Category: Snails

Editing blogs – 30 July 2024

Posted on by Zogman

Scamp was out this morning to have a blether and a coffee with her sister.

I stayed at home to edit and publish a week’s blog posts. They were shorter than normal posts, but I still had to go through the rigmarole of writing it in Day One (that’s what I’m doing now). Then logging in to my webspace and dumping the text in the correct place, before I sourced the photo that went with the text and posted it in the right place. After that I’d only another seven or eight to do. It gets a bit tedious, but it’s not all doom and gloom. I can look back a year and see what I was talking about then. I can search the blog for bits and pieces of my life that I’ve forgotten about. Occasionally I do feel I should just chuck it in, but as Scamp keeps reminding me, I’d regret it. But there should be an easier way to synchronise the writing with the posting.

I had just finished the last posting when Scamp returned from her extended blether with June. Both of them had lots to say and stories to tell, and you know what gossips, sisters are.

After lunch we drove to The Fort for Scamp to return a pair of sandals that looked good, felt good but not really good enough to splash the cash on. Luckily she’d only worn them inside.

Later in the afternoon I took the A7 with a macro lens and the Tamron zoom for a walk in St Mo’s. The Tamron got a bit of use, but the handy wee 50mm macro won the day, capturing not only the PoD of a snail snuggled into the leaves of an unknown plant, but also a closeup of a wee black fly that Google Images could not agree on the name for.

I watered the garden and the bloke next door’s too. We take turn about at watering the front gardens. Everything looked and felt dry. Such a strange thing about Scotland. Scamp may water the back garden tomorrow.

I’m hoping to meet my brother tomorrow and then we’ll drive over to Chatelherault for a walk and a blether.

 

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall – 10 June 2024

Posted on by Zogman

Today we went out looking for a new mirror. A full length one.

We have an old mirror that probably came from Scamp’s mum’s house many years ago. It’s still good, but it’s very heavy. She was looking for a slightly smaller one and definitely a lighter one.

We drove over to Falkirk and were disappointed with the selection in the first of the two shops that would sell mirrors. The ones they had were almost all fancy shaped or had really heavy surrounds or frames and that, really was what we wanted to replace. Scamp was disappointed, but what she did see was a couple of lovely rugs, the bigger one almost deserving the name Carpet. I liked them too, especially the big one. Rich, deep colours and a pile to match. Not too pricey either. Photographed them to remember the names and sizes and put them on the back burner for now.

The second shop had more sensible ‘using’ mirrors, and after some soul searching Scamp finally chose a lighter one with ’distressed’ white frame. You know what I mean. Painted white and then it looked as if the painter got fed up sanding it down and just left it. Saying that, it looked good in the bedroom and it fitted the brief. It also fitted the back seat of the car, just fitted! Lunch was calling and we couldn’t decide what to have, but we got some cold meat in the Falkirk Tesco an Lo and Behold, they had rolls. Big chunky Scottish Breakfast Rolls. How did Falkirk manage to get them when Cumbersheugh couldn’t? Questions will be asked in the house!!

Back home, fed and watered, I knew I needed to get a photo taken. I’d watched the rain clouds roll past, dropping their contents as they went, but imagined I could get out and get some photos in between showers. It wasn’t to be. I was halfway over to St Mo’s when the heavens opened. Luckily I found some shelter under a tree and waited the fifteen minutes or so for the cloud to empty and move on. So did I, move on, that is!

PoD went to a wee snail just starting to form its shell. Apparently it’s an Amber Snail. It was sliming its way down a grass stem and I thought it looked perfect for today’s PoD. It was almost beaten to the line by a stem of grass that had collected a fair amount of rainwater from the shower. Its common name is Cat Grass, because cats like to eat it. There, that’s something you probably didn’t know.

Dinner turned out to be a Margherita pizza with some anchovies sprinkled on top to add some flavour. We watched the first episode of Bake Off: The Professionals. It’s amazing what these people can create in a really tight timescale. Always worth watching.

We had watched an interesting Canadian F1 GP in the morning with so many changes of position in the rain, it was hard to keep track. Just good clean fun, most of it.

Tomorrow we are hoping to go out to lunch in Glasgow.

Where did the sun go again! – 23 May 2023

Posted on by Zogman

Yesterday we sat in the garden in the sunshine.

To risk that today would have been foolhardy in extreme. Cold wind from the west, although Scamp said it was just cool, not cold. The furthest we got today was the Tuesday shopping run to Tesco.

In the morning I finished Jimi Hendrix Live In Lviv. I put a review of it in Goodreads and just in case you were thinking or reading it, I’ll warn you that my review has spoilers. Rated it at 3.5/5

Later in the afternoon I took the A7iii for a walk in St Mo’s and captured a photo of three snails climbing a dried up weed by the edge of the path. After a fair bit of post processing I came up with a mono version of it that looked better than the original colour one.

Dinner was my version of Amatriciana, perhaps with too much chilli flakes.

The prompt today asked for The Contents of a Drawer.
You don’t really want to see the contents of my drawers, do you? You certainly don’t want me to sketch them, because that could take until next week to accomplish. What I have given you instead is a sample of the contents of my acrylic paint drawer in my useful IKEA cabinet. I don’t know if the contents of any of these tubes is still liquid, because the last time I painted with acrylic must be pre-covid, maybe even pre-historic! Anyway, it fulfils the brief.

No plans for tomorrow.

Recovery – 22 May 2023

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Today was a day of recovery. No dancing, no red hot feet!

Scamp was out meeting Isobel for coffee while I ran the computer red hot, rather than my feet. I wrote up three days of blog, if you can call yesterday’s a blog. Saturday’s epistle made up for it though.

When she got back, Scamp started on the garden. There were flowers to plant and seeds to sow and tidying up of pots to do. There were snails to capture and put in a bag for later disposal. Our lupins have been covered in snail slime for weeks now but before we went to Perth, Scamp dusted the pot with lots of slug pellets. It wasn’t slugs that were doing the dirty on the lupins, it was snails. How they managed to haul their big fat bodies and their shells up those fine stems I will never know, in fact I don’t want to know. They have nearly all been dealt with. Hopefully the remainder will go for a walk with me tomorrow to St Mo’s. It’s said that snails have a homing instinct. Well, good luck to them crossing the road from St Mo’s!

After lunch I took the A7iii out for a walk in the woods and that’s where I got today’s PoD. It’s a pair of Lousewort flowers (Pedicularis sylvatica). Tiny little things. There wasn’t much else on offer today. I was hoping the warm weather would bring out some damselflies, but none were to be found. I did find a couple of Wolf Spiders squaring up to each other with their little pedipalps raised like a couple of prize fighters wearing boxing gloves. They were a bit quick for me, I’m out of practise at catching spiders on the hop.

By the time I got back, Scamp was sitting in the garden reading with a glass of wine in her hand and I chose to keep her company with my glass and a book. The book is Jimi Hendrix Live In Lviv. It is very, very strange. Based in Ukraine around 2011 and translated from Russian!

Dinner tonight was yesterday’s leftover risotto made into arancini (deep fried rice balls dusted with breadcrumbs) and they were really quite filling. We both scoffed them.

The prompt today asked for Vegetables.
The basket full of vegetables I have for you today, carrots, onion, leek and mushrooms, would make a good pot of soup, perhaps ‘Just Soup’, given some water and a stock cube or two.

No plans for tomorrow as yet. Something will turn up, I’m sure.

 

Driving the 40mph motorway – 6 May 2023

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That motorway is the M8. No sooner is one set of repairs finished than another set are announced. It seems that we drive more miles at 40mph than we drive at 70mph. PITA.

Yes, we were off to Brookfield this morning for the first dance class after a three week lie up. I thought the Charnwood Cha-Cha would be the end of me. It’s not good to spring things like that on us without warning, or access to a defibrillator. The only thing I can say is WOW, that was hard work. Thankfully we knew all of the steps and I had a rough idea of the order they should be danced in.

Next was a new one, a waltz this time and we both think we were guinea pigs here to see how quickly we’d pick it up. Not that easy was my answer. Thankfully we both filmed it so we could watch it at home and work out what was being described in the walk-through. The Charnwood was a workout for the body. Joy’s Waltz (named for a friend of Jane’s who died in January) was a workout for the brain. Eventually we got the hang of the first three sequences and after watching the videos this afternoon we’ve got an even better idea of the bits we’ve never done before.

The final workout was another quite fast one, a Jive routine this time. It had a few routines we have picked up along the way in the last few years from different teachers, so it wasn’t totally alien to us, and not so fast that we were too exhausted to fit in the final sequence dance of the hour and a half, a Mayfair Quickstep. Just a fairly easy dance to ease us down to drive through the 40mph zones again on the other side of the road.

Back home we had lunch and watched the pageantry unfold in London. I took myself off for most of it as I’d a sketch to complete for EDiM. I was doodling a sketch on a bit of backing paper and the picture came to me. It was a highland cow, but there was too much rubbish on the paper and I knew I’d need to redraw it, so I left the rough there and went to get a photo for today. As I was walking over towards Condorrat, I noticed a snail tucked into a corner of a fence and knew that was the PoD. Of the three photos I took, the one you see here is my favourite. I also got a shot of the inside of a dandelion puff ball. It’s like the highland cow in that it’s not the finished article, but it’s worth another try, possibly in an inside setting with a camera on a tripod. We’ll see.

When I got home, Scamp was whizzing through the recording of the actual Coronation. It is one mighty big and complex piece of organisation. How they worked out how to get all those people into the cathedral and how they covered the lawn of the palace with the thousands of army, navy, airforce personnel from almost every country was astounding. I wasn’t really all that interested in it, I was waiting for Zadok The Priest to be sung. When it was, it was a little disappointing. Scamp said it was too fast and I thought it was lacking in power. Had we been conducting, heads would have rolled.

Dinner was from Golden Bowl. Scamp had her usual Chicken Chop Suey with Fried Rice. I had a treat that I knew I’d suffer for later and had Sweet and Sour Pork Balls and Fried Rice. I did suffer for it, but it was worth it. Pure decadence.

I redrew the Highland Cow and it does look better than the original. I’m happy with it and Scamp laughed out loud when she saw it. That was enough of a stamp of approval for me.

We have no plans as yet for tomorrow and there have been no street parties in and around Cumbersheugh, I’m glad to say, so not many sore heads tomorrow morning. Well no more than usual!

Photos – 27 February 2023

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Photos old and new

Actually I hadn’t taken any of the photos I’m talking about.

The first photos are ones that date back to around 1980, we think, and are of Jamie and Hazy, probably in school. The original has sat on the top of the bookcase in the living room for as long as there has been a bookcase there. Unfortunately it faces the front window and gets the full force of the sun in summer. That’s what has faded it over the years. I’ve scanned it and tried a few times to bring back the colour, but without success. When we came back from holiday I remembered that Photoshop now has a beta version of software that they claim can use AI to restore the colour and repair the scratches on old photos. I tried it on a fresh scan of the old photo and it did quite a good job. After that I dunked it in Lightroom, back into Photoshop, into ON1 and finally back into Lightroom until Scamp and I were satisfied with the result. I’ve now printed it and cropped it to fit the frame. Scamp has cleaned the glass and the frame and the photo is now back on display again. The photo restoration took about four hours, but it was worth it.

I thought I deserved a walk in St Mo’s after that, intending to capture another shot of the ladybirds. Instead it was a photo of a tiny little snail, about 4mm diameter clinging to a tree trunk that made PoD. I have no idea why they climb trees, maybe it’s because they are there!

The second set of photos you’ve already seen Hazy. They were taken by the photographer in the hotel. Good photos too. Separated by about 43 years and light years of technology!

That was about it for Monday. Watched another confusing Death In Paradise and envied you and Sim, Jamie!

Tomorrow I’m going to try to get an appointment with the doc.

Preparing for Spring – 6 February 2023

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Scamp wanted seeds and seed compost. Spring is in the air.

We drove to Torwood at lunch time to get the seeds and seed compost. Scamp also wanted a one tonne bag of general purpose compost. Ok, it maybe didn’t weight a tonne, but it certainly felt it. It was probably full of water because it just kept twisting and turning when I tried to lift it. Why don’t they make bags with handles on them that you can at least get a grip on?

Anyway. We dumped the bag in the blue car’s boot and went for lunch. The place seemed to be full of old folk. I know I’m a member of that illustrious community, but these folk seemed a lot older than me. I ordered a Cajun Chicken Wrap and Scamp had a bowl of chips. I also got a mug of burnt water pretending to be coffee while Scamp went the sensible route and had peppermint tea. I really think, in retrospect, that I was served filter coffee ‘by mistake’. It was brown, had no crema and tasted of nothing. Two sachets of sugar and a fair dollop of milk made no difference to the taste. It was absorbed by the burnt water. I’ll follow Scamp next time and have what she’s having.

Drove home and yes, the sky did seem to be lightening, but only slightly. In the east, the area we were leaving, the sun was definitely breaking through. After I’d humphed the one tonne bag of compost through the house to the back garden, the clouds were closing in again and I knew if I was going to get any photos today I’d have to move soon. The PoD was a snowdrop, flowering in a pot of bare stem roses. To isolate it from its neighbours I used a sheet of matt black neoprene. Not real neoprene, but something that looks and feels like it. It’s great at creating a black backdrop for photographing flowers. Photos taken, PoD on the way.

While I was doing that, Scamp was busy at the kitchen sink, the draining board of which she’d covered with a plastic tablecloth. This gave her a neat worktop to use for taking cuttings of Geraniums. A sensible arrangement, because it was getting cold outside. She has also planted some Sweet Pea seeds. I didn’t get round to planting my kale seeds today, but I will soon. Honest!

Dinner tonight was a “What’s in the fridge that needs used” type of dinner. Basically it was half a tin on chopped tomatoes, a slice of bacon sliced fine, some capers that needed to be used and some penne. It all worked well, for a change.

What I did next was plan out my sketch to meet today’s prompt of The Fast and The Furious. I’ve never seen this film, one of many I’ve never seen, but for some reason an image came into my head of a Reliant Regal 3/30, a three-wheeler I had many moons ago. In fact it was my first car and I could legally drive it on a motorcycle license. It was a great car which carried us all round Scotland for years. Just for the fun factor, I gave the sketch a snail to speed past the Reliant. The driver of the Reliant was Furious to be passed by a super Fast snail.

Tomorrow, Isobel requests our company. No reasons given. It’ll be a surprise.

 

An early walk – 5 October 2022

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I was out early to the post office to send off a parcel to Samsung.

I’d recently bought myself a Samsung phone and as part of their deal, got a discount if I mailed them an old, but working, mobile phone. Scamp volunteered her Huawei P Smart which is now on its way to them. As I was walking over to the post office in the rain, I overtook this snail that was also heading in the same direction. It seemed to be quite sure where it was going and, as it was making fairly good snail time, I said good morning and passed on. At this point I must thank the couple on the other side of the road who stopped and waited while I took a couple of photos. I don’t know what they thought I was doing. I thanked them and walked on.

We had half intended to go out for lunch today, but as it was raining and miserably we agreed we’d walk down to Broadwood Farm for lunch. It’s a part of a chain and, of course, has never been a farm, its main stock in trade now is as a carvery of sorts. That suited me fine, but as Scamp doesn’t eat all that much meat, she had her usual Fish ’n’ Chips. I had the carvery, Turkey, Ham and Roast Beef with all the veg you could eat. Years ago Broadwood Farm was a decent pub with a fair selection of beers. Today I fancied Guinness, but they didn’t have any ‘at this time’. In that case I’d have a Belhaven Best. Oh, that was also off ‘at this time. I asked what they did have, and it turned out they only had lager, no beer. There used to be a song about “A pub with no beer”. Now it’s become a reality. The food was decent pub grub although I could have used the roast beef to repair the soles of my shoes. Next time I’ll have turkey and ham. We took a long way home via M&S for bread and fruit.

Much later in the afternoon I went for a walk in St Mo’s and bumped into another teacher from school who was out walking her dogs and moaning about it. It was obvious that she was really enjoying it, but didn’t want to say so. Some folk are just like that. As the light was fading I walked on, still in the rain, but although I took a few more photos, there was nothing interesting in them once I’d downloaded them to the computer.

I was just thinking the other day that I’ve not seen any swallows recently.  I think the last time I saw some was about a month ago. I think they must all be back in warmer climes now.  Lucky them!

Today’s prompt for Inktober was ‘Flame’ and in an attempt to enhance my sketch I made the flame be a candle flame, put the candle in a candle holder and then had three moths flying around it. Like Moths To a Flame. It’s important to make it one candle and three moths. Odd numbers of objects are seen as more interesting than even numbers apparently.

No plans for tomorrow, now that Scamp has been dumped by her wee sister!