Category: St Mo’s

Cold and Bright – 30 November 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Cloudy and dull to start the day, but later the sky cleared.

Scamp was off to Tesco in the morning, leaving me to start my tidying of my half of the living room. It might not look like it, but it is tidier now than when I started. I was also tasked with some internet research that I cannot divulge as yet. Suffice to say it was successful, I hope. When Scamp returned, there was much rustling of paper and a box was packed. With that done it was my turn to do my part in this project and I had the experience of walking through a town centre with almost every shop closed. While a pre-recorded message was telling anyone who wanted to listen that “The Antonine Centre has all your favourite shops under one roof.” Yes, there are still a few shops in the centre, it’s just that none of them are open! I did my posting and the box changed hands.

By the time I came out the clouds had lifted and I was walking under a blue sky. I did think about going for a drive to take some photos, but decided that lunch would be a better option, so I drove home.

After lunch Scamp wanted to do some gardening and I wanted to take some photos. We decided on a fair division of labour. She did the gardening I did the photography. Couldn’t get any decent photos today. The light was good and the sky was still blue, but things just weren’t working out until I was headed home and saw today’s PoD in front of me. I took three shots of it and this is the only one that was in focus. That didn’t matter to me, I had a PoD.

<Technospeak>
In the evening I got a FB message from Colin (Not Colin C, but Colin B) with a suggestion for a way to get the data off the NAS drive. Basically he had connected his NAS drive to a Raspberry Pi which runs on a subset of Linux and then copied the files from there to a removable drive. Now that would be a lot easier than my idea of dual booting the MBP and doing it that way. I’m thinking it might just work. Thank you Colin, because I know you read this.
</Technospeak>

Today’s Sketch of the Day is “J” for Jelly Beans, traditional jelly beans. Lovely soft, shiny outer sugar shell with the jelly inside. And the colours, oh the colours! What’s not to like?
One of our favourite local Thai/Chinese restaurants, The Cotton House at Longcroft, presents you with a little cardboard tub of these with your bill. Certainly sweetens the paying part!

Tomorrow I must be up early to drive up to the doc’s to get my shingles jag! I don’t like jags, so I hope I get a sweetie for going, or at least a gold star!

Cold and dreary – 29 November 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Frost on the cars and the rooftops this morning.

I thought I’d go out and get some photos, but I waited too long to go and by then almost all that photogenic frost had melted to water. Now that the leaves have lost their autumn colours and are beginning to deteriorate, only a few trees still shine. I’d taken the Oly with me is well as the Sony to hopefully get some macro shots and landscapes, but it looked like the Oly was the only one with a chance of capturing any images. I was right. The PoD is a drip hanging from a pine branch, taken with the Oly and its macro lens. I took about four shots with the Sony and none of them were really successful.

After lunch I spent my time culling the photos, rejecting some and accepting others then processing some of those photos that passed the test. That meant I could post them and get on with the next task which was the sketch of the day.

Sticking with the alphabetic scheme for sketches, I’d already decided that today’s “I” would be “Ink”. W&N ink in this case. I really like their retro little bottles. Unfortunately, I don’t like their ink, just the bottles. My go-to ink is Higgins Fountain Pen Ink. It’s a true black unlike some of the others I’ve tried. It’s water soluble and that allows me to create a nice dark grey with a waterbrush. Annoyingly it comes in a nondescript plastic bottle. So, ink from Higgins and bottle from W&N. That’s what got me to today’s sketch.

Spoke to JIC after dinner and sympathised with him having to go the dentist to repair a broken filling and possibly having to pay for it. Double whammy, JIC.

Scariest GP for ages with Grojean crashing into the barrier on the first lap and the car splitting into two in a great ball of fire. Thankfully he walked away from what could have been a very serious crash.

Rain predicted for tomorrow as the clouds roll in and the temperature rises … a bit. That means we might get a walk, but only might.

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

Posted on by Zogman

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

Posted on by Zogman

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.

Driving through the labyrinth – 14 November 2020

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We had a big ball of string with us, just in case.

Drove in to Glasgow in the morning because the weather fairies said nasty weather was coming our way in the afternoon. They were almost right, as usual. The nasties were coming our way, blown in from the Atlantic by the Jet Stream. There wasn’t a JS when I was attempting to understand geography at Larky Academy. All we could afford was the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift – which was the real name of what’s left of the Gulf Stream when it arrives battered and bruised after a long trip from Mexico to Scottish shores. Anyway the Jet Stream seems to be to the air, what the Gulf Stream is to water. It’s also a pain in the backside because it always dumps its unwanted wind and rain on Scotland and it was coming to a place near us in the afternoon, or so they said. What actually happened was the morning was ok, just ok and the afternoon was dull. The rain got dumped in the evening. It’s still being dumped now. For all those meteorological reasons we drove in to Glasgow in the morning to pick up a duvet cover we’d ordered from JL.

To get to the pick-up place you have to pick up a ticket at the entrance to the car park, drive through the labyrinth that is the Buchanan Galleries car park until you come to the gate that takes you to the pick-up area. There you stick your ticket in the machine and if it doesn’t have a hissy fit and spit your ticket back at you, it allows you to enter the sanctum. From there, suitably PPE’d you enter the collection area and after showing your collection barcode then flashing your picture ID, you get the item you have already paid for.
It sounds a bit archaic, but it works and best of all you don’t have to pay to park if all you want to do is just pick something up. The item in question was a duvet cover we’d ordered during the week. Scamp checked it while we were in the sanctum, just to make sure it was the right pattern and the right size. It was and after that we drove home.

With that excitement over we had lunch and I took the Sony out for a walk. The best of a bad lot today was a picture of some tree fungus in St Mo’s. By the time I was walking home it was growing dark and it was only about 2.30pm! Some of the street lights were on. It was that kind of day.

There’s not a lot else I can say about today other than it was almost exactly what the weather fairies predicted. If they’re to believed tomorrow will be much the same. Oh what fun!

A dull day in the morning – 5 November 2020

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Blue sky looking out the front window but really black at the back.

We decided to wait it out and see if the blue sky or the black clouds would win. Eventually the blues did win the day, but it was lunchtime by then and we stopped our cloudgazing to have a Bruschetta each for lunch. Sounds very posh, but the bread was going stale but would make good toast and the wee tomatoes were just past their sell-by date. A good way to use them up. Full marks to Scamp.

After lunch Scamp decided to make a chicken curry for dinner in the slow cooker and headed off to the shops to get a couple of chicken legs. I gathered my camera gear together and took a walk over to St Mo’s. Today I was mixing my cameras. I had my Oly with a macro lens and the Sony with the kit lens. I was fairly sure the Sony would produce the best landscape shot, and I wasn’t wrong. But I was equally sure the Oly would produce the best macro and again I backed the right horse. In fact, the Oly won the day with PoD going to a conifer trunk with a pattern looking like the flatworms from MC Escher’s lithographs. Google “Escher Flatworms” to see what I mean. I think the tree was a Larch because it was starting to shed its needles.

Back home the chicken curry was beginning to scent the air in the living room, because the great thing about slow cookers is they’re portable. You can plug them in anywhere there’s a power socket and they’ll do their job as well as sitting on the kitchen counter.

For a while we watched the antics of a couple of 70-somethings arguing about who won and I thought: Would I really want either of them to run my country? Boris is a bumbler, but these two are zoomers.

Tonight was Guy Fawkes Night, but since he was a bit of a terrorist and it’s not the done thing to glorify terrorists, the celebration has been renamed Bonfire Night.  That’s what we used to call it anyway, so it’s obviously the right name.  Although we didn’t have an official fireworks display this year, or maybe because we didn’t, there were loads of rockets flying through the air and explosions all around us.  Certainly one of the noisiest Bonfire Nights for many years.

Tomorrow we go out for lunch, but still stay within the boundaries of North Lanarkshire.

The Chicken Curry? Of course it was beautiful. Tasted as good as it smelled!

More junk goes – 2 November 2020

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Even more junk will arrive to fill its place, that’s inevitable, of course.

The junk in question was my Linx 12×64 laptop(ish) computer. The (ish) refers to the fact that it won’t sit comfortably on your lap, because it takes up a fairly large footprint with its kick down stand extended. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but like all ‘good ideas’ there were drawbacks. It was fairly light with a decent sized screen. It wasn’t fast, but I knew that at the time. It could run from an emergency phone charger battery quite happily. The killer was that it was Windows 10 and constantly wanted to ”Get you going again” only it didn’t. The downloads nearly always failed for some unexplained reason and with every successful download it got slower and slower. I finally decided it had to go and today was the day. Scamp was out having coffee with her sister in the morning, so I’d plenty of time to get it organised. I did my final check to make sure the battery was 100% and that it would charge if needed, polished the screen, swept the crumbs out of the keyboard (terrible keyboard) then packed it in its box, ready to go.

It was still looking good outside when I was finished, so I grabbed the camera and headed off to see how much water was in St Mo’s pond. The answer was really quite a lot of water. In fact, all the weeds and assorted rubbish in the pond had blocked the outlet and the pond was overflowing onto the path and cascading down the other side into the gulley that takes it out to somewhere else. I have no idea where. Didn’t get many photos because the trees were looking a bit bare after the buffeting they’ve had from our recent gales. I did try a few landscapes, but I wasn’t impressed with the look through the viewfinder.

Back home, Scamp had arrived just before me and we had lunch. My first look at the photos on the computer confirmed my suspicions that quite a lot of work would be needed to find anything worthwhile there. Took the Linx up to CEX which are the easiest company to deal with for small electrical and electronic gadgets. The next best, I’ve found, are the workers at the council skips, but CEX give you a few quid more for your unwanted electronic junk, and there’s not such a big queue. Left the Linx to be checked and GS23’d and came home to close down Inktober 2020 on Flickr. It hasn’t been such an easy job being admin for the group this year. Too many punters seem to think that slapping some coloured ink on a page is drawing/sketching. It’s not, it’s just being a poser and if you keep doing it, I will remove your ‘artwork’. That’s what happened to an irate Italian bloke last night who seemed to think that he could unload his entire back catalog into my Inktober site. He got barred.

With Inktober sorted, Scamp and I turned our attention to additional storage space needed in the front bedroom. I suggested we get another bookcase and create an organised shelf system. That seemed to meet with her approval.

Back up at CEX the nice lady handed over the readies and I took some of them round to B&M where I exchanged them for a cheap chipboard bookcase. Strangely I met Emma, an FP (Former Pupil). I’d been reading last year’s blog the other night and had written about meeting her in the Beech Tree restaurant a year ago last week. She was one of my nicer FPs. I stopped on the way home when I saw what might just be a decent sunset forming. It got a few shots, and that’s what you see here. Sunset over the Pylons! Scamp approved the purchase of the bookcase. We’ll build it tomorrow.

Watched and interesting video on YouTube tonight that showed how to adjust lens adapters. The first one I bought was very loose. I fixed it tonight after watching the video. Very happy with it now. I’ll be able to use my Nikon lenses on the new camera until I save up enough pennies to buy Sony ones.

Tomorrow the Gas Man is booked to do the maintenance on the boiler. We know he’ll probably try to encourage us to get a new one. We may just let him make an appointment for us. Don’t know how that will work with Covid restrictions. We are now in Tier 3 of the Scottish system. England go into full lockdown later in the week for a month. Wales are just coming out of a ‘Circuit Breaker’. It’s complicated!

MOT – 26 October 2020

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The red car lives to fight another day!

Out at 8am to take the Red Micro to the garage for MOT. Since we’d driven down to the garage, and had nothing else planned for the rest of the day, we went for a walk, since it was such a clear, dry morning. We walked down and round the stadium, then back home for breakfast. Like Scamp said while we were out, we should do this more often. Lie in bed reading on the cold, wet mornings, but on decent days we should be out and enjoying what little sunshine we get now that the days are shorter. It’s a plan. Whether it turns into action is still to be seen.

After breakfast we did sit around for a while and basically ‘footered’ for what was left of the morning. Just after lunch we got a call from the garage to say that the car had failed MOT because of a broken coil spring on the driver’s side. I’d guessed that might be the case, because I’d noticed during the week that it seemed to be listing a bit to that side, and said as much to JIC yesterday. Not too expensive to fix and they had one in stock, so it would be done today. With that dealt with we went for a walk around St Mo’s with a bit of a spring in our steps. Because the light was good and also because the car would be fixed today, we went round the pond twice! On the way back I grabbed today’s PoD of leaves beside the path to the Adventure Playground. Later in the afternoon we paid our dues and picked up the car. MOT’d, repaired and serviced. Scamp had a smile on her face. We drove home in the dark. First time driving in the dark since about February!!

Sketch topic today was “Hide”. I was tempted to put in a signed blank page to the effect that everyone was hiding, so I couldn’t draw them. Instead I drew a bit of a face peering round an open door. The ‘Hide’ part of Hide ’n’ Seek.

Scamp cut the last of her roses today and they were sitting in a vase on the coffee table. With such good light streaming in the window I couldn’t resist the opportunity. Look on Flickr and you’ll see them.

Tomorrow Scamp is meeting Annette who is coming to Cumbersheugh to get her Juke MOT’d. How is that for synchronicity? I may go for a walk.

Better than we expected – 24 October 2020

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It was raining this morning as predicted by the weather fairies. Then, surprisingly, it brightened up!

I wasn’t feeling at my best this morning. I think I’ve got a cold hanging over me. For that reason I was quite happy to sit and watch the rain on the window with nothing really to go out for. I was also waiting for a parcel to arrive for Scamp, one she didn’t know about and thankfully it did arrive on time. It got the reaction I was hoping for.

After that I sketched out my version of today’s prompt “Dig”. I was quite pleased with the result because it was drawn from my imagination. Not sketched from a Google Images photo.

After lunch it brightened up and the rain stopped, so with some vitamin C in me, Scamp and I went for a walk round St Mo’s, but the tribes were holding a convention there that involved getting bevvied and swearing. They really do drag the area down. I’m pretty sure the polis know about it, but it doesn’t tick any boxes for them, so they aren’t interested. At least until something more serious happens and that does tick a box, then, too late, they’ll react. Might give St Mo’s a wide berth at weekends for a while.
Continued or walk down to the shops and came back with stuff for tonight’s and tomorrow’s dinners. Grabbed a few photos on the way and one of them made PoD. It’s my favourite plant, the Cow Parsley against a bush of brambles.

The highlight of the day was tonight’s Zoom dance with, at it’s height, sixteen, or was it seventeen couples participating. One of Stewart’s great ideas. Dancing in your living room, or sitting watching others dance in their own houses no problem with bumping into others or avoiding the “Thick Couple” who insist on stopping every time one of them makes a mistake and enter into a “That was your fault. No, it was your fault.” discussion. No flamboyant show-offs to dance around. Just two and a half hours of dancing. Absolutely brilliant. Made us feel human again in these surreal times. We’ll ache a bit tomorrow, but it will be worth it.

Tomorrow I think it’ll be more of the same weatherwise. Rain and sun. We may go out for a walk.