A Walk in the Park

 It was beautiful and sunny when I got up this morning to turn the griddle on for pancakes for breakfast. Not so much an hour later, but we still thought it would be good to get out and get some fresh air so we went for an amble in the park. Most trees are still green, certainly along the avenue I cycle along going to work, but there were a couple of young saplings that were really starting to show colour against a dense dark green background.

(A couple of photos are from earlier in the week. I had seen on Monday or Tuesday that they had cut the long grass in one of the meadow areas, and I was surprised the following morning to see that they had already baled it. I have a couple of photos on my phone - it goes without saying that when I brought my camera the next morning, it was much duller and more overcast and while the quality of the photos is better, they are not as atmospheric.

We were both struck by the reddish colour of the bark in this tree, and surprised that we hadn't noticed it before. I know we were walking in the opposite direction to normal around the pond, I don't know if that had anything to do with it. 

Juvenile tufted duck

A Walk in the Park

 I can't remember the last time we went for a walk in the park - a long time. After a couple of days of very heavy rain during the week it was pretty muddy, but Saturday morning was fresh and sunny and we went out to enjoy the weather. Not much to photograph, but we did see a shoveller in the pond. And I noticed newer identity labels on the trees - looks like they've got new identities too as the numbers don't appear to match. 

Greening up

 On warm sunny days (rare), you can smell Spring in the air, but most of the deciduous trees in the park are still resolutely bare. So this one, a horse chestnut I think, has been standing out for the last couple of weeks. When Wednesday morning was bright and sunny and for once this month I didn't need to leave the house kitted out in rain gear, I left home a few minutes early and stopped to take a couple of photos while it's still ahead of all the rest. 

Warm off the needles

 A couple of knitting projects.

I started out by making these elbow-length hand warmers for one of my nieces. She is into photography, and I know from personal experience that in colder weather, either fingerless mitts (or better yet, flip-top ones) are the way to go. She liked them.

So then I decided to knit a shorter pair for my aunt, with the remnants of some beautiful blue-faced Leicester wool, hence the blue-faced sheep on the tag.

And I'm currently knitting a pair for myself in a dark blue wool, not quite as nice a wool as either of these, but with the merit of being machine washable :D. Not that I have ever found mittens needed washing that often, it was purely that I was out of nicer remnants in the right weight.

But before I started mine, I used up some of the chunky pink from my recent jacket to knit a cowl for my sister. It's  a chunky (bulky) wool, 80% merino with 20% angora, and it's wonderfully soft and cosy. 

She gets a pink sheep on her tag. The main photos of the cowl, the colour of the wool is pretty true. I took the tag late in the evening, because I need to wrap this up and take it to work to post on the way home. In that case, the colours in the tag are pretty true, but definitely not the wool. 

Ever since I went back to work on the 3rd, I have been seeing tree-pruning going on all the way along the central avenue through the park. They start early, even though it's still dark. And often when I'm coming home, I see them all sitting around on chairs and whatever they have gathered at the back of one of the trucks enjoying a warm mug of tea. A workers' tail-gate party, as it were. Anyway, with the moon this morning and a very stormy cloudy sky, I stopped to take a photo. It was pretty windy, I would not have liked to be up in that cherry-picker. 

October Favourites

 Very thin on the ground. And it's not even as if I'm holding back on Christmas cards, I'll add one in here.

The first card is one of my Tyvek pieces - it was for a challenge to incorporate stitching, and I knew it would be easy enough to sew, even though I can't find my good thimble anywhere. 

I think the second one will go as a Christmas card to C's friend in Maine who isn't really into Christmas. C saw a woodpecker when he was there early this month, and though he didn't come back with a photo to prove it, he did come back with a couple of the tree where he had seen it, complete with multitudes of holes. 

The  third one was a variation on the salt technique for a watercolour background, calling for colouring the salt first. I think I probably made both my watercolour paper and the salt too wet, because the piece wasn't ready to use the next day. It had been intended for a Christmas card but my green got totally subsumed by the colours in the salt, and it more said "sea" to me. 

Assorted photos - the deer were the first morning it was cold enough for there to be a ground mist in the park. It was more visible on my side of the road, looking into the sun, but it was still worth stopping to take a shot of the deer. The rainbow is over Dublin. Thankfully there wasn't much rain that day, as I had about 22 miles to cycle each way, and really there was only a brief shower just as I was leaving my friend's house. A couple of weeks ago, on the other hand, we had amazing thunder and lightning and rain all one afternoon. I left the building in work thinking I didn't need my rain skirt, and I would just pack it so it would be accessible if I did. By the time I got to the bike sheds, the storm had started.  The mass of tiny mushrooms was also in the park. At first as I cycled past I thought someone had dropped some kind of textured bag, so I stopped to look. I've never seen them clustered together so closely like that before. They turned darker brown over time - I was going to take another photo the day after C got back from Maine, but it turned out to be the day they mowed the verges, so they were all gone. The day before I'd been rushing home to get some bread made and hadn't wanted to take any time to stop. My mistake...

I will have some photos from the little seaside town up in the North where C is getting his dental implants. With no Covid restrictions this time I was able to accompany him when he went for his extractions, and I took some good photos but life is busy. And the booster shot seemed to knock me sideways, I took my first sick days from work since some time in 2019, and still feel pretty wiped out. 

The header is some type of seed head, taken on a trip to Farmleigh last November. 

Work Commute

 I count myself blessed that half my cycle ride to work is through the Phoenix Park. I don't carry a camera, but I did absolutely have to stop on Monday morning to snap the deer on our first really frosty morning. I was an hour later than usual on Monday because I knew I'd be on-site on Tuesday too, so for once it was lightening instead of still dark.

This was earlier in the year -actually back in September, so it was sunrise around 7 in the morning, and it was a beautiful foggy morning with the sun just breaking through.

And, not on the way to work but the route I usually take to the library, which runs parallel to the main road and is slightly farther, but has a cycle track - I thought the leaf fall pattern on this tree was very unusual.

Mostly birds

 I discovered, recently, that there was another pond in the Phoenix Park which I wasn't familiar with, so I took a detour and visited it last week. It's small, very much a pond, but set back a bit from the road and very peaceful. I watched squirrels chasing each other, a young moorhen (I think) feeding, and a thrush bathing. 

I tried to take photos of the thrush bathing, but because it was quite shady - the pond is surrounded by trees, a video was the better option. 

The other photos are just a sparrow feeding a young one, in the garden, and the Highland cattle in St Catherine's Park, which we visited for a walk one evening last week. Hard to get a photo with the lowe evening light and the long growth in the water meadow, but it was lovely. 

Tag, you're it...

 I went for a cycle and walks in the park this morning - yesterday was intermittent rain and positively cold. Today was mostly sunny and warm. I have no idea what order Blogger is going to put the photos in and I'm not going to spend a lot of time rearranging them, so I'll upload them and then add text to each one, in case they're not in chronological order. 

So, definitely nothing like chronological order. This was when I had had my walk in the People's Garden, and was cycling back up the hill towards the Ordnance Survey. I could see a group of people (a bit more than twice this number, maybe) walking through the long grass and weeds, all with big nets. There was another man walking along the footpath with a camera, so I asked him what they were doing. He said that they were trying to find the young fawns, to tag them. Sure enough, the signs asking people to be careful and not to let their dogs loose in the areas of long grass have been up for a while now. I can certainly think of worse ways to spend a morning. The photographer said he thought that there were a couple of park rangers but that some of them were students from college.

Before leaving the park, I detoured into the Quarry Pond. As soon as I opened the gate, the less somnolent ducks, along with jackdaws, came over hoping for food. It's mostly mallards there (gone are the glory days of the mandarins, alas), with some coots and moorhens. Last year there were a couple of Muscovy ducks and this looks similar, with the wonderful iridescent green plumage and red beak. He's much larger than the mallards, and was very persistent. As I pushed my bike along the path I could hear a pitter patter of feet in the leaves behind me, and when I looked, it was this one still following me until he realised I obviously didn't have anything. 

Next up, enjoying the sun just as much as the ducks at the entry gate, was this sun-bathing squirrel. I was reluctant to disturb him, but he was lying right across the path - and once he got going, it was obvious that there was nothing wrong with him at all, he was just enjoying the warmth of the morning. 

When I first entered the People's Gardens, I spotted this thrush collecting worms. Once she had a beak full, she took off over the road in the direction of the zoo. 

This was also in the People's Gardens. The coot chicks are growing fast, though I guess it's a couple of weeks since I went in to look. Their wings are no longer the little stumpy things that they were. This one was swimming around and happily diving for food, with a watchful adult escort. The other two (there is in fact another one behind the one you can see) were sitting on the nest enjoying the sunshine and occasionally grooming themselves - which is why I could see how much their wings had grown. No sign of the swans and cygnets.