Adding Some Colour to Life

At last the sun came out this evening, but really it's been grey since some time on Sunday. These are all pictures from Saturday,  with the added bonus that  all I had to do was scale them down. Just as well;  not too much time for fussing around with editing as I took advantage of the sun and lack of rain to go and pull all the ivy and brambles out of the hedge. It's been hard to find a chance recently when I wouldn't get an inadvertent shower at the same time. And I spent a bit of time today making a little mini album of photos from my aunt's garden to give her when we go there for dinner tomorrow evening.

I love Escholztia -I grew some from seed one year and they were almost as vivid as the ones in the photo, maybe a bit more yellow. But after a couple of years all the self-seeded ones were coming up more like primroses and buttermilk.

You don't really see the photos in the mini-album so well, but they were almost all on the blog back at the end of May anyway!

Water-World

We saw a lot of water-snails on Saturday - I don't ever remember seeing that many before. Some were on the lily pads, some were swimming around. You can see that they had just cut the grass - all the lily pads near the bank were covered with grass trimmings.

Winging It

I said that the irises were attracting photographers just like the flowers were attracting bees (OK, so I did have my tripod now that I have my lovely new carbon-fibre one, but one of the guys there had at least two, if not three, different reflectors).  Not sure how come all the iris photos I uploaded were blue, when I did take some other ones...So here are just a very few of the bees we saw.

Time for a good scratch

Feeling happier

Dragonflies - if you look closely, the one on the right is all turquoise, but the one on the left has a green thorax - if that's the right term for it. Abdomen?

And since I just happened to have dragonflies on the card I made today...

I was at the optician this morning. I thought she would tell me I needed to move on to varifocals, but she reckoned that since I didn't need to change my prescription, I might as well wait another year, if I was only finding it a slight inconvenience and not a major problem. No charge for a basic check-up including the glaucoma test and the one where she shines a bright light into your eyes. Now I know for sure why I travel to go to my regular optician for the last number of years, instead of switching to one of the large chains nearby or in the city centre. But between the rain and the heavy traffic, I don't know why I listened to C and drove rather than taking the train, which would have been my first choice. At least he had been over that direction recently for a training course and advised me to allow an hour to eliminate the stress of running late - I needed most of it.

Irises a-Plenty

We went to the Botanic Gardens on Saturday morning. Sadly we were a bit too late for most of the peonies, but the irises were in full bloom and beauty - and attracting photographers like the flowers were attracting bees.

Mount Usher - part two

I think those bluebells almost look like glass!

The night we had dinner at home while we were staying in my aunt's we had chips. I couldn't empty the oil before we left, as it was still too hot. So we had the spicy fried chicken another day before I cleaned the fryer out. I wanted to make a sauce with it, and found this delicious recipe on cooksunited.co.uk. I reduced the garlic from their suggested amount, and probably used a bit more ginger. I can't see that I'll ever buy sweet chilli sauce again - I am sure that if I didn't have a lime, lemon would be an acceptable substitute.

Sweet Chilli Sauce 
60 gm / 1/4 cup sugar
 1 clove garlic
3 cm  / 1 1/2" piece ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
2 red chillies, seeded and roughly chopped
juice of 1 lime
1 tblsp each fish sauce (Nam Pla) and light soy sauce

Put the sugar in a heavy-based pan with 4 tblsp water, stir and heat gently till dissolved, then raise heat and boil till it's a caramel colour. While boiling, process the garlic, ginger, chillies and lime juice to a paste, then add in the soy and fish sauces. Remove caramel from heat and add the paste, being careful in case it splashes. Return to heat, stir till mixed and simmer for two minutes. Cool before serving.

Mount Usher - part one.

Busy weekend - out last night, out tomorrow, a visit to the Botanic Gardens this morning as it wasn't quite nice enough to be going all the way to Birr for an anniversary treat (never mind the Bank Holiday traffic!). But I've managed to pick and re-size the best photos from Mount Usher. It was such a treat to have got there last weekend. We used to go often when we were children - I can still remember Mum dropping the car keys on the slatted wooden bridge, and how we all had to stay still until she picked them up, in case they fell through the gap into the river. We used to regularly when we lived in Bray and Dun Laoghaire, but it could be ten years since we were last there. Avoca Handweavers are certainly doing a good job keeping it well-maintained and looking good. We came back part of the way along the old road, which brought back memories of driving lessons, and learning to change gear to take all those bends smoothly.

And the Handkerchief Tree - we saw three this morning in the Botanic Gardens, but none of them looked as good as the ones in Mount Usher. I wonder is it something to do with the hard winter - it's years since I remember seeing the one that I knew was in the Botanics in bloom, and we go there pretty regularly.

Snail Mail

I haven't had any time this week to sort through the photos of Mount Usher, as I got called into work on one of my day's off. Also I've been having unusual difficulty making buttonholes on a shirt for C. In the end I actually had to take one of the cuffs off the shirt and make a new one, as it got too frayed unpicking one buttonhole several times. I don't know what the problem was - each time I tried a trial one on spare fabric it was absolutely perfect. I was almost at the point of deciding that I'd do them by hand in work tomorrow, but I have no black buttonhole twist. Time to clean the machine thoroughly, and possibly get it serviced.

The photo challenge on SCS this week was Snail Mail, post offices, post boxes, so on.
I was hoping to get a photo of the GPO, but after getting some nice buttons yesterday I didn't have to go in to town today - and I DID have to try and get those darn buttonholes finished.

The old post office on James's Street.

The new (and very welcome) self service in the shopping centre. Saves a lot of time unless it's a big package.

I was also thinking of how, when I worked in Guernsey, the postman used to collect our post as well as deliver it. Any outgoing post we had, we could leave on the table in the hall, and he'd pick it up when he was delivering the incoming post. I can't remember for sure, but I feel there must have been a similar arrangement when I worked in Suffolk, because I don't remember going to a post office all that often, even on my days off, and I used to write four or five letters a week. When I worked in Brodsworth Hall, the postman used to deliver most of the shopping, too. The fish man came once a week, and meat came in bulk and went into the freezer, but everything else came via the postman. I'd ring the post office after dealing with breakfast and give Gracie, the postmistress, my order, and along it would come a couple of hours later.

I was trying to remember if the pillar boxes were always green even when the vans and PT colours were orange. But I couldn't remember!

More post-rain photos

Just a few more photos from Saturday - including one poor very waterlogged bumblebee.

This plant was so full of water around the stem - almost two inches. The pair of opposing leaves grows as one piece from the stem, and then splits into two, so it makes a perfect water container.

Poor bedraggled Mr. Bee

Sunday was much better weather. Plan A had been to do the Cliff Walk from Bray to Greystones, but I think C is still getting over his abscess, infection and two lots of antibiotics, so for a less energetic plan B we went to Mount Usher gardens, taking advantage of being so much nearer than usual. Still haven't uploaded my photos, so they will follow later on this week. I was so pleased that we got to see the Handkerchief Trees in flower, I haven't managed that for more than twenty years.

Sunshine After the Rain

Last Saturday was shorts, suntan lotion and sitting on the beach catching up with friends. This Saturday was umbrellas, raincoats and lighting the fire! That's a real treat, as we don't have an open fire at home; it's not exactly an open fire here, being a wood-burning stove, but it still smells just as good. When the rain had dwindled to just a fine mist and the sun came out, the garden was so full of photo-ops that I'll have to make two posts, one today and one tomorrow. We were standing by the pond at one stage when C felt something jump against his leg - a minute later and we spotted a big frog taking a dive into the pond. There are still tadpoles too, which I would have thought was late in a normal summer.

Goodness, I'll be glad to get back to the GIMP for my editing next week. For some peculiar reason Photofiltre, which was what I had previously installed on my aunt's PC for easy resizing when she wants to email photos, changes all my photos to 314dpi, and I don't understand the options for editing colour and contrast. So it's lucky these all came out of the camera ready to go.

Bits and Pieces

Bella is our other charge this week. Another rescue dog, but she must have a lot of Rottweiler in her. She's as beautiful, in looks and nature, as her name suggests, although now she's getting to be an old lady and a bit stiff and slow.

The bracken is growing just beside one of the water-features in the garden, and was beautifully backlit the other night.

We haven't seen many birds apart from starlings and sparrows - a great tit, that's about it. One of the bird feeders is almost totally hidden in a tree now that the leaves have grown, and it's funny to see the sparrows flying in to the tree, then a whole lot of rustling leaves and out they fly again. When we were out last night we saw swifts nesting in the eaves of a house down the road. To make up for the lack of variety outside my aunt has a whole bunch of bird pictures and sculptures and figures, including this little robin. You can see how thick the house walls are.

This Old Man cactus is certainly old enough - I can remember it in my grandmother's house, and she died when I was eleven! It was only a few inches tall back then.