Missing pics and wildlife

One of the missing pics!

Sometime after 2011 I had a computer die on me. That wasn't so bad, because it was easy enough to replace it ( at great cost, I might add!) but it took a lot of photographs with it and I thought I'd lost them forever. 

Some I probably have, but today I was looking for inspiration and checked my blog for 2011 and found I'd written about our trip north to Ullapool and then to friends in Banchory in the Cairngorms. I'd included pictures! There were many of the missing photographs, so I saved them immediately before I lost track of them again!
Such a small thing, but it really made me happy. 

It looks like we're going to have a third day of hot weather  18-20 degrees. One hardly knows what to wear. It was just above freezing last week. One effect is the gardens have sprung into life - everything is green and sprouting, and the birds are dashing about building nests. Unfortunately our thrush gave up on the nest he built in the blue cedar. Maybe we made too much noise, or our neighbour sat too close to the fence (only about a yard from the nest) or one the many neighbourhood cats chose to walk along the fence top and peer into the nest - anyway, he's gone, leaving one abandoned blue egg. We do have a balackbird in the ivy close to the patio windows and can watch him dashing in and out with mud and moss in his beak. We think there's another nest in the leylandii around the side of the house. 

We've had no frogs in the small sink this year, so no tadpoles to watch. There are wasps in the eves. We see mice occasionsally - one is acrobatic enough to shimmy up the six foot pole to reach the bird table and snaffle the peanuts. Another sort of wildlife lives in the gardens though - a neighbour called in the pest control man because she had seen rats running along under the leylandii. It seems our compost bin was the attraction, plus all the bird food that gets put out around here. (Not just us, I hasten to add) Anyway our compost bin is no more and the body of one young, dead rat was found. A short life for him. Seems those neighbourhood cats are not earning their keep!

A typical morning

Today I was woken at 4.30am by dh claiming "The dog's being sick."
Just what you want to hear as you come hazily out of sleep. Staggered into dressing gown and downstairs with said pooch, opened the door into the garden and out scooted Tim. You may be interested to know that at that time of the day, this far north in the UK, we had a clear blue sky and a vague hint of sunshine. The birds were singing all around the garden. I caught sight of a snail still munching on my new lupin, so it joined its pals in a plastic container.(I caught three last night doing similar things) (Reminder to self: they're still in that container and need to liberated on the field.)

So, pooch was not sick, but - look away now if you are squeamish - defecated in three different spots in the garden. (Not to self: still to be bagged and cleared away.) He tried to eat the plastic container holding the snails, and when deprived of that, sat by his food bowl with one paw raised and offering an angelic expression.

I gave him a few biscuits and staggered back up to bed. Tim went to sleep immediately (dh wasn't even awake at this point) while I lay and thought Oh My God - it's Puppy School in three hours time.

Jacarandah in the park

We’ve walked our socks off in the last few days. Tuesday saw us bussing into Sydney and walking via Circular Quay to the Royal Botanic Gardens where we debated going into Australia House – free – and decided we’d save that for when it rained. We walked around Farm Cove to the Domain and out to the headland in order to find Mrs Macquarie’s Chair. Mrs Macquarie used to walk to the headland every day to watch the ships sailing in and the soldiers carved a chair out of the sandstone rock for her. Click and you’ll find more details of Lachlan Macquarie than you ever wanted to know.

Unfortunately, three coachloads of Chinese tourists were there to visit the chair, and every single one of them had to have their photograph taken sitting on it – we managed one picture as the last of the Chinese left and with one eye on the approaching hordes from the next tour bus. We left and walked through the gardens, stopping for coffee on the way, then went to find the Mitchell State Library of New South Wales. http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/ A splendid new building, all space, glass and light. I must admit I was awestruck.

Wednesday night we ate at Ivan and Lissie’s Tea House on Union Street in North Sydney. We ate Nasi Goreng which in Indonesian means "fried rice" but is so much more than that. It was delicious and we ate every scrap.

Daisy delight

I love these big, splashy daisies. When I sit on the patio and look through them, they seem like a forest of daisies, a wonderful world all of its own.



It seems everyone is on holiday, or else they're all laid low with 'flu, swine or otherwise. Usually I am on holiday along with everyone else, but not this year. At least staying at home has given me time to enjoy my garden all through the summer instead of missing almost a month and coming back to find a jungle and the birds have eaten all the raspberries.

Trouble is, you have to be quick to catch the sun in among all the rain we've had this summer.
We've learned to drop everything and go when ever it appears. We've also become very canny at
hopping on a bus , getting off at some previously unexplored point and walking home, map in hand.

Today we got the bus up the hill, walked across South Park fields and down through Stanleyburn Woods tot he golf course. Delightful. Quiet, pretty and no sound of traffic which is difficult to achieve in this day and age in a relatively small country like the UK. We saw only one person the whole walk, and that was for a split second as he veered off in another direction. Just one thing - I'm so glad we did it south to north. The uphill gradient the other way around would have killed me!


Reluctance is finished and now it is re-read and find all the mistakes time. The words the computer mysteriously edits without your knowledge or permission. The missing letters that turn a vital SHE into an irrelevant HE. The bits you've somehow included twice over and not necessarily because it was so darned good. And worst of all, the bits that you thought you had included and somehow just are not there.