Category: Close-up

December’s here! – 1 December 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Got a lot to do in the morning, and dancing in the afternoon.

While I was bringing in the bins in the rain this morning, I saw a few little leaves on the path and got some photos of them and they would have been PoD until I saw the Ammi majus, like a delicate cow parsley, in the back garden with its flower heads holding a vast amount of rain drops. That became PoD.

It wasn’t our best set of dances, more like a refresher for us and a chance for some exercise! Heavens, we couldn’t even remember how to do the “Baby Waltz” which is a short and fairly easy waltz. Sometimes we practise and practise the more difficult new dances and forget to refresh the older ones. I’d say we’ll practice some more for Saturday’s class, but that’s unlikely we’ve been busy tonight but more of that later.

Today was a Christmas Tea Dance. Christmas themed dress was encouraged. Scamp had her Christmas Tree dress and I had my jolly reindeer tee shirt. We did manage to struggle through the new Cameron Quickstep, but that was mainly my problem. Sequence dances are easier for me, firstly because they are short and secondly because they are repetitive and muscle memory makes it easier to remember. Longer dances like the quickstep and foxtrot are interesting and challenging and I enjoy them one I’ve worked out the pattern of the individual steps. I think “could do better” would be the comment on my dance card for today.

Back home Scamp suggested a fish supper each would be a good idea, because Crawford and Nancy are coming for dinner Tomorrow and we knew we’d be doing prep tonight. I’m in charge of soup and bread. Scamp is in charge of the main course and pudding. She wanted the main course started tonight and I wanted to get the soup made too. So, we took turns working around each other doing our prep and lessening the load for tomorrow. So far, the soup is made and the main has been cooked. The fish ’n’ chips were brilliant. Just thought you’d like to know!

Tomorrow the prep and cooking continues. I’m hoping to get the bread started in the morning and then Scamp can continue with her prep. So, very little time for photos, but hopefully I’ll find something.

Beautiful morning, dull afternoon – 16 November 2022

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We woke to sunshine today. Sunshine and an outside temperature of just over 3ºc, so quite cool.

The sun didn’t tempt me out to take photos, although I wish now it had. We sat around soaking up the sun shining in the window and laughing as our wee Chinese lucky cat waved its hand in the air when the sun hit its the solar cell that powers it. When the sun went behind one of the slats of the blinds, the waving stopped until it cleared the blind again.

Scamp gathered together the ironing and powered up her magic steam iron. I started the long process of turning my new SSD into the heart of the iMac. It’s a fairly easy procedure if you follow the instructions to the letter. Most of the time is taken with downloading and installing the new Big Sur operating system, but as it’s an almost automatic operation, there’s nothing much for me to do.

After lunch when the ironing had been done and the shirts and jeans put away I started phase two which is to transfer, or ‘migrate’ the apps and data from a working installation into the new bigger SSD. Again, once the data is sourced and checked, the new SSD gets to work and does the transfer itself. Some tidying up afterwards and it’s all good. It seems to be working fine (always a dangerous thing to say) because I’m typing this blog post on the new system.

By this time it was early afternoon and the sunshine of the morning had been replaced by cloud. However, I guessed there would be enough light to get some photos in St Mo’s. I walked through a different area of the woods this time and found a straggly bramble bush with bright green, orange and red leaves … and a bramble flower. A very hopeful flower. I’m not sure there will be many insects flying around to pollinate it. Still, it shone out on a dull day.

That was PoD. There wasn’t much more to photograph because the good sunlight never came back. But on the way back I heard the Whump, Whump of a couple of geese flying in to St Mo’s pond.  Then the whumps disappeared to be replaced with honks as they glided in to land on the pond.  The honks got quicker in succession as they got closer to the water.  Almost as if they were counting down to the landing.  I only managed one shot with the wrong lens on, but I saw the whole thing.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to go dancing and the weather doesn’t look very good at all.

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.

Just a lazy Sunday – 18 September 2022

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Didn’t even manage to get my Eight Active Hours or my 10,000 steps.

A lazy morning, completing our Wordle puzzles (I got 3 today, Scamp got a little more). Then we struggled to make the greatest number of words from the seven letters you’re allowed in Spelling Bee. Scamp beat me. These little puzzles have become a daily challenge and a matter of some competition.

I went for a walk in the afternoon after lunch. The sun didn’t come out to see me, though. It kept attempting to break through the clouds and I could see sunbeams over to the west, but they never came near us. It didn’t stop me taking photos. PoD went to a little yellow spider dangling on its web.

While I was out, Scamp was splitting up plants and repotting them, taking cuttings of others and pruning. She is so good at propagation. I’d guess that most, if not all of those cuttings ‘take’ by next year. Before I went out, I got the smelly job of turning over the compost in the bin. It’s now a lot less smelly, but I was for a while.

Dinner tonight was Just Soup then Trout Fillets with cabbage and potatoes. Apple and Rhubarb Crumble (our rhubarb and our apples) to end a Sunday dinner.

Spoke to Jamie later and got a fair bit of information about phones. Yes, the phone may be on the back burner, but it’s still there. Thanks for that Jamie. I did have a look on the Samsung website tonight.

There are no plans for tomorrow as yet.

Autumnal – 16 September 2022

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This is the first day this year I’ve really felt the autumn chill in the air.

Scamp was going out to her FitSteps class this morning and I cleared up yesterday’s dinner dishes. After that I put on my hoodie and with the A7 and the macro lens in my bag I went for a midday walk in St Mo’s. The weather was beautiful to look at, bright sun and blue skies with a few clouds scudding past. The temperature was a bit low though, not very deep into the double figures. It had been in single figures when I was making the breakfast.

The sun must have been warming up the boardwalk round the pond, because the air was full of little red dragonflies that I think were male Common Darters with a couple of Small Black darters too. One of the common darters made PoD. I’d hoped to get some photos of bees feeding on the blue Scabious flowers, but there were none to be seen today. Perhaps they all had the day off.

By the time I got back, Scamp had returned from her class. We discussed going out for lunch, but finally agreed we couldn’t be bothered and settled for a home lunch.

After lunch, Scamp planted two gigantic bulbs of Crown Imperial which is a , one at the front of the house and one at the back. She also planted some small Globe Alliums. Finally, because the sun was warm as long as you stayed where it was shining, we pruned the apple tree to reduce the amount of fruit the poor thing has to carry. We both agree that it will probably need staking in the spring to give it some extra support.

Dinner was provided by Golden Bowl and I volunteered to walk over to Condorrat to collect it. It was getting quite chilly when I was coming back. I think we’ll be looking at single figures again tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow we’ve an early shift at the dance class. Stewart wants class to start at 10am rather than our usual 11am. That will mean getting up at about 8.30am. On a Saturday!

Coffee with Isobel and a question answered – 30 August 2022

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We were out this morning for coffee with Isobel at Costa, so almost coffee.

As usual Isobel was an entertainment. Full of stories of a visit to see the wreck of the Sugar Boat on an afternoon cruise from Greenock. The ship, the MV Captayannis was loaded with raw east African sugar for the Tate & Lyle refinery in Greenock. It was deliberately run aground to prevent it sinking after a collision with another ship during a storm in the Clyde in 1974. Apparently the remains of the ship can still be seen from the esplanade at Helensburgh, but Isobel’s trip started across the Clyde estuary in Greenock. I must admit, this is the first I’ve heard of the Sugar Boat and its story. We must go and have a look for it the next time we’re in Helensburgh. It’s actually visible on Google Maps about halfway between Helensburgh and Greenock.

Scamp was showing Isobel some of our holiday photos and then chanced upon a picture on her phone of a mystery flower that’s growing well in our garden. She showed it to Isobel who immediately recognised it as a Japanese Anemone, and to be honest, it does look like a very large anemone. We’ve been puzzling over that flower for well over a month now, but now Isobel has solved the problem.

We came home via the village to drop Isobel off at her house and then via Tesco to get some messages. Dinner tonight was to be Paella and we needed chicken thighs for that. Of course we bough a lot more besides the chicken. Back home and after lunch I struggled with today’s Wordle and was getting nowhere with it, so I did what I usually do and put it aside and went for a walk in St Mo’s. Not a lot of activity today, but I did get an animated looking group of dandelion seeds. They look as if they’re dancing in the breeze, but actually they’re caught in a spider web. I took a few insect photos too, but nothing spectacular, so the dandelion seeds got PoD.

Paella was ok, but the chicken thighs were a bit cheugh (chewy). Maybe my cooking or maybe not Tesco’s finest. Whatever, it filled a wee space.

We watched a fairly interesting program on the history of University Challenge which is 60 years old this year. I didn’t realise it had been going for such a long time. It was only fairly interesting because there was really far too much padding in it. A 30 minute program made to fit a 60 minute time slot.

I’ve talked Alex into going to the Kelpies tomorrow, rather than Glasgow again. If time permits, we might even get a half hour in Culross.

Look what I got on holiday – 13 August 2022

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This is what happens when you sit in a metal tube with a couple of hundred others breathing recycled air for three hours. At least it happened on the way home, not a week earlier. Lucky 13th!

At least now Scamp and I are twins. She’s a couple of days ahead of me in the Covid race. Sore throat, runny nose and that awful annoying cough. I usually feel a bit deflated after we come back from holiday, but this just puts the tin lid on things.

The highlight of the day was a grocery delivery from Tesco.  Scamp had managed to grab a slot yesterday and with me now under house arrest too, at least we’d have something for dinner.  It wasn’t a big order, but it broke up the day.

Hopefully we’ll begin to feel better soon.

Back to life – 12 August 2022

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Back to reality. Back to the here and now.

This was the day for unpacking and for bundling clothes into the washing machine and then hanging them out to dry. Admittedly, I wasn’t doing much of that. Scamp did most of it.

After lunch I went for a walk in St Mo’s to get some ‘ordinary’ photos. PoD was a close-up of a Yellow Rattle plant. It’s a parasite, feeding on the nutrients in the roots of any nearby grasses. And yes, it really does rattle when you brush past it! It’s the dried seeds in the desiccated pods that make the noise. I also got a shot of a grasshopper hiding deep in the grass, but no Hummingbird Hawk Moths I’m afraid. Too cold for them up here in the frozen north.

It wasn’t really that cold, in fact it was pleasantly warm sitting in the garden. Thunder and lightning predicted for the next few days. We really should make the most of this warm weather before it all comes to a crashing end.

We’re not going anywhere any time soon.

An afternoon with the beasties – 1 August 2022

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The beasties in question were dragonflies and damselflies.

It was a lovely morning and we’d nowhere in particular to go. Scamp went off to get some messages at Tesco and to see what mess the roadworks at the roundabout were creating. Apparently it was a bit of a mess, but that’s not a surprise. I imagine it was even worse by 5pm when the factory traffic heads that way. There has been warning notices out for a week or so and we’d worked out alternative routes to take the avoid the congestion. Scamp had taken one of them and bypassed most of the stramash.

After lunch I had a look round my indoor garden of basil plants and chilli plants. The basil was drying out and took a fair amount of water to pump up its leaves again. One of the good surprises of the day was the old chilli plant from last year had made the effort and produced a fruit. I wasn’t sure the seed had set properly, but there it was a little 25mm fruit. The new chilli plant I got in Skye, of all places, is just covered in flowers and is fruiting away quite happily. I tried one of the branches of basil and the taste was really delightful. It had that spicy basil taste, but with a bit of aniseed to it too. Must be a different strain from the one downstairs. Scamp’s tomato plant is covered with fruit too. We had the first tomato yesterday and there are more ripening in the sunshine.

Later in the afternoon I went for a walk in St Mo’s and captured my first dragonfly of the year. It seemed quite content sitting on the boardwalk sunning itself. Not very skittish, either, sitting perfectly still for a few photos. A couple of blue damselflies crowded in to get their photos taken too. Then I found a big fly clinging to the shadow area of the upstand at the side of the boardwalk. It was a really big monster of a thing, about 30mm long head to tail. It too allowed me to take quite a few shots before I got fed up. Lastly there was a grasshopper, but I couldn’t quite get into a position to capture it. Pity, because they look almost alien. The dragonfly got PoD.

We had an hour in the garden when I got back. Just sitting listening to music on our headphones. It was a relaxing end to the afternoon.

Just before dinner, Scamp decided she’d better take the washing in as the clouds were gathering. I brought in the chairs too. Ten minutes later it was raining and it continued for a couple of hours. Not teeming rain, just gentle soaking rain. The best kind for the garden.

I had meant to go in to Glasgow today, but the notion left me. We may go tomorrow.

 

 

Wee men – 28 July 2022

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They don’t come out as often as they used to, but they enjoy being in the limelight.

Before we got to that, there was a new lens to test. And before that there was messages to go for. We needed some messages and we drove up to Tesco. Just some veg really, but it got us out the house on a dull day. On the way home we stopped for a stir fry kit from M&S. Chicken strips, veg mix, noodles and a carton of chicken stock to make a Ramen just as good as Wagamama and a whole lot cheaper.

Back home there was more pruning to do and also I potted up a Ammi Majus I’ve been growing from seed. Scamp bought me the seeds when we were down at Jamie and Simonne’s in the spring and the plants have been very slow growing. I sowed a row of them in the raised bed and another row in the ground. The ones in the ground have never developed. Most of the ones in the raised bed had disappeared too, but three plants remain and I was potting up the largest one. They look a bit like bushy carrots, but should grow into a plant resembling the Cow Parsley that I love to photograph. I’m hoping the slow growth is because the plant is biennial and will survive the winter to flower next year.

<Technospeak>
After lunch I took two cameras out with two different lenses for the big test. It wasn’t a great day for a test because it was dull and uninspiring. I did get a few photos taken with the new ultra wide zoom lens. It’s actually designed to be used with a smaller camera like the A6000, but it copes quite well with the much bigger sensor of the A7iii. At its shortest setting, 10mm there is a lot of empty space on the photo. It’s a bit like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. At 13mm the empty space is gone and the distorted image is very sharp indeed. It can go as far as 18mm and is then almost in the realm of wide angle. Ultra wide is much more interesting to me. It passed today’s test with flying colours. It’s a keeper.
</Technospeak>

An even bigger surprise was that the A6000 coped with the 105mm macro lens and produced some good images. Worth trying again, if for no other reason than it weighs a lot less than the A7iii.

After dinner I started building the set for “Kiss”, Flicker Friday’s competition. No prizes, just an exercise in covering the prompt. My solution to the prompt made PoD. A “Troopies” wedding! Just a bit of fun.

The dinner, by the way, turned out fine, except … the veg mix had green beans in it and I’m sure two of my readers know that Scamp will not eat them. I was going to pick them out of the dry veg, but Scamp said I should just keep them in and she’d spit them out! That’s what she did, but delicately leaving them at the side of her plate, rather than inelegantly spitting them out. Other than that and the fact that the chicken stock was a bit spicy, it was a good meal.

I have a morning to myself tomorrow as Scamp is out all morning! What will I get up to, unsupervised?