Little Boy Blue mark 2

C is going to post this off for me tomorrow. Just as well I've made this one in a larger size - if I'd gone for a newborn or the next size up it probably wouldn't fit by the time it arrives. If it's not raining tomorrow I'm going to walk into town after work and pick up some fine wool for a christening-type baby shawl - it's raining babies just now, it seems!

Currently reading: I heard most, but not all, of the BBC Radio 4 serialisation of The Far Pavilions by M M Kaye, and picked the book up the last time I was in the library. It's a mammoth book, but I'm enjoying it and making good progress. I always like Kipling's Kim and have read it several times; this is set in a similar period. For lighter entertainment I'm reading  The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner - well written and very enjoyable. It's a good balance to Eat Your Heart Out: Why the food business is bad for the planet and your health, which I am almost finished. We don't eat a lot of processed food anyway - reflected in the fact that when I was adding up how many times we had put our bin out for collection last year to claim a tax refund, it was only 8 times in the whole year. Even the bins that are free to collect usually only get put out for every third collection or so. But a couple of chapters in that book left me wondering how I could change a couple of other things in my purchasing patterns - and would it have any impact on the big agri-businesses if I did. I always remember that my mother boycotted South African goods during the apartheid years - we learned very early on not to choose South African oranges or other fruit.

Troll Alert

I meant to include this in my rag-tag collection of photos yesterday, but it wasn't on the memory card I'd brought upstairs. Someone with a sense of humour had spray-painted this little tag on the footpath on Rory O More Bridge.



Summertime photo of the bridge. Given that the Hapenny Bridge or the Boardwalk might possible count as rickety-rackety, I'm now curious as to whether there's more graffiti on any of the other bridges.

It rained today, and rained and rained and rained.

Wishing everyone a dry and warm weekend.

Scraps

of photos, scraps of food.

Lichen on a sign post.

I had a vague idea from my gardening books, and after looking at one again today, I think these little blue flowers in Farmleigh are Scilla (Squill).

They inspired this card with its blue flowers.

We had some lovely corned beef from the butcher recently - tasty and tender- but after having already once reheated it in the cooking broth I wanted to find something to do with the leftovers. I remembered a recipe from Ronald Johnson's An American Table, which made a good dinner for us last night. I think he called it Hashed Corned Beef with Eggs. Corned Beef Hash was a favourite of ours when we were little, but I know my mother always made it with the tinned stuff. This recipe called for about 2 cups of finely chopped corned beef - no problem. Cook some potatoes in their skins in the broth. When they're cooked and cool enough to handle, peel them and crumble them in with the corned beef. Chop and fry some onion in a little butter, then stir in the beef, potatoes, a little cream, plenty of chopped parsley and seasoning. Press into a buttered shallow dish, dot a little more butter on top and bake in a hot oven for 15 minutes. Remove from oven, reduce heat a bit, make indentations in the top and break an egg into each one. Season and return to the oven till the eggs are cooked.
The one I remember from my childhood had the lots of parsley, but it was chunks of meat and potato, and had a tin of tomatoes and some Worcestershire Sauce for a bit of zing, cooked on the stove top.

Sunny Monday Morning ...

...meant a walk along the canal to get bread, instead of just walking down the road.
There was so much rubbish floating in the canal, though - I don't know if it's always like that on a Monday morning. It's been a while since I walked along that stretch.

A thrush enjoying whatever pickings were to be found in the grass:

And two swans feeding on some crumbs somebody had left for them under the bridge.

Black: Bird: Singing??

Blackbird singing in the dead of night...
Not a blackbird, and not the dead of the night - it was about quarter past eight in the morning. I was highly entertained by this crow trying to sing. I promise, he wasn't just cawing and croaking away but really truly trying to sing - it must be Spring. My bus was coming, so I didn't have much time to try to grab a quick shot.

A real blackbird too, this one not singing, alas. I went out to visit my aunt today, and walked up Church Lane to try to get a couple of photos for the current and an older photo challenge on SCS.

Architectural Details

The photo challenge on Splitcoast this week was architectural details. Just up my street, I always enjoy looking at the smaller details. Photos are meant to be current, taking after the challenge was posted, so when I went to Farmleigh this morning I took the same photograph of a detail on the gazebo that I had taken last week.

It was a photo of the Ionic capital that I had taken last week - first time I'd noticed the paint only on the outer edge of it. The bright spring sunshine really highlighted it.  It brought back memories of my second exchange visit to France, when I was 15; we visited what felt like almost every Romanesque church on the route from Paris to the south of France. I'd never seen painted stonework before then. I love the way the paint matches the verdigris patina on the gazebo roof.

 Detail over the door of the dairy, and one of the stained glass windows that run around it just under roof height.

Roofs - the house and the gate lodge

I always notice this window on a big new house at the entrance to the park. The house has been empty since it was built - the gateway is blocked with a big container of flowers. Sad indictment on the property market and the greed of developers to see it empty for so long. It also means that a lot of people have to do 5-point rather than 3-point turns to turn their cars to get back up the road again.

March already!!

How did that happen? The lobster claw bush in my new header photo didn't survive the harsh weather early in 2010. At some stage it was apparent it wasn't going to recover and our neighbours trimmed it back a lot. After I removed the feeders that were hanging in it they cut it down altogether.

Favourite cards for February...

From Farmleigh last week.

Willow

Wood Anemone

Flowering Quince

The last picture is the same willow as the first picture, but coming at it from the far side of the lake with the sun behind it. It looked like a tree full of glittering, sparkling glass.

Tomorrow is forecast to be another sunny morning after a cold night, so perhaps I'll get a walk in somewhere. We walked along the canal on Sunday; they have been doing major work clearing the paths, and while I am sure it will look lovely in a month or so, it was rather butchered looking in the bright sunshine on Sunday. We turned back when the clouds got dark, and got caught in a heavy hail shower.

Paradise Abstract

The last of my photos from the Botanic Gardens. The photo challenge on SCS this week was to share photos straight from the camera, no editing apart from re-sizing to upload. My big weak points are not bother to frame properly because I can always crop later, and crooked horizons. That's a funny one, because I don't remember it being a problem with my old SLR - maybe it's to do with an increasingly sore shoulder. I'll have to be more diligent with some exercises...
It was so cold even in the sunshine last Saturday that as soon as I entered the greenhouse my lens steamed right up. I have a few pictures from the temperate zone area, but they could all charitably be described as soft focus. Luckily by the time I reached the central atrium the lens had unfogged again, and this was my shot straight from the camera.

Birds a-Plenty

Yesterday I was lucky enough to see the cormorants not just barrelling up the river at top speed and diving, but one of them perched on some debris in the river. I was having a hiccup with my lens. I didn't realise that it had accidentally got switched to manual focus only on the lens, but I knew it wasn't auto-focussing so I was doing my best with manual. Hard with glasses - I can see why people invest in the special dioptre eyecups. My first attempts with the grey wagtails (been seeing them a lot these last few weeks) aren't really very good, but a couple of the cormorant ones certainly came out OK. What a relief to find that somehow the switch had got pushed on in my bag and that the lens didn't need an expensive repair.

In the silhouetted image where I was looking up the river into the sun you can really see how hooked his beak is. At first I thought there was an annoying twig sticking up behind him till I realised it was just beak. It's almost hooked.

Three snatched shots from this morning. The first two are a blackcap, which I've never seen on the feeder before. I had to take the pictures through both back doors in case it flew off, so they're a bit grainy. I'll be keeping an extra-watchful eye out for the next while.

As it was a beautiful sunny morning I paid a quick visit to Farmleigh before going to pick up a reserved book at the library. I was just walking back to the car when I saw some movement in a cherry tree by the lake. I only had time to grab one quick shot before someone else came crunching along the gravel nearer the tree and the little bluetit was gone.

 

There were even some daffodils out already too, and some wood anemones which I am pretty sure weren't out last week.

Botanic Gardens, Fauna - a surfeit of squirrels

The squirrels were out in force on Saturday - I always enjoy watching them, and this time there was no C to tell me that they're just rodents. I have to admit that certainly in the photo of the one sitting up a tree, he's very rodent-like. I think it's because his tail isn't bushed up at all.
I was visiting a friend today, and her daughter gave me one of her gerbils to hold; she was so warm. I'd forgotten that, it's years and years since we had pets of that ilk. The sharp smell certainly brought back memories of our childhood guinea-pigs.

Whatever he was digging for, he was pretty to dig quite deep and quite persistently. I was sorry that, yet again, I had forgotten to bring any nuts, as I guess he was looking for food. Not that he looks thin or in any way starved after the hard winter!