Category: St Mo’s

Coffee with Isobel – 7 December 2022

Posted on by Zogman

We were out this cold morning (-0.4ºc) for coffee with Isobel. Always an entertainment. Straight talking, never bothered who hears her and straight to the point. She never changes and that’s what’s so great about her. She and Scamp had a long conversation about her extended family and I listened because there wasn’t much chance of getting a word in edgewise. When the two of them had finished their discussions we dropped Isobel back at her house and then came home via Tesco.

After lunch which was a bowl of Scamp’s rather delicious lentil soup, I dragged my boots on and went over to St Mo’s with the A6000 and a couple of lenses. Again I was just that half an hour too late to capture the trees lit by the setting sun. One of these days I’ll get it right. However I did get a shot of a duck feather sitting on the ice with tiny little frozen water drops hanging from it. That became PoD. The contender for the accolade was a low down photo of a single dandelion with its seed head closed, waiting for a blustery day to release those seeds to the vagaries of the wind. It’s on Flickr if you care to look.

Dinner tonight was paella which I haven’t made for ages. It tasted good, so good in fact that we ate the whole lot. I’d hoped to keep some of the rice to make more arancini tomorrow, or next day.

We watched the Portrait Artist winner for this year painting her portrait of Lenny Henry. I wasn’t impressed with her, or the painting, but I was impressed with him. I hadn’t realised he’d worked to get a PhD. What impressed me most about his was his quiet manner. No longer the noisy shouting comic, but a man who looked comfortable in his skin. We both agreed that the portrait didn’t look like him, and isn’t that what portraits are all about? Nice perspective and control of things like foreshortening, but there was only a fleeting likeness of him in the face. Disappointing.

Tomorrow I’m heading in to Glasgow to take some photos with Alex and hopefully to have a pizza for lunch.

 

Another beautiful day – 6 December 2022

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Same blue sky as yesterday, but colder.

Today started with a visit by the bloke to do a service on the boiler. Half an hour later it was done and given a clean bill of health. More or less as we expected, the boiler being just a couple of years old.

Next I was out to the doc’s to find out what he thought about the lesions (his word) on my leg. I’d been using cortisone cream for the last two weeks and they had almost disappeared. He had a good look and a prod round the nearby skin and pronounced them as looking good, but recommended another fortnight’s treatment with the cream twice a day. It’s not an onerous task, putting some cream on four marks.

Went home and did the usual Wordle and Spelling Bee before lunch which was a flat sausage I’d found in the freezer the other day, cooked and squashed between two slices of brown bread. Delicious, but an amazing amount of fat was left in the pan. One a week is quite enough, I think.

We did go out for a walk today, well wrapped up because it was cold. Lots of icy, slippery leaves. Today’s circuit was almost the same as yesterday and I got a few shots of seagulls on the outfall of Broadwood Loch again. On the way home we stopped at the shops to get some bread, milk and also a pack of four pineapple tarts. Well, man (and woman) cannot live by bread alone, as someone once said.

On the final leg of the walk I took the opportunity to get some photos in St Mo’s while Scamp went straight home. PoD came from there and was a view across the rushes to St Mo’s school lit up by the setting sun.

Dinner tonight was “What have we got in the fridge” and pasta. Actually it tasted quite good despite being made from odds and ends. I confess, I actually watched almost a whole episode of Masterchef tonight, mainly because Greg (Oh, Mate) wasn’t involved. He’d been sat in a corner with a bow tie and told to be quiet, I think. It was interesting to discover the number of things you can do with carrots, or an octopus on one occasion!

Tomorrow we’re booked for coffee with Isobel. That should be an entertainment.

I saw the sun today – 4 December 2022

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I did, I saw the sun. I also saw cloudy skies and rain, but for about an hour I saw the sun.

I thought we might get out for a run, maybe over to Cramond for a walk along the esplanade, but it wasn’t to be. The rain came on and scuppered that trip. The longest walk we managed was down to the shops to get some ingredients for dinner and then we walked back. I chose to go further and went round the pond at St Mo’s and a quick foray into the woods. A few photos came from that walk, and PoD was a backlit leaf with lovely golden light and little bubbles of refraction called ‘bokeh’ from the sunlight shining through the water drops that were everywhere. It did rain for a while, but I was too busy to really notice.

Scamp had gone home to start baking her three Christmas cakes. Why three? I think it was because if she made just one big cake, it wouldn’t all get eaten and she’d end up throwing some of it away. The mixture would make three cakes. Two would go upstairs to rest for later and one would be for our Christmas. I could be wrong, but I think that’s the plan. When I got back from my walk, she was just filling the last cake tin and was almost elbows deep in cake mix. My contribution to the cake was finding the parchment cake liners in the bottom of the kitchen cupboard and putting them in the cake tins. Baking was now up to Scamp.

About three hours later, dinner was an old favourite, Smoked Haddock and Leek Risotto. The bake in the oven version. So just after the cakes come out, the risotto was ready to go in. It turned out a bit more watery than usual, but Friday’s Sweet Potato Soup wasn’t and it had some croutons too, cut from a thick slice of my bread, also from Friday. A fairly substantial Sunday dinner, washed down with a glass of shiraz that Crawford and Nancy brought on Friday.

Spoke to Jamie later and heard that they had their new Christmas tree built up and lit. It looked very grand in the living room. Also, Jamie just dropped it into conversation that they had their log burner going to keep the place warm.

No where planned for tomorrow, but if it’s dry we may go to Drumpellier for a walk in the woods.

 

 

Cold and dull – 29 November 2022

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Struggled to find the word in Wordle and didn’t finish the Spelling Bee. Such is life.

However, I put that disappointment behind me and started thinking about tonight’s dinner, which was going to be Spag Bol for me with chopped up chicken livers for extra meatiness. That meant I had to be on the ball, getting the meats out of the freezer to defrost. The mince had been chilling away in there since April! Scamp was having cauliflower cheese, so no early prep was necessary there.

With that done, we started packing a parcel to go down south. Then we realised that it should really have gone yesterday to avoid getting caught up in more postal strikes that start this week. Not to worry, we could send it with DPD which is usually pretty good at getting things done on time … touch wood! Even better, we could send the parcel from Matalan which is virtually on our doorstep. Drove down to the shops and sent the parcel on its way.

Two things done. The next thing to do was finish the backup for the newly refurbished and SSD powered iMac. A walk in St Mo’s got me a PoD which wasn’t looking very hopeful to start with, mainly because it was so dull and it looked like being a 3pm sunset, but after dunking it in Lightroom, scrubbing it and hanging it out to dry, it looked far more interesting.

The walk also cemented the backup strategy in my head and when I came back I got started on moving things around between the SSDs. An hour later the job was done and the photo was ready to post on Flickr. It’s a trio of bramble leaves shining brightly against a grim looking St Mo’s sunset. I liked it. Three tasks completed!

My Spag Bol turned out reasonable tonight, but probably needs more basil and oregano to brighten it up tomorrow. I think I might try some tagliatelle instead of spaghetti too. Scamp’s cauliflower cheese looked lovely by comparison.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot.  Yesterday I had washed the car just as it was getting dark.  Today when I was driving down to the shops, I found loads of mucky bits I’d missed.  I may have to take it through the car wash now!

Tomorrow I’m told we may need some shopping.

Up far too early – 21 November 2022

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We were both up and on the go by about 8.30am which, for me at least, is far too early.

Today the plumber was coming to fit a new kitchen tap. We were ready by 9am, but he didn’t make an appearance until 11am. By that time Scamp had driven down to The Village to have coffee with Isobel and Isobel had phoned me to ask if Sheila was still at our house. Then she cut me off to say “Oh, she’s just coming in the door.”

It only took the plumber about twenty minutes to swap out the taps. I paid him what he asked for which was really too much for twenty minutes work and the price of a cheap mixer tap. Ok, there were two of them, but one was just there to mop up the water that had dripped out of the old tap. Still, we’ve got a tap now that doesn’t drip … so far and we won’t use that plumber again, but if anyone ask us to recommend a good plumber his name will be mentioned as someone to avoid.

With the main event of the day over, I walked over to the post office in Condorrat to send back a pair of dance trainers that were a size too big. While I was there I managed to get some sliced sausage, black puddings and half a kilo of diced stew at the butchers. Finally I took a trip round St Mo’s to see what was happening there. It was cold. The temperature when I left the house was just over 4ºc but the wind made it feel colder. Bunnet on the head and fingerless Foto Gra4 gloves on the hands.

The pond was really full of water, almost flooding over the path in places, because the channel that’s supposed to drain the excess water down into a soak-away and eventually on to the River Kelvin was blocked. The blockage was caused by the horsetails that grow on the verges of the pond dying off and floating towards the outlet. The council sometime clear them away, but they must be too busy putting up Christmas lights in Motherwell. As I headed home I dialled up the Hive on my phone and set it for a quick half hour boost of 21.5ºc. If you’ve got the technology, use it!

Today’s PoD was what will probably be the last of the low views of the reed beds with the camera held about five centimetres above the water surface. I had a dream last night where I leaned too far and fell in. Dreams do come true, but hopefully not that one!

So in the morning today I’ve spoken to Isobel, paid the plumber, been to the post office and the butchers and taken at least one photo. Scamp came home half an hour after I got back and it was time to investigate the ‘better quality’ of the sliced steak sausage. It was delicious.

I spent most of the afternoon poring over the poor quality photos I’d taken, but eventually decided on one that, with a few dunks in Lightroom and Photoshop became PoD.

Dinner was chicken soup again with croutons this time followed by more cake, stewed apples and cream. Good warming food.

We watched The Big Scottish Book Club with Damian Barr doing a great job of keeping everyone on the right track.

Another early rise tomorrow to go to the docs for 9am. Then, I’m told, we may need ‘some messages’. Such a hard life!

A host of fillings today – 10 November 2022

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I’ve had two fillings come out recently. I was hoping this was third time lucky.

I expected she would complete the fillings over two days, but I was wrong. One filling and about half a dozen caps. It’s early days yet, I know, but they feel fine for now. I’ve been warned only to eat soft food for the next two days. So, does that mean chocolate and ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner for me? I hope so.

I think evening began about 2pm today. Black clouds were rolling around and the threat of rain was always there, plus the wind had been gusting all day. I went for a walk. I wanted a photo to become PoD and it wasn’t going to be flowers, anything but flowers. The light in St Mo’s wasn’t really any better than back home, but at least there was standing water there that I could use. It was a water based photo that made PoD. It was the outfall from the pond without any ducks for a change. The ducks, mainly mallards seem to get good feeding near the outfall.

After that I walked down to the shops and got some of that aforementioned chocolate, although I realised soup and pudding was a more reasonable alternative. The rain never really came, but the clouds got thicker and lower all the time. So different from yesterday when rain showers and sunshine took it in turns to change the landscape.

We got a message from Neil to say that he had a good night, although the pain got worse after breakfast but was still bearable. He was intending to rest for the remainder of the day. That sounds like a plan.

Tomorrow Scamp has FitSteps in the morning and I have a meeting with the nurse tomorrow afternoon.

Coffee – 7 November 2022

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Well, not really coffee because this was a Costa hot milk drink to paraphrase an american lady I heard once in Dubrovnik.

I joked three weeks ago about Crunchy Nut Cornflakes breaking my tooth. That’s exactly what happened this morning.  A crunch and the filling came out in two pieces. It was due to be replaced this week anyway. It will have to be now and I will have to apologise to the dentist for breaking a second filling.  Having said that, it couldn’t have bonded properly to the tooth in the first place, so not all My or the Crunch Nut’s fault!

Scamp was meeting Isobel and I was meeting Val at Costa. I’d forgotten that Val was using two walking sticks now. We talked for a long time about his plans for their new bathroom and possible remodelling of their kitchen. Of course we talked about tech too. Val’s Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of memory, but after that he lost me in the tech. Also, Val is an experimenter who loves making things that look like a box of wires, but act just like a desktop computer does. I like the idea of that, but will it run Lightroom? Will it turn on every time I want it to? Great fun to play with, but it’s not a fully fledged computer yet, at least not for me, besides, it runs on Linux which is like black magic to me. But the Raspberry Pi  is very, very clever and so is he!

We discussed my experimentation with running MacOS 11.7 from an SSD and the next stage I want to take it to once I get the actual process settled in my head. We even talked about changing the washer inside our kitchen mixer tap. Sometimes you just have to come down to the basics! When we were done talking Val left to meet his wife and I went to find mine. We’d agreed that we’d try to get everyone together for a coffee before Christmas.

Scamp and I drove to Tesco and bought a trolley full of messages, plus a couple of bottles of wine. After lunch I took a camera out to St Mo’s. Just one camera and one lens. Not a lot of light and I’d no idea what I was going to photograph. In the middle of winter I like to rest a camera on the ice and photograph the weeds poking through the ice with a macro lens. I tried the same thing today but without actually resting the camera on the surface of the water! I got a similar effect and after running it through noise reduction software it looked perfectly clean and tidy. That was PoD.

Pasta Carbonara looked and tasted more like scrambled eggs tonight.  Over cooked the sauce, not for the first time.  Must try harder.

No plans, and no meetings set for tomorrow. We’ll see what transpires.

 

Heading North – 4 November 2022

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A busy morning, then we’re off to Perth.

Scamp was out in the morning to her FitSteps class and I began my organisation. That meant I laid out the clothes I was taking, made sure I had all the camera gear I wanted and tried on my new dancing shoes for the first time. They fitted. That was a bonus!

Fairly clear in my head that I had everything sorted, I took the Sony A7 out for a walk in St Mo’s. Just for fun I took the Lensbaby 50mm lens and it did prove useful today. There was blue sky and the sun was shining. PoD became a low level shot of a couple of mushrooms poking through the larch needles.

By the time I got back Scamp had returned from her exercise class and we had lunch and got on our way. It was a beautiful day for a change with bright sunshine all the way up to Perth. Parked in the same place we used last year and booked in. Since we were on the third floor, the top floor, we took the lift. It sounded arthritic as it staggered its way down from the top and even worse on the way back up. I fully expected a pre-recorded voice to say “One at a time please!”. However it did get us to the top floor and thankfully our room was just across the corridor. Last year we almost needed a map to get from the stairs to the room and we found there was more than one way to get there. A bigger room than last year, but much the same quality of fixtures and fittings. But we didn’t come here for the view or the attractions of the room, we came to dance.

Tonight had a ‘smart casual’ dress code. We found our table and met our fellow dancers for the weekend, gave our names and instantly forgot theirs as I’m sure they did with ours. Four couples to a table, three of whom knew each other so we were left a bit out in the cold. This was going well!

Just as the food was being served, a lady at table 13 collapsed. The medics arrived promptly and although she was declared ok, she was taken to hospital for a full checkup. The food was ok, just ok, I thought. It was supposed to be a carvery, but ended up a ‘servery’. There were three items on the menu: Roast Pork, Pollock and Veg Chilli. Unfortunately when I got to the front of the queue, the roast pork had gone, one slice of the pollock was left, so it was veg chilli for us. I’d have chosen anything but veg chilli having had it three days this week already.

The dance floor was mobbed after the dinner tables and the serving areas had been cleared. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dance floor so full of folk determined to stake their claim on their square metre of wood. Too many people or too small a floor. After the first dance the floor got a bit less congested and we had our money’s worth of the dancing time. Ballroom, Latin and Sequence. I think we tried everything except Quickstep which we just haven’t mastered yet.

With sore feet we made our way up the wooden mountain to bed and slept like logs.

Tomorrow there will be a lesson or two and more dancing.

A wild morning – 26 October 2022

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A wild morning and a computing afternoon with a walk in the late afternoon.

Heavy rain in the morning, but by the time Scamp was driving to meet her sister, the worst of the rain had passed and the sun was beginning to shine on the hills. Scamp had put some towels in the washing machine and once they had run their cycle I was in two minds whether to hang them up on the whirly to dry in the breeze. I finally decided to just do it because although the clouds were still massing, the breaks were getting bigger.

I planted a pot of basil after the washing had been hung out. It cost virtually nothing, just a couple of quid for a packet of seeds. There is always some compost in the greenhouse, enough to plant the seeds in and lots of plastic pots. The seeds should germinate in about a week’s time and once they have their second set of leaves they can be divided up into individual pots. They seem to like to live on the window sills of the bedrooms. Not too warm, but plenty of light. Let’s hope they grow well.

<Technospeak>
With that done, I started to carve up the SSD that holds the new operating system for the iMac. I’d initially set up the SSD almost a year ago, before I knew what the APFS was all about and it ended up a confused mixture of partition and APFS filing systems. To get it cleaned out I had to be careful and take one piece out at a time and in the correct order, or I risked screwing the whole 1TB drive. Long story short, after about two hours I had the ‘easy’ stuff done. The next chunk of data was about 250GB in size and I was copying it off to an old spinning disk (scathing called “Spinning Rust by the SSD fanboys). The copy would take about an hour according to the info box. That left time for lunch with Scamp who had just arrived home.
</Technospeak>

After a plate of Scamp’s Just Soup I put a pair of boots on and went out for a walk around St Mo’s for the first time in about a week. Deep in the woods I found some delicate looking fungi growing out of a fallen tree branch. They made PoD. I’d made some changes to the colour balance in the A7 last night, but clean forgot to leave myself a note as to what I’d done. Whatever it was it seemed to have cleared away a green cast that had appeared on everything yesterday. Easily changed in post-processing, but better if it’s done in the camera instead.

Back home the backup was complete and I could continue with the last part of the clean up. I wasn’t entirely sure if the next bit would work, but was pretty sure the Mac would tell me if danger threatened. It went very smoothly in the end. I shut the machine down, then powered it up again and the operating system operated and it now had twice as much space as it had last night. Phew!

Dinner was Carrot & Lentil Curry and Scamp was chef. It was very good, but I just know it will be even better tomorrow. Curries are like that.

Prompt for today was another vague “Ego”. Now, in Latin, Ego means “I” or “Me”. That gave me the germ of an idea. After I looked through Google Images the germ became a reality, this is my interpretation of “Ego”.

No plans for tomorrow, but it looks wet … again.

Roses and lunch – 15 October 2022

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We’d intended going in to Glasgow today, but …

We really had intended going in to Glasgow on the bus today, but half way to Condorrat I realised my watch was still charging in the house. By the time we went back, we’d missed the bus, the only bus for an hour. The best thing to do was to have lunch, but then I mentioned to Scamp that I’d seen one of the roses she loves in Torwood the other day. That changed the whole complexion of the day. We would drive to Torwood for a rose and grab a spot of lunch while we were there.

There were a host of roses in the garden centre and thankfully they had her rose too, Sheila’s Perfume. She’s had one for a few years now, but she transplanted it last year and it never made any decent growth this year. Just to insure against the original rose being lost in the winter, a second one wouldn’t go amiss. That was the theory, anyway. The fact that another rose in the garden would never go amiss wasn’t in her head at all …! For the new rose we needed a pot, but we had enough compost at home to give it a good start. With plant and pot bought, I put them in the boot of the car and we had that spot of lunch.

First I had to drag Scamp away from the knitwear that attracts ladies of all ages like moths to a flame (some of them do get burned!) Lunch for both of us was a Tuna Toastie and half a Tipsy Cake each. Nothing very tipsy tasting in the cake. More rum essence than real rum in the cakes. Strangely, for a little tea room in a garden centre, their coffee is made with real coffee and tastes like real coffee too. Impressed. On the way out, that flame was still attracting the lady moths, but Scamp resolutely passed it by and we drove home.

Back home, Scamp was set up with another coffee and a good book, but I needed a PoD which turned out to be a picture of a bunch of rosehips framed in branches with wicked looking thorns. Pretty to look at but you’ll rip yourself to shreds if you try to pick them. That was the only decent photo of the day.

Dinner tonight was going to be a fish pie from M&S, but that has been postponed until tomorrow. We had a pizza instead. Then it was time to watch Strictly. I did watch a bit, but concentrated more on getting a decent score in Angry Birds. Matt Goss really needs to go and seek some medical help. I don’t think his head is securely fixed to his body. One of these time it will come clean off. I hope I’m there to see it. There seemed to be a dichotomy in the acts I did watch. Half were wonderful and clever. Half were dangerously bad.

Found out today that Isobel has Covid. She’s had it for about a week and is still positive. She sounds terrible on the phone according to Scamp. Hope she gets rid of it soon.

Today’s prompt was “Armadillo”. I chose The Armadillo in Glasgow. Originally it was called the Clyde Auditorium but as with so many structures in Glasgow it was becoming better know by its nickname “The Armadillo”. Now it’s officially the SEC Armadillo. It was completed in 1997 and is meant to represent a series of ships hulls.

Tomorrow we’re off to a tea dance in the Lantern House in the new Cumbernauld Academy. I won’t like it. It’s not my school.