It was a very, very grey day; I had the car lights on both going and coming back home - but the soft muted feel it gave was very atmospheric along the coast.
Tuesday 19 January 2016
Howth
I had to visit the doctor today, and on the way to visit someone else, took time for a quick walk down the pier in Howth. Just as I was walking back to the car, a redshank flew in and landed on the shore...
It was a very, very grey day; I had the car lights on both going and coming back home - but the soft muted feel it gave was very atmospheric along the coast.
It was a very, very grey day; I had the car lights on both going and coming back home - but the soft muted feel it gave was very atmospheric along the coast.
Saturday 16 January 2016
Photo Prompts week 2
Photo prompts week two, taken from Clare on her blog HERE
I sort of sneaked a Rust for last Sunday in with my garden bench in front of the greenhouse in Farmleigh.
Monday was guilty pleasure...this was a hard one. I like most things in moderation and don't see the need to feel guilty about them.
Best I could come up with was feeding the gulls. I know that on many peoples' radar, gulls range from a mild nuisance to a major pest. I grew up near a local landfill site AND by the sea; they were certainly a nuisance with some of the rubbish they dropped in the garden. And I would rather feed my bread scraps to ducks - sometimes on the way to work there are indeed mallards and an occasional moorhen, and swans. But every day, come rain or shine, you can count on the gulls. And I'd certainly rather feed my stale bread to them than toss it in landfill; there are only so many breadcrumbs I can use.
Tuesday - Black and White. The obvious thought was a monochrome photo, and the next one was the Black & White whiskey ads - but finding a Westie would be possible, finding a Scottie much more improbable. Then I thought of magpies, and black-headed gulls - but they are still in winter plumage and don't have a lot of black. In the end, I was renewing my work ID and went with the black and white colours of Guinness. As per the information board (inside the gate, where no tourists will see it), it only started being painted in black and white in the sixties.
Wednesday: keepsake. Lots of possibilities here, I ended up with one of my little thimble displays. After filling up three, I more or less stopped collecting thimbles, though if I see an outstanding one I will probably still get it. Some of these come from friends, including the Chester one and the Welsh harpist (but in fact, Chester is where we bought C's wedding ring), some come from the markets in London when I worked there ...and the one in front is my regular sewing thimble, a gift on my 18th, and I still have the stacked origami waterlilies which my sister presented it in, too.
Thursday: books. Where to start...I still remember my total incomprehension when I was once asked, by a removal man who had come to give us a quote, what we did with all our books. And at that stage he had only seen my recipe books and our "coffee table" collection, not all the paperbacks and "reading" books. Well, most of them I read and re-read, and even in this Internet age, I still refer to a lot of our reference books.
For the prompt, I thought I'd go with generations of books! I'm not sure that I have anything belonging to my (Irish) grandfather, certainly nothing from my maternal one who was Scottish and lived most of his adult life in Canada. But this picture shows some old Babar books which were my father's when he was a child, and two of the Little Grey Rabbit books which I collected as a child. I can still remember going into the bookshop and picking new ones when I had Christmas or birthday money to spend. One of them is as re-bound by my father, who drew the little hedgehogs on the cover. And the other books came from my great-grandfather; the leather-bound one is a book of Dante's poetry, and I really just keep it for the beautiful binding. The hardback one was a prize presentation to him when he was in college in 1881, and it's "Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré by George Sand, published in Paris in 1874. I've taken a photo from the side, so you can see how even the edges of the paper (as well as the fly-papers) have a beautiful marbled finish. And yes - I never finished it but I did read a lot of this one. While on the French connection, we have quite a large collection of French children's books accumulated on our various trips - and here is a beautiful pop-up scene from a book called A Night in the Forest. Most of it I can translate easily but I usually end up having to look up a couple of the birds and animals.
Friday: out and about. Sadly the tide wasn't out, I was hoping for some low-tide photos with birds. Instead, I just snapped these on my way home from work. A sign on the bus, a veterinary surgery sign and some carpets. Also sadly, it wasn't one of the day the carpets were facing right-side out, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm so curious to know who lives in that house or apartment - do they have a huge dust allergy or what? The carpets are regularly hung over the wall, and this is the first time I've made the time to stop and take a photograph.
Saturday: on screen. For us, that's a varying degree of small screens, we don't have television. And while we went to the cinema twice over Christmas, that's probably the first time in about 5 years.
So, we have a screenshot of the current weather, and then I admit to taking the one that's based on Star Wars in advance, when I was walking into town after renewing my work ID the other day.
And the current wallpaper on my PC is one of the photos from Le Teich.
I sort of sneaked a Rust for last Sunday in with my garden bench in front of the greenhouse in Farmleigh.
Monday was guilty pleasure...this was a hard one. I like most things in moderation and don't see the need to feel guilty about them.
Best I could come up with was feeding the gulls. I know that on many peoples' radar, gulls range from a mild nuisance to a major pest. I grew up near a local landfill site AND by the sea; they were certainly a nuisance with some of the rubbish they dropped in the garden. And I would rather feed my bread scraps to ducks - sometimes on the way to work there are indeed mallards and an occasional moorhen, and swans. But every day, come rain or shine, you can count on the gulls. And I'd certainly rather feed my stale bread to them than toss it in landfill; there are only so many breadcrumbs I can use.
Tuesday - Black and White. The obvious thought was a monochrome photo, and the next one was the Black & White whiskey ads - but finding a Westie would be possible, finding a Scottie much more improbable. Then I thought of magpies, and black-headed gulls - but they are still in winter plumage and don't have a lot of black. In the end, I was renewing my work ID and went with the black and white colours of Guinness. As per the information board (inside the gate, where no tourists will see it), it only started being painted in black and white in the sixties.
Wednesday: keepsake. Lots of possibilities here, I ended up with one of my little thimble displays. After filling up three, I more or less stopped collecting thimbles, though if I see an outstanding one I will probably still get it. Some of these come from friends, including the Chester one and the Welsh harpist (but in fact, Chester is where we bought C's wedding ring), some come from the markets in London when I worked there ...and the one in front is my regular sewing thimble, a gift on my 18th, and I still have the stacked origami waterlilies which my sister presented it in, too.
Thursday: books. Where to start...I still remember my total incomprehension when I was once asked, by a removal man who had come to give us a quote, what we did with all our books. And at that stage he had only seen my recipe books and our "coffee table" collection, not all the paperbacks and "reading" books. Well, most of them I read and re-read, and even in this Internet age, I still refer to a lot of our reference books.
For the prompt, I thought I'd go with generations of books! I'm not sure that I have anything belonging to my (Irish) grandfather, certainly nothing from my maternal one who was Scottish and lived most of his adult life in Canada. But this picture shows some old Babar books which were my father's when he was a child, and two of the Little Grey Rabbit books which I collected as a child. I can still remember going into the bookshop and picking new ones when I had Christmas or birthday money to spend. One of them is as re-bound by my father, who drew the little hedgehogs on the cover. And the other books came from my great-grandfather; the leather-bound one is a book of Dante's poetry, and I really just keep it for the beautiful binding. The hardback one was a prize presentation to him when he was in college in 1881, and it's "Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré by George Sand, published in Paris in 1874. I've taken a photo from the side, so you can see how even the edges of the paper (as well as the fly-papers) have a beautiful marbled finish. And yes - I never finished it but I did read a lot of this one. While on the French connection, we have quite a large collection of French children's books accumulated on our various trips - and here is a beautiful pop-up scene from a book called A Night in the Forest. Most of it I can translate easily but I usually end up having to look up a couple of the birds and animals.
Friday: out and about. Sadly the tide wasn't out, I was hoping for some low-tide photos with birds. Instead, I just snapped these on my way home from work. A sign on the bus, a veterinary surgery sign and some carpets. Also sadly, it wasn't one of the day the carpets were facing right-side out, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm so curious to know who lives in that house or apartment - do they have a huge dust allergy or what? The carpets are regularly hung over the wall, and this is the first time I've made the time to stop and take a photograph.
Saturday: on screen. For us, that's a varying degree of small screens, we don't have television. And while we went to the cinema twice over Christmas, that's probably the first time in about 5 years.
So, we have a screenshot of the current weather, and then I admit to taking the one that's based on Star Wars in advance, when I was walking into town after renewing my work ID the other day.
And the current wallpaper on my PC is one of the photos from Le Teich.
Monday 11 January 2016
Duck Fest
The mandarins and mallards, with the occasional coot, moorhen and tufted duck. I had to up the ISO almost as high as it would go, since by this time it had got a little overcast and I only had brought my Canon. So the photo quality isn't great...
Sunday 10 January 2016
A Somewhat Sunny Saturday
Friday morning was bright and sunny - and busy. The forecast was for rain on Saturday, but when it too was bright and sunny, we got up and headed over to Farmleigh to enjoy it. It didn't last long - it was already pretty overcast by the time we headed to the duck pond in Phoenix Park, but it was lovely to get out and see the sunshine.
There were a lot of raindrops on all the bare trees - like little shining crystals.
 |
| OK, so I took this on the 9th, but photo prompt #10 is rust, and I thought of it when I was taking this photo |
They are working on renovating the yew hedges, so I took this photo of the noticeboard describing the process.
Saturday 9 January 2016
Photo Prompts
Encouraged and inspired by Lorraine, I checked out her link to a photo challenge - a month of prompts. The list is found HERE; Clare is a blogging friend (as I am) of Lorraine.
I copied the list into a file on my phone, and thought I would try to hit at least some of them.
...
4. New
5. In your bag
6. Broken
7. Upside down
8. Ordinary
9. Makes me smile
The 4th was my first day back at work, so that's when I started - and my photo is a new Christmas decoration this year, from my sister.
In my bag: it's slightly apocryphal, but it's alleged in work that if anybody needs something, it's in my bag. Sellotape, jumbo markers and the map of Dublin are all in my rucksack, but if it's a screwdriver, penknife or scissors, they are all in my handbag. Along with a French translator, my external back-up (spare camera battery and memory card in the case too), bandages, tape-measure and lavender oil for burns. The lavender oil is what kept C going during the more whiffy low-tide estuary parts of our day in the Le Teich bird reservation last summer. Other first-aid basics are there too; pain-killers and anti-histamine. A sewing needle and some threads are in the same pack as the plasters.
Broken - and new, too. I have a pair of little baking mouse ornaments - one in a mixing bowl and one on a "gingerbread" star-shaped cookie. The one with the bowl fell off the tree and the bowl broke. Superglue didn't do much for it - so I bought a pack of Fimo and made a rough-and-ready new mixing bowl before packing all the decorations away again for next Christmas. It's definitely on the rough side, but at least I still have my pair of mice.
I passed on Upside-down, no inspiration on the day and no time on Friday to catch up.
Ordinary - my ordinary vinegars, flanking two more expensive and special ones. Friday was a busy, busy day so it's just a quick phone-photo.
Makes me smile: today dawned bright and sunny. So did yesterday, but it was, as mentioned, a busy, busy day. Today we visited Farmleigh, and also took a quick walk to the duck pond in the park. The mandarin ducks always make me smile! And...thank goodness for the spare battery in that case that holds my external back-up. Without that, I would have got the photos in Farmleigh but there wouldn't have been any of the ducks. There seemed to be a definite pair-bond between a particular drake and the little female, they were always together.
I copied the list into a file on my phone, and thought I would try to hit at least some of them.
...
4. New
5. In your bag
6. Broken
7. Upside down
8. Ordinary
9. Makes me smile
The 4th was my first day back at work, so that's when I started - and my photo is a new Christmas decoration this year, from my sister.
In my bag: it's slightly apocryphal, but it's alleged in work that if anybody needs something, it's in my bag. Sellotape, jumbo markers and the map of Dublin are all in my rucksack, but if it's a screwdriver, penknife or scissors, they are all in my handbag. Along with a French translator, my external back-up (spare camera battery and memory card in the case too), bandages, tape-measure and lavender oil for burns. The lavender oil is what kept C going during the more whiffy low-tide estuary parts of our day in the Le Teich bird reservation last summer. Other first-aid basics are there too; pain-killers and anti-histamine. A sewing needle and some threads are in the same pack as the plasters.
Broken - and new, too. I have a pair of little baking mouse ornaments - one in a mixing bowl and one on a "gingerbread" star-shaped cookie. The one with the bowl fell off the tree and the bowl broke. Superglue didn't do much for it - so I bought a pack of Fimo and made a rough-and-ready new mixing bowl before packing all the decorations away again for next Christmas. It's definitely on the rough side, but at least I still have my pair of mice.
I passed on Upside-down, no inspiration on the day and no time on Friday to catch up.
Ordinary - my ordinary vinegars, flanking two more expensive and special ones. Friday was a busy, busy day so it's just a quick phone-photo.
Makes me smile: today dawned bright and sunny. So did yesterday, but it was, as mentioned, a busy, busy day. Today we visited Farmleigh, and also took a quick walk to the duck pond in the park. The mandarin ducks always make me smile! And...thank goodness for the spare battery in that case that holds my external back-up. Without that, I would have got the photos in Farmleigh but there wouldn't have been any of the ducks. There seemed to be a definite pair-bond between a particular drake and the little female, they were always together.
Sunday 3 January 2016
Old recipes, fresh pictures.
Christmas baking: both recipes have been posted before, but the photos are brand spanking new.
Mincemeat
Pears preserved with ginger
Mincemeat
Pears preserved with ginger
 |
| Freshly baked for seasonal treats - one batch on Christmas Eve, one batch on St. Stephen's Day |
 |
| The tags were also cooked up quickly on St. Stephen's Day morning, along with the mince pies! |
Friday 1 January 2016
December Favourites
It's January already?!? How did that happen. The weather has been so bad that we have only been out to visit friends and family, and I have totally lost track of the days - apart from knowing that we both start back to work on Monday. It's going to be a shock to the system, that's for sure.
Here are my favourite cards from December... and if the lighting levels stay this bad, I will have to find space to set up my mini studio and two daylight bulbs.
And the blog header is a female blackcap, photo taken in January 2014 as I didn't have a lot in my folder for 2015.
Here are my favourite cards from December... and if the lighting levels stay this bad, I will have to find space to set up my mini studio and two daylight bulbs.
And the blog header is a female blackcap, photo taken in January 2014 as I didn't have a lot in my folder for 2015.
Friday 25 December 2015
Christmas Wishes
And from our snowy winter in 2010: it's great that our squirrel-proof feeders really are squirrel-proof, but they don't lend themselves to taking such good bird photos.
Happy Christmas and good wishes for 2016
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