Category: Food

Out walking in the morning – 11 December 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp decided we should walk the canal this morning.

We drove to Auchinstarry hoping to walk along the railway path since it should nearly be finished by now, but when we got to the plantation path the men in the yellow suits were still wandering around behind the wire fences. I assume they are almost finished, but it’s hard to tell. Anyway, we weren’t getting to go that way today, that was for sure.

Instead, we crossed at the plantation and walked up onto the canal footpath at the other end. From there we walked on heading for Twechar. Found today’s PoD on a dull day. It was a Grey Heron standing on the far side of the canal. Far too far away for the Sony to get a decent image, so it was down to the TZ90 to get the job done. At about the same point I got a dull landscape shot of the Campsie Fells, but once it had been processed in ON1 2020 and then Lightroom, it looked a lot better and it got second place. We stopped and turned not long after that because the canal runs straight and boring after that. The bends are the most interesting areas of this stretch.

We watched a Cormorant fishing as we walked on. We were both amazed at the length of time it managed to stay under water and how far it could swim in that time. It kept its distance from us and as soon as we got too close it would fly off. The rest of the walk was uneventful. After the walk we drove to Lidl for one or two things and came home with two bags full. Lots of meat, fish and chicken mainly. Now we need to find a home for it all in the freezer tomorrow.

Dinner was Chicken Stir Fry form Lidl with me cooking. It wasn’t too bad. A bit spicy, but also tasty. Cooked it with noodles for a change from rice.

Watched the first episode of The Queen’s Gambit. It was ok. I liked the chess play part and well remember Ian McKay, a prodigy when I started at CHS playing ’Simos’. A simultaneous set of games, just like on the film. He also won every one. He could also play Simos blindfolded. I wonder what became of him.

Nic the Chick gave us some bad news this morning. Yes, all the shops were open again. Yes, the restaurants would be open from tomorrow. However it’s against the law for anyone to travel outside their local authority area. How nasty is that. She’s changed her name to The Littlest Witch!

Tomorrow looks even more wet than today. It did rain a bit when we were walking the canal, but tomorrow looks like more serious rain. We’ll have to wait and see just how wet it’s going to be as we joyfully tramp round our local authority area. At least until Monday 😉.

When the cactus is in bloom – 10 December 2020

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When there’s nothing else to photograph, you have to resort to flowers.

Today was another dull day. Not surprising, just disappointing. We had to wait in because I was getting coffee delivered from The Bean Shop in Perth and I didn’t want it to be left in the bin shed. It’s far too important for that, besides, I had lots of stuff to do. Computer stuff.

I was going to try to access that bloody Linux based hard drive – Now don’t switch off JIC. There is going to be the barest minimum Technospeak here. I won’t go into the details of what I was going to do, just that I was going to get the MacBook Pro to speak Linux for a while. To do that I had to clear away a bit of its memory so I could fit in some Linux language there. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all do that. Just clear away a bit of our brain and put in, say, a French module and then we’d be able to speak and understand English and French. I think it’s a great idea. Maybe I should suggest it to Boris Johnson. Then he’d be able to understand what the French are really saying about him. That might make him sit back on his heels for a while instead of just bumbling on.
I didn’t actually get the task completed, although I’m in a better place to ‘Get Linux Done’ tomorrow, to quote the aforementioned Bumbler.

We went for a walk after the coffee arrived, just down to the shops for the essentials for dinner which strangely enough contained a bottle of wine! I wonder how that happened. On the way back we split up. Scamp went home and I went to walk round St Mo’s. I took a few desultory shots of cow parsley, but didn’t notice that I was shooting wide open – never a good thing. I stole ‘desultory’ from a Paul Simon song “A Simple Desultory Philippic”. Back home I decided on the Christmas Cactus as a subject. It usually manages to keep its flowers until Christmas Day. I wonder how it knows. Maybe it’s a Christian Cactus.

After dinner, Bacon and Borlotti beans thanks to the Stotfold duo’s recipe, I set up a still life in the painting room. I’d bought a little hand held LED light at the shops and it proved very useful for creating directional shadows on the white background of the still life. I actually intended to put it in my camera bag to use for when the light was poor like most of this week. It might just work in to open air too. I’ll probably get plenty of chance to test it in the next few days. I liked the finished photos and one became PoD.

Tomorrow it looks like more rain is on the way, but the good news is the non-essential shops are going to be open. Restaurants have to wait until Saturday, though. Scamp is not pleased. We’ve agreed that we won’t be going crazy in the shops at the weekend but we’ll go and have a look next week, all being well. Until then we’ll stay in, stay safe and ‘Get Linux Done.’

By the way, John Fahey has a guitar piece called “When The Catfish Is In Bloom”. I paraphrased it for the title of today’s blog.

Freedom looms large – 8 December 2020

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Nic the Chick has spoken.

We watched the news and heard that all of Scotland will now be on level 3 or lower. It must have been the worst kept secret of the year. However, it was good to hear that it was true. We return to level 3 after Friday. It’s a pity that she didn’t do the decent thing for the hospitality sector and drop us to level 2 as a wee early Christmas prezzy. That would have allowed folk to have a glass of wine with their meal. I hope the big fat man with the red coat and the reindeer puts ashes in her stocking on the 25th and that’s not Alex Salmond I’m talking about either!

It wasn’t until the mid afternoon that the rain stopped and the sun started to poke through the clouds. We got our cold weather gear on and went out for a walk. We attempted to walk down the path to the shops, but Cooncil workies were cutting down the bushes and eventually getting round to paring back the undergrowth. No warning signs, that a tractor was pruning the trees. Bloke toting the hedge trimmer didn’t have protective equipment and was just wildly swinging at the snowberry stems. I got pinged on the face with a wee bit of flying debris. No point in complaining, they were just cooncil workies who were pretending to be gardeners today.

Further down the path another mob were just packing up. At least they had the sense to put warning triangles out. Must be “clean up the bushes for Christmas”. Either that or the queen’s coming to visit us. Can’t be, there was no smell of fresh paint.

Anyway, but the time we were walking down the side of the football stadium the sun was sinking into the west and we just managed a walk along the boardwalk in the light. That’s where today’s PoD came from. This one is almost unprocessed. Straight out of the camera.

It was starting to get cold when we got back and almost time to do the prep for dinner. For me it was mince and beef olives. Both from Muirhead butcher. With Scamp’s careful tutelage I managed to get it cooked to perfection. Scamp had ‘pretend mince’ which is made with brown lentils. I don’t know about the lentil mince, but mine was fine, considering I made it.

Weather looks a bit better tomorrow with the chance of sunshine in the early afternoon

A dull day with one bright shining light – 4 December 2020

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It was raining in the morning and it’s raining now, at 23:57. It hasn’t stopped raining all day.

Today was a day for finding things to do inside. Scamp made a start with putting up our four Christmas cards and some of the decorations. I followed suit by clearing the dining table and together we covered it with the Snowman™ table cover. I bought it many years ago and worried that I’d paid too much. It’s paid for itself many times over since then. It always brings a smile to our faces, even in such trying times.

With that done and after lunch I intended to take a walk to the shops, but after I opened the door I changed my mind. These are the days we bought the car for. Days when you don’t want to come home dripping with rain. Not exactly soaked to the skin because the Goretex in the Bergy works so well, but not feeling totally comfortable either. Waltzed into M&S and stocked up on oranges, grapefruit, chicken and a curry each for tonight’s dinner. Went to the till and that’s where the magic happened.

After I’d scanned all the messages, I scanned my M&S card and got a message to the effect that today as a special surprise, my purchases were all free! I checked with the till assistant and she confirmed that tonight’s dinner was on M&S. Scamp has had one of the M&S cards for months, probably over a year and has never got much more than a bag of Percy Pig sweets. I won over £25 worth of groceries and I’ve only had the cards about a month! Almost walked back because I was still in shock at my good luck, then I remembered I’d brought the car and drove home.

Today’s PoD is a Christmas Rose growing in the garden. I risked the rain to get its photo. According to Scamp’s records it’s a Helleborus niger “Christmas Carol”. It was very pretty sitting there in the rain brightening up that corner of the garden.

I did attempt a picture of the letter M subject, but I wasn’t impressed with it and a bottle of beer followed by a glass of Hortus Gin from Lidl put paid to any and all attempts to improve it. Hopefully tomorrow will be more fruitful.

We have no plans for tomorrow other than a Zoom dance at night for which we practised tonight. We even attempted a medium paced salsa track and had to sit down to allow the room to stop spinning afterwards.

Happy Birthday Hazy – 2 December 2020

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After sending the usual birthday greeting to Hazy, I forced myself to get up and face the day.

We did a Skype with Hazy. It’s so hard to decide which of the many video conferencing apps to use now. Each one has its own advantages an disadvantages. We settled for Skype because the Birthday Girl thought it would be best. It was great, considering Mickysoft has its claws in it. Having said that I did notice a £ sign next to my sign in name. Is that a sign of things to come? Got to see her opening her presents and then caught up with all things round about Epsom and we had a few laughs too. Then it was time to go.

I rejoined battle with my NAS drive and Scamp went shopping for bird food and things. I got nowhere with the NAS. It just could be that the drive has been damaged by that one kick in the head too many. Since I’d accessed it last week using a Linux distro last week, I’d assumed everything was intact. Now I’m thinking that the data may be intact, but the OS is damaged, hence the problems I’m having trying to contact it with its own software.

I made a pizza to get my mind off the problem NAS. It was looking good, then I dropped it when I was cutting it. Half fell on the floor and I promptly decided that was my half. Just as bread always falls butter side down, so the half pizza fell topping side down. It’s all to do with neutral axis and centre of gravity. When you look at it that way it’s perfectly logical … but still annoying. It actually tasted ok and the pizza base was perfect. Scamp’s half was even better I’m told.

Struggled for a short while with the NAS software before I gave up and went for a walk with my camera in St Mo’s. I’d left it too late, far too late and by time I found some interesting stuff, like a couple of hibernating ladybirds, there was really insufficient light to get a decent shot. Then the rain started and I made the decision that a warm house was better than a cold, wet forest and I went home. All the time I’d been planning what to do with the NAS disk and by the time I came home I had a plan. The PoD went to a piece of Reindeer Moss although there were no reindeer to be seen and it was a bit of lichen, not moss.

I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say that the plan worked. Copied a few files from the dodgy NAS drive to a newly formatted little hard disk using Linux as the copying OS. Now I can go to bed knowing that I can retrieve most, if not all, of the data on the drive. Thank you Colin for the suggestion and thank you Val for your help. Thank you lot for reading this exciting story of lost data and bad drives. Don’t worry about your WD My Cloud, Colin. It will be fine just as long as you don’t kick it in the head too many times.

A quick dance practise tonight before Scamp made Fish ’n’ Chips. Ages since we’ve had that.

I couldn’t settle on a subject for today’s sketch which would start with the letter ‘L’..  Light? Landscape? Lamp?  All were attempted and rejected.  Eventually I asked Scamp if she would like a drink as today was ‘Hump Day’, middle day of the week.  It’s all downhill from here, or so they say.  She was having G ‘n’ T and I was going to have beer, then I thought I might have lager, and the subject just appeared like magic.  It’s not a magic drawing, of that I’m sure, but it’s done and posted, so that’s a success of a kind.

Tomorrow looks like a Scottish winter. Thankfully we’re not rushing out anywhere too early, at least I hope we’re not!

Fog – 26 November 2020

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Woke to fog. We’d been warned about it by the weather fairies, but you can never believe anything they say.

It took a fair time to clear and the house was cold, because the heating hadn’t come on, because I’d turned it off last night when I was trying in vain to program the lights to do something they didn’t want to do and forgotten to put them back on schedule. Quickly fixed once I discovered what had happened.

When I was making the breakfast, I plugged in the skeleton NAS drive and powered up the computer. Later when I’d showered and was ready to meet the monster I tried to access the NAS. At the second attempt I got connected, but when I tried to download a small PDF file the access stopped and the icon for the drive disappeared from the screen. The most success I’ve had with it has been from Windows 10 on Scamp’s computer. Apparently, NAS drives in general don’t like what Apple OS in any of its many flavours. No taste, you see! I’ve given up. Even with Scamp’s reliable laptop the downloads don’t actually complete. I think it’s time to “take the burst ba’ away from the dug”.

We kept waiting for the fog to lift but it took its own sweet time. Scamp made some soup, leek and potato and I thought it was lovely but she was more critical. She didn’t want to go for a walk, because she had tidying up to do. I didn’t ask what was being tidied, sometimes it’s better not to know.

Instead, I grabbed my old Clarks boots which, although they have little or no tread, at least keep my feet dry, and I went for a walk in St Mo’s hoping for some sunshine since the fog had lifted and the sky was clearing. It wasn’t to be. However, I did get a PoD which was the water drops left by the fog on some spiderwebs. It’s ok and the quality is good, but the lens just isn’t up to close-ups. We are supposed to get more fog tomorrow morning, so I may take the old macro lens and try again.

I redrew yesterday’s sketch of eggs an egg shells and laid on some better washes. I’m happier with this version. I also drew today’s sketch which is the wee fairy that sits on the shelf in the living room. At Christmas it gets to sit beside the Christmas tree. I think it enjoys the change of view, but prefers its higher viewpoint on the bookcase.

Tonight Scamp and I had a practise of The Christmas Pudding Rock which is a dance Stewart and Jane have invented for the virtual Christmas ball. It’s left me with two left feet Usually the man leads with his left foot, but in this dance he leads with his right! Most confusing, but I’ve almost got it. Another few practise sessions and I’ll be there or there about … I hope!

One last thing.  Today Hazy sent a photo of a postcard that had just dropped through her letterbox, sent by us from Fuerteventura A YEAR AGO!  Delivered by camelpost perhaps?

No plans made for tomorrow. It looks like it will be cold. If it’s cold and clear that will be fine, a walk might be on the cards. It it’s not we may practise that Christmas Pudding Rock again.

Will the rain never end? – 24 November 2020

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Just another day of seemingly unremitting rain and wind.

I’m beginning to see a pattern forming from these incessant lows being driven across the Atlantic to dump their rain on us. They seem to come in three day bursts. Sometimes we almost have a dry morning. Sometimes almost a dry afternoon, but the ‘almost’ is always there. Then there are a couple of cold, dry, sunny days or sometimes only one of those before the next train of wets lands. Personally I blame Trump.

I’d downloaded a potential saviour for the old NAS hard disk, but unfortunately it didn’t live up to the hype, which was unusual because I’ve bought the same sort of software from this company before and it’s been faultless. Not today. I’m not going to rant on about this, so don’t skip ahead. All I’m going to say is I’ve found a workaround. Not an elegant one, but it does work and I’m now on the lookout for a replacement NAS.

Scamp went to Tesco today and got soaked just walking from house to car to shop and then the same coming back. You don’t have to be out in this wind driven rain for long to get soaked. After lunch I reckoned I’d get a half hour of light before darkness fell and I was just about right. I took a total of 9 photos and one of them, with Scamp’s cropping suggestion made PoD.

Today’s sketch was generated by the letter ‘D’ and it was Driver, as in Screwdriver. It could have been Dugs, Diamonds or Donald (selfie), but for some reason I chose screwDriver. I think it looks a bit bent, this screwdriver, but who has never used a screwdriver to open a paint can or two? Some say today’s choice is a con or a cop-out, but “C” was yesterday.

Dinner tonight was mince ‘n’ tatties for me and cabbage ‘n’ tatties for Scamp.  Not the most elegant food, but filling and very tasty.  I still had to have a great deal of assistance from Scamp to cook the mince, but my head was still trying to get round the problems of Linux and Unix.  If that means nothing to you, then you are lucky.

Tomorrow may be the first of two dry(ish) days. We must wait and see about that.

A beautiful day – 19 November 2020

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If only we could decide what to do with it.

Neither of us could decide where to go on what would be our last free day before Lockdown 2 happened. Finally Scamp said “Take me to the Kelpies” so that’s what I did. We drove to Grangemouth on a cold, day with a temperature in single digits, low single digits.

The giant horse statues looked as magnificent as ever and even better because there were no people standing around them taking selfies or pouting at their phones. We walked round them, admired them and told them just how impressive they were. They already knew, but accepted our praise in dignified silence.

We found a new path that took us round the outskirts of the sewage treatment works that was producing the awful smell. I don’t know if it was the direction the wind was blowing that was causing it, or maybe they only switch on the machinery at night in the summer to cause less offence to visitors, but it was certainly working at full blast today. The path took us along the side of the River Carron. It wasn’t the most interesting walk and we gave up after a while to walk back and go along the canal this time. It was on this path that I got PoD. Looking down the canal towards the Ochil Hills with the sun lighting up the Kelpies. It was good to be in the right place at the right time for once. We were going to have a quick coffee at the information centre, but there were a few folk waiting to get in and it was too cold to hang around. We drove home and had some “Just Soup” instead.

In the afternoon we walked down to the shops for last minute essentials for dinner (veg chilli with one of our own chillies) on the way back, Scamp offered to go straight back which allowed me half an hour to grab some more shots in St Mo’s. The Samyang was carefully supervised and although it did miss focus a couple of times, most of the shots were on target. It didn’t affect the PoD, that remained with the Kelpies.

Tonight we cleared out the boiler cupboard and now there’s garden stuff all over the house. Boiler arrives tomorrow between 7am and 9am. Engineer arrives about 9am and it’s going to be pouring by the look of the weather fairies’ report. It might be a long day.

Because of the above, we have no plans for tomorrow.

Rain, rain, rain then sun – 18 November 2020

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It was one of those days when you just know it’s going to start raining and never stop.

Actually, the rain had started yesterday and continued unabated through the night. I felt it had rather overstayed its welcome when it was still with us this morning. We had planned to drive to The Fort today, but one look out the window convinced us that wouldn’t be happening. If we were desperate for something from that curve of shops, I might have made the effort, but as neither of us were all that bothered, we decided we’d maybe go another day. Scamp had a hair appointment in the afternoon and I was making soup for tonight’s dinner, so that would keep us busy.

Lunchtime came and went with the highlight being Scamp’s apple pie. Not our own apples, those are well gone, but a very tasty wholemeal pastry encasing some lovely Bramley apples. I’m worried that I’m beginning to sound a bit like Nigella here! It was a lovely pie, though. Just as Scamp was leaving for the hairdressers, the sky did seem to lighten a bit. A few minutes later, shadows were appearing outside and we didn’t need the room lights on. It was definitely brightening up.

Not one to pass on an invitation like that, I had my boots on and the bag on my shoulder before it would all fall apart. It didn’t fall apart, the sky was clearing nicely when I walked up the path that leads to St Mo’s. There was a torrent of water coming down that path and it was that torrent that became today’s PoD. One in the bag. There was a wild sky with a low sun when I walked round the pond, wild enough to be the subject of a photo, not just the background and I did take quite a few. Still not altogether happy with the focusing of the 18mm Samyang lens. I may still resort to sending it back to Amazon because they have foolishly extended the returns window to January 2021. Never look a gift horse … etc.

By the time I got home, so was Scamp, sporting her new hairstyle which she said was almost exactly what she’d asked for, but she didn’t like it. I didn’t want to say that the difference between a bad haircut and a good one is only about two weeks. I like it, it frames her face really well. Maybe tomorrow I’ll photograph her, just to prove to her that it works.

Dinner was indeed my version of Scamp’s “Just Soup”, served with crispy croutons, our new favourite. The pudding was another slice of Scamp’s apple pie with cream. Finishing touch was two little meringues each with more cream!

It’s raining again tonight, but the temperature is forecast to drop tomorrow with an overnight low of about 2ºc and remain dry all day then more rain on Friday. No plans for tomorrow, but if there’s anything we need in ‘non-essential shops’ we’d better get it or have to wait for three weeks.

Oh yes, one more thing.  I was just heading for bed last night when I heard a buzzing, but a doppler buzzing, you know what I mean a rise and fall in the pitch of the buzz.  An insect or something flying past me.  It was a big wasp, I don’t think it was a hornet, but it was a big wasp.  I didn’t want to kill it, but I didn’t want to wake up with a bit lump on my nose from a wasp sting either.  I managed to backhand it and trapped in on the carpet under a glass tumbler, eased a bit of cardboard under it and it was trapped.  I opened the bathroom window and helped it to fly away.  It wasn’t too happy about flying off and clung to the cardboard for a while, but I managed to convince it that going would be less painful than staying.  It’s now out there somewhere thinking “It’s a bit chilly for June!”

We were up early again – 17 November 2020

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That’s Friday sorted

Not to go out this time, but we both got up early because we had a phone call booked with British Gas to agree a suitable day to get the new boiler installed. The call would be some time between 9.30am and 1pm today, hence our decision to get up and face the day. Of course, we could have just lain in bed and taken the call there, but just in case those clever British Gas bods had a way of turning on the webcam that might be fitted to our landline phone and caught us lounging around, we decided it would be safer to get up and have breakfast downstairs.

The call came at just after 11am. The first available slot they could offer was Friday 20th November. Couldn’t they have come sooner? We didn’t ask that question, we just said “That will do nicely.” Boiler get delivered between 7 and 9am on the day and the fitter arrives at 9am. It will probably take most of the day. Now Thursday is to be a very cold day with wind from the north and scattered wintry showers that might just reach us. Let’s hope Friday is a balmy sun drenched day.

The other thing that happens on Friday is we go up to Level 4 of the Scottish government anti-covid restrictions. It starts at 6pm on Friday and lasts for three weeks. It shouldn’t make much difference to us, really. We probably won’t feel like travelling far if the cold weather continues. We’ll be legally restricted to the NL council area for that time. Legally, because the restrictions have now been written into law and can be enforced by the police. They’ll be installing smart cameras and have unmarked police cars on the motorway at Castlecary to trap any unwary travellers hoping to nip along to Falkirk on the fly. Three weeks of no fun and local walks I think.

It rained almost all day and with gusty winds too, it was a day for working inside. Before lunch I repaired two of my masks and produced a really neat job, even if I say so myself. If the rainy weather continues, I may make another one or two. Maybe even try a new design I saw somewhere.

It was a truly awful day today. After the good news about the boiler I grabbed a rucksack and walked down to the shops in the rain. Scamp was baking so she stayed in. The rucksack was a great idea for going to the shops. We go there to get stuff for the dinner and to stretch our legs, not our arms, and today’s lot was quite heavy. I may use that wee bag again.

I’d already taken what I was sure would be my PoD. It was two of my carrots. The birds pulled most of the first lot out then the snails finished almost all or the rest off. I eventually resorted to the blue slug pellets and that seemed to put an end to their raids. The two you see were all that was left to two rows of them in my raised bed. I’ve got a few growing in the ‘Tattie Bags’, but they’re not making much headway there at all. I think these two are my lot for this year. If I get a chance to grow them next year I’ll stretch some black thread across the bed like my mum did. It terrifies the sparrows and finches. The tiny wee carrots tasted lovely.

Hopefully we’re going to The Fort tomorrow I’m hoping to rebuild the camera box that sits in my black shoulder bag and am intending to use either Plastazote (Thick, strong foam plastic) or Foamboard (A sandwich of card outer layers and a middle layer of Styrofoam). Both of these thing I should be able to get in Hobbycraft at The Fort. Scamp’s going for something too, but as yet it is undisclosed.

Scamp’s booked to get her hair cut tomorrow afternoon, so we have to drive to the shops in the morning. Another early rise in store.