yesterday, but the day just seemed to disappear. I blame the whisky or it might have been the gin or the wine!

Love is Like a Butterfly was today’s prompt.  Another delightful melody, thanks for that Dolly. I chose to attempt a painting of a real butterfly (without satin wings). It a fair representation of a Small Copper.

Palomino Blackwing soft pencil
Cass Art watercolours
Seawhite A5 Concertina sketchbook

#EDiF #28DL

Walked back to the car and drove home. I was pretty sure I had enough photos for a PoD and it turned out I was right, but I went for a walk later in the afternoon and took some more. You can never have enough photos. While I was out, Scamp was working in the garden getting things sorted out for a new gardening year. She had to give up eventually because she just couldn’t see properly to get the work done. I think I may be her eyes tomorrow.

Nothing else planned for tomorrow, but we better make the best of it, because Wednesday and Thursday don’t look like great weather days.

A short post on a wet day – 12 February 2022

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There wasn’t much to say about today. Certainly not much good anyway. It rained almost all day.

We were just getting ready to go out for a walk to the shops when the rain came thumping down. It showed no signs of stopping, but as we needed bread, I volunteered to go for it. By the time I’d walked the half mile to the shops and back I was soaked. Not soaked to the skin, thanks to my Bergy jacket and its Goretex lining, but sodden enough to know I wasn’t going out there again today unless there was a real need.

I had a Kilmarnock Pie for my lunch and Scamp had a chicken pie. I don’t know if the folk in Kilmarnock actually eat these pies, but it they do, I pity them. Gristly beef in an almost solid gravy in a mutton pie base with a flaky pastry top. The flaky pastry was good, the rest I should have flung in the bin. Scamp’s chicken pie was much better, apparently.

Late in the afternoon the sky did clear and by the time I got over to St Mo’s, the rain had stopped and the sun was shining. Saw some signs of new growth in the woods with what looked like a sycamore seedling sprouting through the leaf litter. Tried breathing some life into it in Lightroom, but it didn’t quite make the cut. I’ll try again tomorrow if the light is behaving itself again. Tried for a photo of a coot in the pond, but then the swan family arrived and scared it away, but they provided today’s PoD.

Today’s prompt was Born To Run, much more in my comfort zone. Always one to shy away from attempting to draw a famous face, I decided a back view would be safer. Even so there were hurdles to be hurdled, rivers to cross and bridges to be burned. Did I get the shape and colour of the guitar right? Was his hair too frilly? Artist’s decision is final and my decision is, it’s near enough for me.

That was about it for today. Hoping for better weather earlier tomorrow so we can get out for a walk.