Category: Flowers

It was a dull day again – 24 January 2023

Posted on by Zogman

Worse than that, it was a dull day with rain. Never a good combination.

Scamp’s cough wasn’t abating and by the time I’d showered and shaved, she was just ending a call to the doc’s and had been given an appointment with the nurse for mid afternoon.

It hadn’t looked as if we would be going anywhere anyway, and as the cough had been there since Friday, it was time to let a professional have a look at it. I was planning on making a pot of soup in the new magic pot. This was to be Minestrone, but a different recipe from our usual one. Some unusual ingredients like courgette in the recipe would be interesting.

We drove up to the surgery. I dropped Scamp there and then went to Tesco to get the extra ingredients for the soup. I also managed to get a bottle of Benylin, Red Benylin no less. This is the most sought after medicine of the moment and here was a bottle sitting on a shelf, the last one again. Yesterday’s bottle of Benylin had been the wrong one, but it too had been the last one on the shelf. Drove back to the surgery and was just parking when Scamp appeared from the chemist and we drove home. She was told to take 8 steroid pills a day for five days and was also give a five day course of antibiotics. Shake her and she’ll rattle! but they seem to work because she’s not coughing quite as much.

I chopped the veg and made the soup and it tasted really too thick and quite bitter. A generous pinch of sugar helped with the bitter taste and after decanting a bowl full of concentrated tomato soup and replacing it with a bowl full of hot water, then giving it another 3min pressure cook, we had a decent minestrone. Still not as good as the original, but the courgette worked well in the mixture of veg. My only mistake was channeling my Simon & Garfunkel when I bought my herbs. I bought Sage and it should have been Thyme. Parsley would have been good too, but Rosemary would have been overpowering. You can have too much of a good thing!!

We watched an episode of Silent Witness, but the shock factor is being overplayed now and it’s becoming difficult to see where the past ends and the present begins. We both agreed after the first episode that it’s time to put it to bed, so the entire series was deleted. Thankfully you can do that with just one button now on Virgin.

I’d decided when we came back from the doc’s that I wasn’t going out in the drizzly rain to take photos I wasn’t really interested in. That’s why today’s PoD is cut flowers. Usually a photo of flowers is a last resort for me, but today’s were planned and I knew Scamp was just waiting for an opportunity to throw some of the wilting flowers out and the wilting ones are my favourites. I could have used more interesting lighting, but I was happy with my Yellow Lilies. They became PoD.

Tomorrow is to be a better day than today. We might just manage a short walk if Scamp is up to it. We’ll wait and see.

 

Dancin’ … badly – 12 January 2023

Posted on by Zogman

Today was the first Tea Dance of the year.

It was raining when we woke, which wasn’t surprising because it had been raining all night after a beautifully clear day yesterday. When I was opening the curtains this morning I was drawn to the distortion caused by raindrops running down the window. I thought the two geranium plants made a good foreground and trusting my new phone, I took some shots as ‘bankers’, just in case I didn’t get a chance to get some with my ‘real’ camera. That was a good move, as it turned out, because the rain just kept coming all day.

By midday we were almost ready to drive to Glenburn, south of Paisley for the tea dance. A much smaller group than normal today which was a double edged sword. More room to practise the moves we had sort of forgotten, but on the other hand, nowhere to hide when we made mistakes, and we did make mistakes, both of us. I was the worst though, I’ll admit it. Even dancing the two simple waltzes we know I still managed to make a load of mistakes. Sequence dances I could handle, but it’s the repetition that cements the steps and of course the ‘sequence’ of those steps. The other plus for sequence dances is that they are danced in a circle, so most of the time there’s someone in front of you to watch and learn from. Waltz, Foxtrot and Quickstep are a different kettle of fish. You’re out on a limb with them. If you do find yourself making mistakes or if you lose the sequence of the steps, your partner is going to give you THAT STARE! I know, I’ve been there. Having said all that, we had a great time. Almost two hours of dancing that passed in a flash. We sat with Barry and Cath and the conversation was good.

Drove home through more lashing rain and went the ‘long way’ down the M74 and the M73 and continued on to Tesco to post a birthday card to one of Scamp’s pals and get some Thursday stuff. You know what I mean. Thursday is still ‘Prize day’.

Dinner was a fall back, Fish Fingers, Egg and Spaghetti (it has to be tinned spaghetti). The fish fingers went between two pieces of butter bread and became a Fish Finger Sandwich. Delicious.

Remember those photos I took in the morning? One of them became PoD. I’d shot them in RAW format. Very few phone cameras will record in RAW which is an uncompressed, unprocessed, literally raw image file. Usually it takes up a lot more space in the phone’s memory, but the excellent quality makes up for that. I dumped them into Lightroom and after half an hour of tweaking it looked presentable, so that’s what you see here.

Tomorrow is a busy day. Scamp’s intending to go out to FitSteps class in the morning and I’m hoping to start by making the dough for the night’s bread. John & Marion are coming to dinner. First time they’ve been here for ages. Looking forward to it.

What!! No Coffee!!! – 8 January 2023

Posted on by Zogman

The orange warning light was flashing on the coffee maker this morning, indicating that its innards needed cleaning and I had no cleaning solution. Oh my! What would I do without coffee?

Well, the answer, of course was to look on Amazon. Ah the relief, they had the descaled, but it wouldn’t be delivered until TUESDAY!!! That would be three days before I’d get my 11am fix. What other options were there. Thankfully JL came to the rescue. John Lewis had them in stock and actually cheaper than Amazon too, so I could get them today. We just dropped everything, jumped in the car and drove to Glasgow where I picked up the life saving liquid. Scamp was looking for tops to go with skirts, but I had the important stuff paid for and in my bag. We’d nothing else to go for today, so we just drove home.

After lunch I started the long winded cleaning routine. It takes a good half hour to descale the boiler of the De Longhi 685 and then another fifteen minutes to wash it out. Life is tough when you’re a home barista.

While I was engaged in this delicate operation, Scamp was out pruning the roses and tidying up the plants in the back garden. She came in to tell me she’d found a Snowdrop, the first one of the winter, and a sign that spring wasn’t too far off. The flower was growing in a rose pot, surrounded by vicious looking thorns, so I was extra careful getting its photo, but I did get it, more than once. We compared the photos I’d taken and Scamp chose her favourite. She’s becoming really good at spotting the good shots and sidelining the poorer ones. I think she chose the best one to be PoD and I started work on it.

She was almost finished when I thought I’d broaden my photographic horizons and went over to St Mo’s to see if I could capture some of the reflections of the setting sun from the boardwalk. I managed a good dozen shots of various formats and angles and then quite suddenly, the light was gone. It was like the sunsets you get in much warmer places, when the sun sets and fifteen minutes later it’s almost dark. It’s not something you find very often in more temperate zones. It didn’t matter all that much, because I was on my way home by then.

Dinner was Chicken Milanese (battered flat and dipped in breadcrumbs before being pan fried) with a baked potato each. Beautiful. It was followed by coffee from the sparkling clean and descaled coffee maker. I’d say the coffee was better than normal, but it was probably something to do with the extra glug of Kahlua that went into each cup.

Spoke to Jamie later and heard that he’s got ‘Mallet Finger’. I was telling him that my pal, Fred has ‘Hammer Thumb’ which sounds similar and that I get a less painful version of that. Then the strangest thing happened, my thumb (always my left thumb) went into spasm and folded across my palm and refused to come back out. How strange is that.

Tomorrow Scamp is out in the morning for coffee with one of her, recently retired, work colleagues. I’m tidying up the living room table of all the calendar junk that’s been living on it for the past month. If it’s dry I may go and take some photos in St Mo’s.

No’ Dancin’ – 3 December 2022

Posted on by Zogman

We were supposed to go to the dance class this morning, but I’d had an upset night with pains in my stomach, probably from eating too much too late yesterday. Also yesterday evening Crawford and I had been sampling some whisky, so I decided it would be safer not to drive this morning, just in case..

We had a fairly lazy morning and I ended up patching together the Lightroom catalog. That patching up actually lasted for most of the afternoon too. Sixty one images to find, edit and turn into the ones in the Flickr and Blog posts. It all takes time, but now it’s done. Tonight, before I go to bed I’m going to back-up the catalog!

Scamp ventured out in the afternoon to walk to the shops for some messages, but I wasn’t past the door today. Still not feeling quite right. Not ill or anything, just not feeling great.

As well as patching up the Lightroom cat, I also wrote yesterday’s blog because there simply wasn’t time to do it yesterday. I hate having to write catch-up blog posts, but like the editing of the photos, it all takes time and now it too is done.

Didn’t go out, didn’t go dancing, just stayed in the house and moped all day. Well, actually I did go out. I went out to the front garden and photographed one of Scamp’s roses, “Simply the Best”. It’s well named. This is its second flowering this year and it looked great with the raindrops on the petals.

So I did go out, but only just! Tomorrow will be better. Hopefully we’ll both go out together for a walk.

Happy Birthday Hazy – 2 December 2022

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Happy Birthday Hazy. Hope your day was less frantic than ours.

Today was always going to be a busy day, but cramming too much into one day is never a good thing.

The day started well for me. I measured out the ingredients to make a loaf and got the mixer to do the hard work, then left it to do its first rise. Also, I was getting things organised in my head for repairing the damage I’d inflicted on my Lightrooom catalog yesterday. One simple bit of digital housework led to a scrambled catalog. The Lightroom catalog holds the records of everything you do to every photo. Every adjustment however small is recorded and can be played back and altered later … until you screw it up. After that, Lightroom is no longer your friend. I left it last night and by this morning I’d worked out how to fix it.

Scamp meantime had gone off early, 9.15am early, to get her hair cut. She arrived back about an hour later with a new cut that she didn’t like. She rarely likes the cut she gets, but it’s nothing to do with the hairdresser, it just her resisting change, I think. She came home for a fleeting visit, had a cup of coffee and was out again to go to FitSteps class wearing her new dance trainers that make spinning easier!

<Technospeak>
After Scamp left, I started work on the repair. It involved moving the damaged files to a temporary drive, erasing everything on the old drive then putting everything back again, in the right order. Simple. Except, somewhere along the line I forgot to move the catalog on to the temporary drive and when I formatted the original drive, my catalog was destroyed. Only after I had put everything in place did I discover that the catalog couldn’t be found. What a numpty. As usual, I had a backup on the system that gave me nine months worth of catalog data, but October and November were gone into the ether.
</Technospeak>

I wasn’t a happy bunny when Scamp came home, but things brightened up again when Hazy organised a Zoom call. We had about an hour’s worth of relaxed conversation and heard about the further complications of Neil’s op and what it feels like to have your own house. We were both pleased that she liked her birthday present.

Back to work, My bread needed to be ‘knocked back’ that means you knock all the air out of it and put it into a wicker basket to let it do its second rise before it goes into the oven. Going in to the oven at that moment was Scamp’s Chicken and Mushroom Pithivier. A posh name for a Chicken and Mushroom Pie. I’d drawn a circle or exactly 35mm diameter and another of 30mm diameter on greaseproof paper using an old pair of compasses to act as a template for cutting the pastry. It looked good as it went in to the oven, nothing to do with my drawing, but everything to do with Scamp’s skill. When it came out, the bread was ready to go in for its 20min bake and it looked good when it came out, as did Scamp’s Pithivier.

A bit of a break before we cleared the dining table and dressed it up for tonight’s dinner with Crawford and Nancy. The menu was Sweet Potato and Peppers Soup, Chicken and Mushroom Pithivier with potatoes and broccoli followed by Dutch Apple Cake with Custard or Cream.

C&N arrived a bit later than expected, but we had a good night. Lots of catching up and lots of laughter. Maybe a bit too much to drink and certainly far too much to eat.

Just after midnight we waved them off on their journey home and settled down to calm down.

PoD was a Fuchsia in the back garden flowering long after it should have shut down for the winter.

Tomorrow (today) we’re intending to go to Brookfield for our Saturday dance class.

December’s here! – 1 December 2022

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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.

Another day, another surgery – 11 November 2022

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This time it was the doctor’s surgery for my annual check-up.

That wasn’t until the afternoon. It was a dull, depressing morning, but at least it wasn’t raining. Scamp went off to her FitSteps class and I started hacking into my SSD drives. Not literally, but I wanted to see if there was any advantage to using a new method of forcing Big Sur into a partition of one of the SSDs and that meant finding some space to put the truncated version of the operating system in. Following the instructions by the author, Andrew Tsai, to the letter (for once), after a couple of hours I had the OS in place but there was no appreciable improvement to the boot speed. At least I know that now and I hadn’t spent any money finding it out. That experiment took up most of the morning.

Soup for lunch and then it was time to steel myself for what might be bad news at the doc’s. I needn’t have worried. I’d lost four pounds (lb pounds not £) since last year, my cholesterol was down my glucose levels were also down and my BP was just where it should have been. I got a gold star from the sister for being a good boy. Feeling better, I went to get the makings of tonight’s dinner which was to be Baked Haddock and Cabbage Risotto, which at least a couple of my readers have had before.

Driving back home I realised that the light had gone. It was just after 3pm and I was driving with the auto headlights on! That’s Scotland. The wind was still gust and almost gale-force. The bins that were emptied yesterday were lying where they’d fallen last night. There was no point in lifting them, because they’re top heavy when empty and would just fall down again. Worst of all, there was no point in taking a camera out. It was just too dark. Today would be an indoor photo, and probably Flooers!

The risotto is one of the easiest ones to make, because the oven does most of the work. I’d bought some tomatoes in Tesco and I thought that as the oven was going to be on anyway, I’d use it to roast the tomatoes for making soup tomorrow. In these straitened times you have to do a bit of lateral thinking at times.

One of Scamp’s Pelargonium plants became the PoD. Not the best photo in the world, but it was better that than nothing at all.

We practised the Cameron Quickstep tonight and I discovered how to make a slow-mo video on my phone, because you really need to see the steps at half speed. Also it’s quite funny to listen to the teachers’ instructions at half speed. Cleverly the app can reduce the speed while keeping the pitch of music or speech at the normal level. It just sounds a bit slurred.

Tomorrow we are booked for our normal dance class at Brookfield. It hardly seems like a week since we were at Perth!

Dance Class – 29 October 2022

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Today being Saturday we were off to Brookfield for dance class.

Sometimes the class goes well, sometimes I have a few problems, but this class was an utter disaster for me today. I seemed to be able to do nothing right. We were dancing Foxtrot. Well, the rest of the class were dancing foxtrot, I was staggering around the floor for most of the time. I just couldn’t get one part of it right. The part is called the Continuous Hover Cross and it was indeed making me cross. I’d practised it in class last week and after following Stewart with the rest of the leaders, I could do it. When I tried dancing it with Scamp, it didn’t work. We also practised it last night and after a few mistakes, it fell into place. Today it just fell. I had to admit defeat after a while. Gave up and thankfully could manage the Tango we did after the (bloody) Foxtrot.

Driving home was a bit of a slog. Even using my shortcut through the Clyde Tunnel, we were still locked into a long queue of slow moving traffic. In retrospect, I think the problem was a weekend rail strike, meaning that those folk wanting to get to the football had to drive there. Whatever it was, it meant an extra half an hour added to our journey.

The clouds that we’d seen beginning to break as we left Brookfield were joining together the nearer we got to Cumbersheugh and they’d invited all their cloud pals along too. So much so that it felt like evening was coming by about 3pm.

I did manage to get one or two photos of a beautiful rose flowering for the second time this year in the garden. It’s called Simply The Best and it’s living up to its name. It became PoD.

The prompt for today was “Uh-Oh”. So my interpretation of that was a broken egg. There is a saying that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Sometimes I can’t make anything without an egg catastrophe!

I remember reading somewhere “You always get a second chance. It’s called Tomorrow.” We have no plans for Sunday.

Making the most of the morning – 23 October 2022

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This morning there was light cloud, but the weather report looked gloomy.

We decided that it would be best to go for a walk in the morning while it was still dry, if not bright. Boots on for both of us, because it was going to be wet underfoot, wherever we went.

It wasn’t a long walk. Just down to Broadwood Loch, over the dam past the exercise machines and back past the shops. Around 6000 steps all told. We didn’t hang around much and I only took two photos, that’s how dull it was. We did stop at the shops to get some veg for dinner and a very nice piece of rump steak for my dinner. Scamp was having salmon instead of meat. By the time we reached home it felt like there was rain in the wind and just after lunch it was definitely raining. I’m glad we decided to go out while it was still dry.

Just before it got too heavy I went out and took a few shots of the fuchsia plants that hang in a basket on the fence. There was just enough sunlight to pick out the raindrops on the flowers. That became PoD.

I spent a while fiddling with the settings on the SSD that was now taking the place of the internal hard disk drive of the iMac. I did one upgrade that brought the version number up from 11.68 to 11.7. That seemed to make a big difference to the stability of the drive. The speed difference from using the hard drive is immense. Lightroom takes between 3 and 4 minutes to boot from the hard drive. Today it took 14 seconds. That’s over a ten fold speed increase. There are lots of other areas where things are working a lot smoother too. Still not totally settled on the new technology, but it’s working well for now.

Today’s prompt was ‘Boogers’.
As another sketcher with the nickname “Mydoghasnno.se” says, different places have different words for the mucus that must be removed from our nostrils. In the US they may be Boogers, but in Scotland they are Bogles and the more liquid varieties are Snotters. The bloke I drew is obviously an expert Bogle hunter.

Spoke to Jamie and heard about the cost of repairing a roof in a listed building. It’s a lot more than I’d have thought, but Jamie seemed to accept it as a reasonable price and with winter coming, it has to be done. Glad to hear they are getting some much needed rain.

I’ve never been much of a political animal, but the events of last week with Liz Truss resigning after 45 days as PM and Boris attempting a comeback are the stuff of pantomime. Unfortunately, it’s real.

Tomorrow we may go and visit Margie … in hospital.

Back in the old routine – 22 October 2022

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We were off to Brookfield again after a three week layoff.

Dull foggy morning with the threat of rain, but we were off to dance class, and that lifted our spirits, even mine. According to the messages that were crossing and recrossing the ether last night it appeared that there would only be about four couples coming to the class. That’s a nice number, but it means there’s nowhere to hide!

The road was unusually busy this morning and the fog that had faded out as we reached Glasgow thickened again as we drove out of the city again. The land is fairly low lying there and we could see pockets of fog all around. Strange weather.

We were first into the hall and we saw the teachers final practise for what was to come in a week or two. There were four couples to start with, then another arrive and another. So it wasn’t as small a class after all. We started with what was a new sequence dance for me, but not for Scamp, the Blue Angel Rumba. It seemed it was new for quite a few folk and took a while for everyone to get to grips with it. Next was the Foxtrot which we knew quite well, at least the first half of it we knew quite well. The second half, the back end as the teachers called it, was cloaked in mystery for me. We did, however make a decent fist of the first half. That dance took up almost an hour of our allotted time. We finished off with a couple of relatively easy sequence dances. Then it was time to head home into the rain that had developed from the fog. As we got nearer Cumbersheugh the rain tailed off and, I’d like to say it was a lovely day after that, but it wasn’t. It was just dull and miserable. Dreich was how one of the ladies in the class described it, and if fitted perfectly.

PoD was a quick photo of a rose in the garden that’s just starting to produce its second flush of buds, Lady of Shalott. Taken in the rain, if you look closely you can see the streaks of the falling rain drops.

Prompt for today was ‘Heist’. It was getting late when I started it and it’s not as glamorous as an American heist with guns blazing and tyres screaming. This is a more sedate British heist.

No plans for tomorrow.