Category: Garden

Out to lunch for some, but not for all – 14 March 2024

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp was out to lunch with her pal today. I had stuff to do at home.

I drove Scamp up to the town centre and then came home via Tesco for my own lunch and to pick up some meds that had arrived in Boots while we were sunning ourselves in foreign climes. Then it was back to working out what we did, when and what new sights we’d seen since the last time we were in Fuerteventura. Actually not a lot had changed overall, but of course there were new developments as there always are when you haven’t visited a place for four or five years.

It has been a dull wet day with no real chance to grab much in the way of photos. What I did do was wrap the 24-105mm lens in clingfilm to keep it fairly dry while still being able to access the focusing controls as I took some photos of the changes that were happening in the plants in the garden. Because it was so dull, the ISO was quite high and that meant more digital noise than I had been used to in the last week, but with help from Lightroom and ON1 Photo Raw I think I’ve minimised it. POD turned out to be new buds on the old James Grieve apple tree. It really needs another stake to shoulder the increasing weight in its boughs. Something else to add to the ‘To-Do list.

Watched the unveiling of the winning painting from this year’s Landscape Artist of the Year and was impressed with the way the artist dealt with the landscape of Orkney, but didn’t think she rendered the clouds in a meaningful way. They looked too heavy and almost abstract. Also, for something that was intended to emphasise the importance of low carbon energy, the wind turbines looked like an afterthought.
It’s true that you can’t please all the people all of the time!

Scamp and I agree that this is the first day when we’ve felt ‘normal’. It’s strange that a relaxing holiday takes so much out of you!

Trying to get back to normal – 12 March 2024

Posted on by Zogman

It’s the little things you notice after you get home, like the fact that there’s nobody to take away your dirty dishes, and the lack of a table length of fresh fruit for you to pick your way through.

Today was about shopping and coming to terms with single digit temperatures.

We’ve all probably been on a foreign holiday and had to come back to reality. It’s not a pleasant prospect, so I won’t labour it. However, at least you get to sleep in your own bed again.

Today’s PoD was a couple of daffodils in the garden to welcome us home.

Tomorrow we start getting back to ‘normal’ if we can find it.

Dull and cold wind – 8 March 2024

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Sat for a while out of the sun, but gave up after a while and went into the big round building where yesterday’s Gala Event had been. It was warmer there.

Eventually when the skies cleared a bit and the sun shone, we walked to the ‘Island’. It’s actually a man-made island built on boulders and the last time we were there we had to queue for a table. Today was similar, but we managed to get an inside table out of the wind. I had a burger and Scamp had two of the fattest Sea Bass fillets we’d ever seen. We both had Mojitos.

By the time we were going back, the weather was improving and I went for a walk again in the wilderness. Got a photo of a group of wild goats and also what looks like a locust. I remember seeing locusts in Lanzarote a few years ago and these were very similar.

Came back to the hotel and watched the qualifying for tomorrow’s F1 GP. Didn’t find out who was on pole, because somebody pulled a plug somewhere and we were left with a black screen and muddled sound. No explanation. No apologies. That’s the way it is here.

Entertainment in the evening was two acrobats. The bloke seemed to have trained as a ballet dancer and the girl’s speciality appeared to be the splits. There was a fair bit of faffing about and posing. Entertaining for a while, but I was glad when it was finished.

PoD was a stunning Bird of Paradise flower in the hotel garden. Beautiful colours.

Tomorrow is Saturday and the days are slipping away.

 

A day to tidy things up – 3 March 2024

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We didn’t do very much today. Didn’t go out although it was dry but cold. Just a day when we had to get things done. Mainly it was packing and unpacking cases and bags and rucksacks. Checking the weight of each of them and rechecking them, knowing all the time that we were well within the limits.

It’s days like this that are the worst. You know you can’t actually go until tomorrow, and there is nothing you can do to make tomorrow come quicker. Time just doesn’t work that way.

Almost time to go to bed, not to sleep, because we know we won’t. Well, maybe we will, but that will be just before the alarm wakes us.

PoD was a photo of the Rhododendrons in the garden.

Tomorrow we fly south.

The wind and the rain and a parcel – 31 January 2024

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It had been a wild night again and Storm Something-unpronounceable (maybe Norwegian?) was still growling around the houses. It didn’t look like we were going anywhere today!

We weren’t. But that was good, because Hazy phoned to find out what was going on in the rest of the family. So we discussed the weather as you do in Scotland and also how Jamie’s house was progressing. She told me that a parcel would be arriving today or maybe tomorrow by Royal Mail. Then she went on to tell me that the previous parcel had had a wee accident and was now in a hundred pieces. After that, she and Scamp had a long discussion about singing in a choir, which they both had done in the past and I could sense that she wished she could have joined June and Scamp in their recent recital of the Verdi Requiem. I really felt sorry for Neil being put under pressure by his Head Teacher. I’ve been there and got the tee shirt, but didn’t like wearing it. Finally she sent me a GIF of a catbus! Google it. It’s hilarious. I must watch some Japanese cartoons some time!!!

Five minutes later, the postman knocked on the door and handed me a big box that had come from Kirkcaldy, ordered from London. Inside was a lovely plant pot that I hope my Split Rock, Nelly is going to go into as soon as I can get some compost – that’s part of tomorrow’s task. It’s a lovely blue and white painted terracotta pot and saucer. I’m sure Uncle Murdo would love it, Hazy! But he won’t get a chance because it’s mine.

Lunch was left over haggis mixed with left over potatoes, mashed together with some butter and served with a fried egg. Sort of like Bubble and Squeak, Scottish style. Very nice, Scamp. A great idea.

In the afternoon I phoned Val. It’s ages since we spoke. Probably not since last year. We discussed our health and what we were doing about it and the damage the latest storm is causing. He had just lost his garden table to one of those gusts when the glass top smashed to smithereens. Poor guy. I think he like us has had enough of Windy Willy’s carry on.

That was about it for a dull day. We did get an hour in the late afternoon when the wind dropped and the rain stopped and I wandered the garden searching for subjects. I finally settled on some rhododendron buds that are beginning to plump up. Developed in Lightroom, Photoshop 2023 and in On1 2024. It looked presentable after that.

Tomorrow we’re intending getting compost for Nelly and some bulbs for Scamp.

Out on the Ice – 9 January 2024

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Scamp was off in the morning to meet Shona and June for coffee and a blether. I stayed at home.

Well, I’d things to do and the first one was trying to locate Katy. I’ve photographed her before a few years ago before she changed her name to Katy. It took a bit of searching to locate her, but I finally found her back in 2017, skating on a frozen pond. That was my intention for today too. I though I could get a few shots of her skating on a slightly smaller pond, a frozen bird bath to be precise, but first I had to find her. Like most of my ‘weemen’. Which for the sake of political correctness can be pronounced ’wee men’ or the Glaswegian ’weemen’ which translates as ’women’ in English. I was sure she lived on the window ledge in the bedroom, but she was nowhere to the seen there. Some weemen live in various stages of disassembly in a big cereal box and a smaller subset of ‘favourites’ can be found in a smaller Lock & Lock box, but Katy was not in any of those places. After Scamp had left, I finally tracked her down to a turned square wooden dish I’d made many, many moons ago, when I had skills.

After dusting her down and ensuring she still had her skates with her I set up a tripod in the back garden next to the ‘skating rink’ cum bird bath. I just couldn’t get the shot I wanted despite using two cameras and umpteen lenses. I finally settle for a hand-held A7m3 camera with 50mm macro lens and got a few shots with of her standing on the ice, looking like the star she is.

It was a cold day, but the temperature must have been just above zero, because by the end of the photo session, pools or water were appearing on the ice. Poor wee soul looked frozen out there on the ice. Back inside in the warm, she got a place on the bookcase while I checked the quality of the photos and they passed muster.

By then Scamp had returned from the coffee and blether group and it was lunch time. Yesterday’s rolls warmed up to hold some slices of bacon for me and an egg for Scamp.

The next task I had set myself was to try to mail-merge a spreadsheet of photo info using Microsoft 365 on the Mac. I had cancelled my subscription a few days ago, but had a few days grace left on it. I tried everything I could think of to get MS Word to work with MS Excel, but they kept finding errors. Eventually I borrowed Scamp’s HP PC and using the same apps and the same data set, at the first attempt got exactly what I wanted. Just to be awkward, I tried to do the same thing on my old slow Toshiba PC laptop and after a lot of huffing and puffing (from the laptop, this time!), it too came up with the goods. I went online to find a solution to the problem. I didn’t find it, but I did find a lot of people with exactly the same problem. All of them trying to get Word and Excel to work together on a Mac. In one case, 695 folk had the same problem as me and Microsoft were no help to them at all. And they wanted me to pay £80 a year for their faulty software? The sheets are printed out now, so if I need a “Where was it took in 2024”, I’ll know to use my old Windoze 7 Tosh laptop with MS Office 2017.

That was today’s two tasks completed so I de-stressed over Fish Fingers, Egg and Chips for dinner, followed by the last piece of Scamp’s Apple Pie.

Tomorrow we may need more shopping to cook for visitors on Friday.

Freezin’ – 7 January 2024

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It really was freezing. Freezing fog. Temp just below zero.

Just to check it out I took out the rubbish, slipped on the icy step and landed with a bump, knocking over the bin in the process. I don’t do it every day, but occasionally I do try to get a bit of gymnastic practise in and this seemed like a good time to do it. Thankfully it was foggy, so nobody was about to see my wee slide. Then I went round the garden in baby steps picking up all the fallen cardboard and yoghurt tubs. I think Scamp got a bigger fright than me!

Back inside I grabbed a camera and gingerly walked out into the back garden to grab a photo of what were our sunflowers with trails of frosted ice crystals hanging on them. It wasn’t a day for hanging around, so I equally gingerly made my way back inside again to the nice, warm, safe kitchen.

If you read yesterday’s blog (published today), you will have read that last night I gave up on trying to fix the botched attempt at clearing up the mess of the Lightroom catalog. Well, I did sleep on it, and somewhere in the restless night, I came up with a plan. Why build a new catalog when you can just adapt the one you’ve used for a year. There must be a way of changing the name from 2023 to 2024. There was and it was a Scottish lady who explained the intricacies of the renaming in a YouTube video. It was really simple, but also convoluted, with some parts being done while Lightroom was active and others when it was shut down. Long story short, it worked. So now it looks like I have an operating catalog for 2024. However, I’ll know better tomorrow.

Dinner tonight was the opposite of last Sunday’s three course meal and was lentil soup with apple pie and custard for dessert.

Spoke to Jamie later and heard about aquaplaning cars and flooded fields and roads. However he says it’s not too cold in the house and the builders start again this week. So work is progressing.

The frosted sunflower stalks with their necklace of ice crystals were PoD.

I think we will have to go out tomorrow to get some much needed supplies. Just simple stuff like bread and milk. No alcohol was mentioned!

A break in the clouds – 24 December 2023

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That’s what I was looking for today, a break in the clouds would be nice.

However, the reality was different. It was raining and it was dull and it felt, at 11am that it was already heading to evening. But Scamp had a suggestion. I’d said I fancied scrambled egg with smoked salmon for lunch. I knew we didn’t have any smoked salmon, so she said, let’s walk down to the shops and get some. That would force us to get out of the house for a while and we’d get some fresh air into the bargain. Plus, she said we could split up halfway home and she’d carry the messages while I walked over to St Mo’s to get a photo. Deal done.

For once M&S wasn’t too busy, especially on Christmas Eve that was unusual. We weren’t buying much, apart from the obvious smoked salmon. I thought we should get some milk, just a small bottle and Scamp said we needed baking potatoes for tonight’s dinner. We got that and other stuff as well and filled a basket, then walked home. For the first time ever there were two different people selling Big Issues outside a couple of the shops. The first one we encountered was a young teenager and further down someone we took for his father. We both agreed that we weren’t sure about them at all.

We walked back and just as we’d agreed I handed over the message bag to Scamp and I went on to walk round St Mo’s. The rain had stopped now and it was also a bit brighter. In fact the clouds were opening up and the sun was trying to break through. I got a few shots, but nothing I was really set on. Halfway round the the rain came on again and I walked home.

Scamp was hard at work making scrambled egg with chopped up bits of smoked salmon. My job was to coax the ancient, cantankerous toaster to do its job and gently burn the bread and turn it into toast, but it just wouldn’t do it. Eventually Scamp just pressed the lever on the toaster and it worked. Was this a case of great minds thinking alike? Perhaps.

After lunch I looked at the photos and they weren’t really worth keeping, but I kept them anyway, because I hadn’t anything else. Then as I was standing at the kitchen window I saw the birdbath, full of water and with a quarter of a brick in it to allow the smaller birds to drink if they needed it without being submerged in the deep water. Did I still have the wee old man Minifig figure? The wee old man with the fishing rod? After emptying a couple of boxes of dismembered Minifigs, I found what I was looking for and after three, or was it four sorties out into the garden? I had today’s PoD of a wee old man fishing in the birdbath. That’s what makes a PoD so attractive. It’s having to think round a problem and make it work.

Dinner was tomato soup which I’d made yesterday. Then a baked potato each, halved and the inside scooped out and mixed with leek, cheese and smoked haddock that had been poached in milk and with the milk added to the mixture to thin it down a bit. The lot was baked in the oven or the grill, I can’t remember which, but it was Scamp’s magic working again. It was really delicious.

That was about it for the day. We watched the Great Scottish Book Club (Christmas edition) and it was a mine of information. I bought Pink Floyd’s first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, back in the late ‘60s. I learned tonight on the GSBC that the title derived from a reference to the god Pan in Wind in the Willows! Now I need to find out where the second album A Saucer Full of Secrets came from!

Tomorrow looks like a calmer day, but still with some rain. Hoping to do a Zoom call with the family.

I think the sun is on strike – 17 December 2023

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As you’ve probably guessed, today was another sunless day, and it rained all day too.

We both read for a while in the morning and the early afternoon too.

After lunch I started planning dinner, which was Carrot and Lentil Curry. It’s ages since I made it and I had to look up the recipe to make sure I was doing it right. I was, but grating two big carrots doesn’t half make your arm ache. I was contemplating transferring my Fitbit watch to my right arm so I would get the benefit of some extra steps, because it didn’t seem like I was going to get many outside steps today.

Once the curry was on the go and simmering gently, I started looking around for a photo. I tried some photos of the Christmas Roses at the back door, but they were battered by the wind and rain and not looking at their best. The plants in the hanging basket were a possibility, but they needed some focal point. Then I found a Lego Minifig of a weeman in a gorilla suit and that’s where today’s PoD came from. It’s entitled “In the jungle …”

The curry wasn’t really all that spicy, but we didn’t have much garam masala, probably not enough to add the authentic taste. However, it was warm and there was rice and flat bread to fill it out. More for tomorrow and maybe even the next day.

Spoke to Jamie later in the evening and heard about a surprise visit from the previous house owner’s son who was just passing. Probably been asked by his dad to go and have a wee look at what they were doing in the plastic wrapped house. Also, it seems that they might not need to have their wall taken down after all. That will make less of a dent in their expenses.

Not a lot else happened today, but what can you do when it’s windy, wet and sunless. Well, you could moan about it, but nobody would listen.

Finally got round to writing most of my Christmas cards and with a bit of luck I’ll get them finished tomorrow.

Scamp and I are booked for coffee with Isobel tomorrow. More gossip for the ladies and coffee for me!

 

Steak Pie and Macaroni Cheese – 15 December 2023

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Scamp was off to FitSteps this morning. The last one of this year.

While she was away, it was my job to post the parcels to the boys and girls.

First I had to write the addresses on all the boxes and then humph them over to the post office in Condorrat. It was supposed to be 8ºc this morning, but that didn’t take into account the wind chill and it was chilling. Condorrat post office is a tiny wee place and it was crowded today with folk carrying big parcels, me being one of them. However, the woman who was in charge was efficient at getting through the queues of folk waiting to send parcels out to other folk. After answering a load of questions I got all three parcels posted off. Hopefully everyone will like what’s in them, and there are a couple of surprises.

I took a few photos on the way back home, mainly boring tree photos and a few of the bright red berries that no animal wants to eat and no birds do either. The bright red colour seems to signify ‘Danger’ and they all steer well clear. I imagine they are poisonous to all flesh, so I kept my distance too, but they did brighten up the trees. One of them became PoD.

Cup of coffee when I got home and we were ready to go to Brodens for lunch. Last week we were the only folk in the restaurant for a while. Today it was jumping, but our table was marked as reserved. Steak pie for me and macaroni cheese for Scamp. Good filling food. Then we walked down the road. We had intended to go down to the shops for some things, but then decided it was a bit cold for that, so we went home instead.

Scamp though it would be a good idea to put up her new automatic lights on the tall fence. I grabbed my trusty staple gun and proceeded to staple some cable ties to the fence, then we could use them to hold the wires of the long string of lights. Just as I was nearly finished, I managed to drive a staple through the fleshy part of my thumb, just shy of my nail, thankfully. Lots of blood, but nothing an Elastoplast couldn’t cope with. It was sore at the time, but now it’s settled down. Dafty! I think Scamp got a bigger fright than me. The lights look very pretty all different colours. We checked tonight and they went off after their 6 hours.

I did some post processing afterwards and Scamp sat and read for a while. We watched the final of the Portrait Artist of the Year and the right person won, for once. So unusual for us to pick the winner.

No real plans for tomorrow. Every year, June buys Scamp a Poinsettia at Christmas. Lately she just gives Scamp the money to buy one. Tomorrow I think we might go and buy June’s poinsettia.