Category: Cycling

British Summer Time – 26 March 2017

Posted on by Zogman

None of your Daylight Saving Time.  This is British Summer Time.  Two sunny days in a row means it’s Summer and we are in Britain, at least until Nick the Chick gets her Second Referendum, then her Third, then her Fourth until the people give her the result she craves, because it his her job to protect Scotland! Cue the fanfare and  the cheering crowds.  But I digress.  We don’t save daylight here.  Sometimes I wish we could.  I wish we could bottle it up and bring it out on cold December days when the starlings are making their tuneless twittering noises in the skeleton trees and it’s dull, grey and just miserable.  If we had a bottle of Daylight, we could open it up and everything would be lovely.  Unfortunately, it’s not like that, so we make the most of two days of sunshine back to back, like we did today.

Scamp wanted to do a bit of gardening with the scary gardening gloves Hazy sent.  I wanted to get the bike out and go cycling just because I could.  I even put a pair of shorts on!  I didn’t go far, just a few miles, because this is only the second time I’ve been out this year on Dewdrop.  Got a photo of a zombie frog and a blue vent cover the birds have been crapping on and a strip of silver birch bark the sun was shining through, turning the silver to gold.  Best of all, I got a bit lost coming home and came upon the branch of cherry blossom.  Imagine, I’ve been living in the place for around thirty years and I still manage to get lost!

Came home and watched a really boring F1 GP.  Really, the cars look like they did back in the 1950s with big triangular fins and wide tyres. Also, what’s with the multitude of spoilers and wings?  They look like boy-racer specials.  Despite all the changes and supposed improvements, the excitement just wasn’t there.

Dinner was a beautiful piece of haddock with sautéed potatoes.  Quite delicious.

Tomorrow may be warm and a bit sunny, but low pressure is ensuring that the weather is on a downward path again.  I knew it couldn’t last.

Geese – 15 January 2017

Posted on by Zogman

Half past one in the afternoon and I’m standing in the middle of an old coup that was previously a spoil tip for a coal mine. Now it’s just wilderness and I’m watching and listening to skein after skein of geese flying overhead heading north. What do they know that we don’t?

That was written much earlier in the day.  I’d cycled to the tip and by the time I was heading for home, an hour and a half later, the skeins were flying west, south and occasionally north, but not east.  By that time the light was failing and I imagine that these birds had been flying since first light some eight hours earlier and are now looking for somewhere to roost for the night.  There are quite a few fields around Cumbersheugh where geese feed and then roost.  That would explain the apparently contradictory flight paths.  It was great listening to the skeins as they ‘talked’ to each other.  Some will say that’s not true, that they don’t communicate, but if you listen, it does sound like they are sharing information with each other.

While I was walking around the tip, I got a few shots of folk on top of the Kirkie Volcano.  It’s really a pit bing (spoil heap), but from this angle it looks just like a volcano.  One day I’m going to walk up it and take some photos from the top.  East Dunbarton Council should really make it into a visitor attraction with a wee coffee shop at the top.  It would make a fortune.  I may suggest it to them.

It was a lovely day today with a few showers of rain, but the temperature was decent, very decent for the time of year with highs of just over 10ºc.  Not quite shorts and tee shirts weather, but not far off it.  I did wander around in my shorts for a while, but it was too cool to cycle in them.  I saw the moss fruiting bodies (Green Blobs) when I was putting my cycling ‘longs’ (the opposite of shorts) back on and was quite impressed with the colour the camera caught.

Tomorrow is back to Gems in the afternoon, so I need somewhere to go.  Not sure where yet.  😉

Another dismal day – 6 September 2016

Posted on by Zogman

6 SeptI spent the morning working out exactly why and how I wanted to put a contact box on this, my blog. I think the answer is in my description. The key phrase is “this, my blog”. It’s My blog. It’s a documentary of my life now, in this new phase of my life, meant for me, my family and my friends. However, it is in the public domain and I realise that others may want to read it and I’m very happy to let them do it. With that said, here is my solution. The blog is a daily publication, one post every day. If you want to read it, feel free, especially if you know me, but nobody wants an email every day to remind them that I’ve added another ‘slice of my life’.  I did try with Hazy’s help to create a weekly update on posts for the previous week, but that became too complicated and unnecessary as far as I was concerned. If you want to keep up to date, I suggest that for the present, you save “www.https://dhcampbell.co.uk/blog/” in your favourites so you don’t miss a single episode of this unfolding story.  What I suppose it boils down to is that I won’t be adding a ‘contact box’ to the website any time soon. However, I reserve the right to change my mind any time I feel like it.  Thanks for the suggestions and help with the contact box, Hazy.  It may make an appearance some time in the future and I’ll need more help then.  You know me, always changing things. To all the (all because there are more than two of you now!) rest of you, I hope you continue to enjoy the read, and the photos of course.

So what of the day then? It started off a bit dank, damp and miserable in the morning, but with the prospect of better things to come in the afternoon. Unfortunately, that prospect never materialised because the dank and damp became dull and drizzle in the afternoon. Undeterred, I went out on my bike to pick some brambles, the wonderful free, hedgerow fruit that some misguided people mistakenly call ‘blackberries’. Managed to gather just over half a kilo (which sounds better than 500gms to my ears) before the drizzle strengthened to full tilt rain. Strangely, this happened at much the same time as yesterday’s deluge. After that I gave up and cycled home. I stopped near the wet corn field and grabbed a shot of tractor tracks that I knew I could convert to a gritty black & white in Lightroom. Now, here’s a tip for all you budding typists. When you are keying in a word like ‘white’, don’t let your left ring finger slip down a row on the keyboard from the ‘W’ to the ‘S’ key. Just a little heads-up there. The other photo in today’s meagre mosaic is of a couple of flies on bramble leaves. I just liked it.

Tomorrow the weather WILL be better, just repeat three times:
“The weather WILL be better”
“The weather WILL be better”
“The weather WILL be better”

Who knows, it might work.

A Run in the Rain – 5 September 2016

Posted on by Zogman

Today I was going out on my bike.  In the rain.  I lost a good pair of cheap glasses last week.  Like I say they were cheap, but they were perfect for wearing when I am working at the computer and they were bright green, very designery.  There were only one or two places they could be and today I was going to find them.  The fact that it was the restart day for Gems, had nothing to do with it, nothing at all.  Anyway, it was just a wee bit damp, not really raining.

Checked out the first place on my list, but they weren’t there, nor were they at the second which was just across the road.  The corn I had photographed was still there uncut.  Poor farmer must have been waiting for another couple of days of sun to dry it out perfectly and he got this drizzle instead.  Who would be a farmer?

Third place drew a blank as did the fourth.  Either they are deep in the undergrowth or some lucky bugger has picked up a lovely pair of designer(y) green glasses.  I’ve tried Tiger, now rebadged as Flying Tiger, reminiscent of Braddock and the Flying Tigers.  Brilliant book. Well, it is when you’re a twelve year old schoolboy.  I digress. I’ve tried Tiger and they still have something like the green designery glasses, but not them.  Oh well, nothing lasts forever.

By the time the search had been called off, the drizzle had turned to full force rain and I was getting soaked.  It didn’t matter too much because it was quite a mild day, so the rain was warm.  Headed home to a quieter house than I’d left, made the dinner, went to salsa and came home from that bathed in sweat and with a smile on my face.  Salsa does make you happy.

5 sept
Today’s mosaic is very spider orientated.  If anyone out there is an arachnophobe, then I apologise to you.  Just put your hand over the picture and avoid clicking on it, because that action will release the spiders hiding behind the picture.

Better weather forecast for tomorrow.

The last day of summer? – 30 August 2016

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30 AugIt looks from the weather forecast that it will rain later tonight, so this may be the last day of summer. Who can tell?

Day two of the new early rising regime and resolve is flagging already, but at least I didn’t stay in bed all morning. Scamp, on the other hand, was showing how it should be done and was up and working before I’d switched the shower on.

Went out in the afternoon, equipped with a tripod to get some more photos of the mini toadstools I’d seen on Friday, but when I got there, the toadstools were gone. There were some slug trails, but not enough to explain the complete decimation of the toadstool forest. I knew they had a short life-span, but I didn’t think it was that short. Disappointed, I looked for other photo opportunities, but none were to be found. It seemed too good a day to waste by going home early, so I went for a walk over the grassland of the dump, but there were no deer, not even a rabbit. The closest I got to a decent photo was on the way home when I took the shot of the corn field with the nice wee sinusoidal path. When I got home I found that I’d dropped my designer green glasses somewhere on the road or the paths. Must go back and find them soon.

Made some Tiger Bread today. Attempt 1 is not too successful. The actual bread is fine, but the Tiger part is too thick. More testing required.

Finally got photo galleries to work on my newly themed blog. This time they are totally within WordPress and not using the Galleria widget, thingy. It was proving just too clumsy and untrustworthy. To be honest, the basic ‘Classic’ theme worked fine except for the black background, but the paid-for ‘Twelve’ theme wouldn’t cooperate at all, so I used a much simpler WordPress plugin that did the trick for now. May revisit them later.

Beer with the Old Guys tomorrow. Usually a good laugh.

Fungi, Physio and That Friday Feeling – 26 August 2016

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26 AugWhen I was making breakfast this morning I saw a coal tit having its breakfast of peanuts in the garden.  Grabbed the Oly and got a dozen shots.  Two of them were fairly sharp and showed a bit of detail in the bird.

Physio later in the morning and it looks like there is quite an improvement in my shoulder, but I’ve to keep doing the exercises and continue being a pincushion.  I was amazed when the physio (David Brogan) showed me his cycling shoes, made from carbon fibre with dial-in adjusters to tighten them.  I didn’t dare ask him how much they cost.  It looks, JIC, as if his whole bike is carbon fibre.  It’s a Wilier.  A Beautiful machine, designed for racing and that’s what he does with it, I think.

After lunch I took the bike out.  Poor wee thing had been languishing in the hall for so long, its computer had gone to sleep.  Anyway, despite a fairly strong west wind, I headed out for a bit of exercise.  Nothing too strenuous.  Half an hour of cycling and then an hour or two searching out some interesting things to photograph.  The Three Amigos were an easy candidate, but getting a decent viewpoint was a bit more demanding.  I finally settled on leaning on the fence by the railway to get a usable shot without the intrusion of the overhead lines for the electrification of the line to Embra.  Big push to get all the gantries and cables in place and then for some reason it’s going to take another seven or eight months before they will be used.  That’s British efficiency for you.  In my wanderings I found hundreds, perhaps thousands of tiny little toadstools on a rotting tree stump.  I got a few shots of them, because fungi in general grow, seed and die in a very short time span.  Better to get the shots when I can and hopefully get some more later when I’ve got the proper equipment (tripod) with me.

We had dinner booked at Cotton House for 6pm, so I took the shots I could get and headed home hoping for a tailwind and with thoughts of Chow Mein in my head.  I got both.  See, even when you’re retired, you can still have That Friday Feeling!

Colin’s flower show tomorrow.

An Afternoon with the Beastie Boys (and Girls) – 4 August 2016

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4 augNow that was a much better day, wasn’t it. The answer here was a resounding Yes! Spent the afternoon finishing off my latest read, Cloud Atlas. Not the best book I’ve ever read. Five or six disparate stories that were tenuously linked. I’d previously read The Bone Clocks and enjoyed it tremendously, but apart from the cloned server, I didn’t like any of the subjects. Maybe I wasn’t concentrating enough, but I just couldn’t see the point of the whole thing. I’d made the mistake of buying the book – physical book, from a bookshop – without even flicking through it. It was a fairly substantial paperback, but when I opened it, my heart sank. Such a small font. It made it really difficult to read, even with my best reading glasses on. That and the silly phonetic spelling made we want to give up before I’d begun. However, Kindle to the rescue, I downloaded an e-book version and at least I was able to change the font size, if not the irritating attempt at an 18th century dialogue. It’s finished. I gave it only one star on Amazon and will do the same in Goodreads. I’m glad I didn’t read it before Bone Clocks because I would have missed out on an interesting and thought provoking novel. Sorry Hazy.

Today! Scamp was out in the morning having coffee with family. After finishing CA, I set to, to hoover, or to be more exact, Dyson the downstairs. That done and Facebook checked out, I attempted today’s Hard sudoku. It was certainly hard. Just after 10pm tonight I finished it using more than a few ‘hints’ from Enjoy Sudoku on my phone.  Anyway, it too is done. As you can imagine, I called a halt to the number crunching earlier, in time for lunch. Afterwards, the weather was still holding up so I went out on my bike, looking for beasties. Hoped to find some dragonflies in far flung places, but none were to be found. Instead, I found a couple of hover flies, a hungry damselfly, a crane fly AKA Jenny Longlegs and a Burnet Moth. I’ve not seen any Burnet Moths for the last couple of years and it was a pleasure to find a couple of photogenic ones today. It was a pleasant day for cycling. Not much wind, warm without being hot and with just a few rain showers to cool a lazy cyclist down without getting too wet.

Tomorrow will be a busy day, so I’m glad I got some relaxation time today.

Broken Back – 29 July 2016

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When you’ve got a really small garden like ours, that retains the water when the rains come and ends up turning into a swamp, the majority of your plants have to live in pots.  After we got the fence built, all the plant pots were dumped into the centre of our swampy postage stamp.  Today was the day to put a bit of order into the chaos.  Scamp had decided that since we had moved the compost bin (another back breaker), we should rethink the area immediately in front of the fence.  She decided that we would lay down some weed suppressing fabric and then put some white pebbles on top.  The plant pots would then sit on the pebbles and they would provide drainage.

We drove to Tesco, because they were doing a 3 for 2 deal on pebbles.  Well, they would have if they had any pebbles.  Ok, next stop Dobbies which were also doing the same deal.  Yes, they did have pebbles in a variety of sizes from really small things that were really chips up to big bold boulders and almost every bag was slit open with the contents strewn around.  We’ve been thinking that Dobbies quality has fallen away sharply recently, and this is the proof of the pudding.  Next stop, B&Q.  They weren’t doing any deals, but they did have lots of different bags of different sized and different coloured pebbles.  Scamp decided that the white pebbles were out and large golden chips were in.  We bought three bags, hoping it would be enough.  Getting them into the car wasn’t a problem, but I wasn’t looking forward to getting them out again.  Scamp wondered if we should have bought a cheap barrow to wheel them into the garden.  In retrospect, we should have.  Truly, retrospect is the only 20-20 vision.  We finished off the front of the border with some big boulders we’d dug out at various times from the garden, and it looks good.  Three bags of chips were almost enough.  Perhaps we need just one more bag, to finish it off perfectly, but it looks beautiful as it is, and anyway, I need time to allow my poor back to get better.
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To put some suppleness back into my angry muscles, I went out for a bike run in the late afternoon.  I wanted to photograph a local farm that I’ve wanted to paint for a while.  I ended up photographing three different farms and small holdings and may manage to get paintings of them done soon.
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Feeling sore tonight, but the effort was worth it.

 

A day less wet – 28 July 2016

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E7281082- flickr--210-1We went for a drive today to Oakwood garden centre for lunch, a light lunch and a great cafetieres of coffee. The garden centre is pretty good too and Scamp can never resist some pretty plants. We ended up with some Big Daisies, a berberis and something unpronounceable with lovely big red flowers. We also had a great lunch. Honest, this isn’t an advert, other garden centres are available, but they just aren’t as good as this one.

When we got home, I finally got the bike out and cycled for a few miles … in the rain. Rain isn’t so bad, even when you’re cycling. My uncle Wullie Hutchens was a great hill walker and I remember him telling me that the best way to dress in Scotland in the summer was to wear as little as possible, because when you got wet, it didn’t take long to dry again. Partly due to the Scottish weather’s ability to produce four seasons in an hour, never mind a day. Remember, that only applies in the Scottish summer, NOT the winter. Two seasons in a day in winter: Wet winter and Cold winter. Anyway, I dressed for the climate. The outside thermometer read 19ºc, so it was boots on the feet, cycling top and cycling shorts. To those in southern climes this might seem a bit risky. Anything below 25ºc requires at least a jacket and longs, not shorts. Just in case, I added a nylon rain jacket. Dressed.

Crossed the dam at Broadwood and spotted a great crested grebe, and got a few shots of it as it went fishing for its supper in the shallows. Didn’t see much else all the way out and back. It did rain, so it was a good idea to pack the rain jacket, if only to stop myself getting wet. The rain only got me wet, not cold. Maybe that’s because I’m Scottish and Scottish rain is wet, but warm for both the months of summer, June and July. Don’t let them kid you, August is Autumn.

Hoping for more sun tomorrow.

Down Glasgow Green – 5 June 2016

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5 JuneIt was such a beautiful day, we just drove down Glasgow Green and wandered through to the McLellan arch and back along the river on the park side this time, not the Gorbals side like we did a few weeks ago. That was a bit strange. It seemed to be Ladies Day on the river with only a very few men out rowing.  We’re sitting in the People’s Palace now. Near the door to get the benefit of the cooling breeze. We usually avoid these seats because of the cold draught. Not today.

After that gentle exercise, we drove home and while Scamp did a bit of sun worshipping, I went out on the bike and cycled down to Auchinstarry (because I reckoned I wouldn’t get parked – I would have) and from there along the canal which is where I was and photographed Mrs Mallard and her seven wee ducklings out for a paddle.  I simply couldn’t pass up that opportunity now, could I?  From there it was all uphill.  Up the first tough climb from the canal to Twechar itself, then the long slog up to the Drumgrew bridge.  I stopped off there for some water.  This was the first stop from the canal at Twechar and I’m quite proud of it.  Had a wee rest in the garden after my run.  My legs are sore tonight, but I enjoyed it.  May go in to Glasgow tomorrow to get a UV filter for the new lens.  Saves me using and losing the tiny wee lens cap.  Best make good use of the sun as it looks like drizzle on Tuesday.  Oh dear!