Robin - again

Just a couple of quick pictures. We've had a lot of heavy rain this week, apart from today. Yesterday I was taking a quick photo of a card in a dry spell, and friendly little robin came out to play. I can get pretty close before he takes off - and then he comes back pretty quickly, so he's obviously not too stressed by it. So these photos are the full frame, not cropped at all, and not even with the long zoom, just the 40-150mm.

Past reflections

One night earlier in the week I had to go to bed right after dinner with a bad migraine. Later on when it was more manageable, C came in with his laptop to choose some photos. When he was doing his PhotoShop course last year, two of his projects were based on the Botanic Gardens, and one of them was 6 months of a calendar. He promised his brother in Australia that he'd send him a calendar, and I've been pointing out that if he doesn't get it done soon, I'll just have to buy one as usual.
This isn't one of the photos he's going to use, but I liked it at the time, just never got round to uploading it.

Farmleigh

Just a couple of quick pictures from yesterday. We'd arranged to meet my sister - and were lucky enough to have the lovely sunshine from Friday evening carry over...
Autumn colour by the house:

Autumn colour by the lake:

My sister's two dogs - the one with the blue bandana is her new one, just ten months old. She was so good on the leash - seemed blissfully unaware of all the squirrels that were catching Missie's attention.

A little coal tit on the patio during the week:

Park Pics

Just a couple of photos from the park last night. After a mostly grey week, except for Monday, the weather took a turn for the sunnier yesterday afternoon. So when C got home from work, as soon as we'd had coffee we headed out to the park. And since he's been telling me all week about how he keeps seeing the deer on his way to work, I stuck the long zoom in my pocket...

The crumble that nearly wasn't...

The railway line runs at the end of our garden - there's a bit of no-man's land between our wall and the railway, and the brambles grow over it. C was leaving cutting them back till after we'd harvested the blackberries, which we did on Monday - it was a lovely sunny evening. We had a friend for dinner on Tuesday, so the berries stayed sitting out in the cold porch. But that meant that I really had to use them on Wednesday...off down to the vegetable shop. I reached the little local shopping centre, and there was no electricity. Luckily the greengrocer was happy to estimate the weight of the apples and I had the right change; I am not sure that I would have thought it was worth driving all the way to the big shopping centre just to get apples, but the berries did need using. Luckily that catch-22 was avoided.
I'm always looking for a good crumble recipe - all suggestions welcome. Sometimes I use the one from the Penguin Cordon Bleu Puddings and Desserts. This time I used one from an old edition of The Joy of Cooking. In the book it's equal measures brown sugar, butter and flour, but my mother had doubled the amount of sugar when she wrote in imperial measurements, and I stuck with that. No matter what recipe I try, they rarely come out as I think they should, but this one was pretty good.

Weekend Photos Continued...

The first two photos are still Mullaghmore...apparently the house with the blue car in front has fresh eggs for sale - you could see the yard with the hens through the gate. I think, although it doesn't seem right to me, that those are Donegal mountains in the background. Slieve League, T said. I must have been totally disorientated, in that case.



These three are from Bundoran, and you can see we did actually get some sunshine. Amazing light through the clouds as we walked south, and beautiful light on the dunes as we walked back. It was a shame we were pressed for time - those dunes reminded me so much of where we used to holiday in Killybegs when I was very young.

Leitrim, Sligo and Donegal.

We were away for the weekend visiting a friend. She lives in County Letrim; on Saturday we drove about 15 minutes to Mullaghmore in County Sligo to walk along the beach and coast there, and on Sunday we drove ten minutes to Bundoran to fit in a VERY short walk along the seafront before heading home again. Made me realise how little coastline Leitrim itself has.
Don't want to put too many photos in one post, so I'll add some now and the rest tomorrow. On the Saturday night we were invited to go along to a 60th birthday party. When we arrived, for some reason a couple of people thought we were foreigners - as in not even Irish, let alone not local. And us in our lovely handknit Aran sweaters - maybe that made us look too much like tourists. Far from being foreigners, it turned out that one of the hostesses brothers is married to a cousin of C's whom he hadn't seen for almost 40 years (and being a kid at the time, he didn't even remember that), and one of her sister's best friends is someone we know quite well and whom C often used to call in to for a cup of coffee if he was driving through her area. Lots of singing and music - shame I didn't know in advance or I'd have tucked my flute in along with C's guitar.


The last time I can remember being on the beach here was when I was in Irish College one summer - and my main memory is that there was such a large amount of jellyfish in the water that swimming was not a very enticing prospect! No jellyfish this time, but though our friend kept hoping the sun would appear, it stayed grey and overcast all afternoon.






The people walking back in from the sea had just been helping to release some seals. We arrived just too late, although we did see one who was reluctant to swim out to sea. In fact, when we were having a cup of coffee later, someone came into the hotel bar to see could he find anyone from the seal sanctuary, as the seal was still there just a few feet from the shore.


A not very good photo of the seal - my zoom lens was in the car because I was only anticipating panorama shots, and C was not inclined to go back for it. I've left the foreground in, because where the water is curling is actually the shoreline - with wellies you could easily have walked out to the seal.

Salambos, profiteroles...and birds

We had a busy weekend - it was C's father's 90th birthday last week, and there was a family meal on Saturday. I was asked to make a dessert, so I thought I'd make profiteroles. And just for a change I made some of them as Salambos à l'Orange. It's the same choux pastry buns, but you used caramel to top them (being careful not to burn your fingers when you're dipping the buns into the hot caramel) and filled with an orange flavoured cream; the finely grated zest of one orange crushed with a couple of spoons of sugar and a bit of orange juice or an orange liqueur like Cointreau or Grand Marnier, folded into stiffly whipped cream. I had more orange cream than I needed, so some of the regular profiteroles had orange filling too - very nice with the chocolate sauce.
Our little robin is still hanging around. These photos were not even with the big zoom, I was able to get quite close. C was amazed one morning when he was out to see how close the little robin will come. Speaking of which, I'd better go and fill up the feeder, I didn't have time to do it this morning.

Timeless

The photo challenge this week on SCS is "Timeless". This photo, being about 12 years old, is not eligible, but when I was thinking about the theme this morning, and about the Botanic Gardens, this photo came to mind.



It was taken in the chateau grounds at Villandry. Villandry isn't one of the chateaux you visit to see the castle, particularly. It's the gardens that are the real show-stopper. And strangely, for the official website, the photos in that link are a bit disappointing. There are nine square formal beds, planted totally with vegetables, using proper crop rotation. They are quite amazing to see - I'll have to scan and post a couple of my better photos. We took the car to France that year, and stayed part of the time with friends, and then took off on our own and camped around the Loire Valley. We had to specially buy a roof-rack; we knew that our friend F was going to take advantage of coming back to Ireland in a car to bring stuff that she couldn't normally manage on the plane or as a foot passenger. My last photo from the holiday is C trying to load everything into the car - the fact that we now had two guitars instead of just one added considerably to the volume.
I love this dog statue, gazing out over the garden with his patina of lichen.
And while I'm on the theme, here's an even older dog photo. This was taken a couple of months before we got married, so 22 years ago - so not the best photo. My last job in the UK before I came back here was in Brodsworth Hall, when it was still a private home. It looks as if it was just the next year that English Heritage took it over. The greyhound (?) sculptures were at the bases of each flight of steps down into the garden - you can just about see in the photo on the website :D.

More Greek memories

Nothing special about this - it was our local beach in Argassi - all of about 3 metres in some places, nothing in others. The ruined bridge you've already seen used to be on land, and there were a couple of other ruined walls in the sea too - parts of old churches, I think. I liked the colours in this...

We spent a lot of time trying to find an aqueduct quite near us. We did find it on our last full day - we found this little church on one of our many false trails...

One of the areas we drove through where there had been a fire...



A view over Zakynthos port from halfway up the hill behind it. It's actually quite a busy port, there were always ferries coming in and out, and the occasional cruise ship.