The refrain is familiar to anyone who has been on the most beautiful of all Mid Wales train lines from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth.
We went there on this sunny Bank holiday weekend. Continue reading
Go to the Netherlands on Queen’s Day. Get free Orange Tompou.
I don’t remember the last time I tried to grow a vegetable.
Some years ago I won a minor giveaway and got a Howies organic t-shirt (ooh, posh) which says “grow some… vegetables” on it. Despite being super-comfy and one of my favourite t-shirts I have always felt a little pang of irony that I am not doing what my t-shirt (albeit tongue-in-cheekly) exhorts others to do.
Well, tonight I planted 24 onion bulbs.
I was told the compost wanted a good soaking, but we are now hoping that it isn’t going to be too wet for them and lead to them rotting before it drys out a bit.
Also in the pipeline are: leeks, potatoes, broccoli/cauliflower (Romanesco doesn’t know what it really is – one pack of seeds say one thing, another says the opposite), garlic and peas. We are expecting challenges with rabbits and pigeons so are trying to grow mostly things that either won’t like or can’t reach. But they’ll need netting over them too!
A little trailer for the timelapse video I am making of our new place.
The tour de force will be a clip of the whole seasons changing from our window. I’m taking the same photo every morning and will make them all match up and hopefully show the spring bringing the trees to life.
We have got our first bit of planting done. Some seed trays are now pregnant with sweet peas and ox-eye daisies.
I saw this out of the window. From looking at some guides we think it is a kestrel.
P.S. This is also a test of embedding a Skydrive photo into a blog post. It would be ideal if I could do this rather than uploading photos again to my own website. Unfortunately so far I can only work out how to use the default embedding which gives this small image.
Update: I have worked out how, by not using the ‘embed’ feature but just grabbing the ‘original’ url and making the photo public, I can put in a full-size image.
This is the view from our back door tonight. That is, if you have eyes which can take a 30 second long exposure at 1600 ISO and have the contrast and sharpness cranked up in Photoshop afterwards. It also features some of the fuchsia bush which Louise took a saw to yesterday and is now not quite the dominant feature of the garden which it had become. Also some daffodils.
In ‘real life’, while waiting for the long exposure to do its thing, I couldn’t see most of the stars that appear in the photo. Which is all the more amazing really.
Now that the clocks have changed and the evenings have some light in them the cycling season comes to life. For me anyway.
My local club runs a training ride on Tuesdays in the summer. The first one was last night.
Offt.*
It’s hard work to keep up, even with the slowest of the three groups which set of in intervals, with the aim of finishing at much the same time. I tend to get dropped off the first group part of the way around, scooped up by the second group for some high-speed cruising, then dropped by them and thoroughly blown past by the ‘scratch’ or fastest group.
Last summer I managed to get, after many weeks of consistent effort, to a point of being able to start off and stay with the second group.
This week my time for the 41km training route was 1:21:07. Plenty of room for improvement there.
With just under four weeks until the Düsseldorf unicycle marathon I hope I can get a good bit of extra power.
* As they say around here.
Our new house has a fire place. This was no small part of why we liked the look of it, and it has allowed me to indulge the Monty Python career dream that I suspect many of us have somewhere inside. Continue reading
It has been a while since I tried to do anything like a blog. I’ve used a few sharing services like Twitter, Flickr and Google+ to lesser or greater degrees but have missed having my own little space for them to point back to.
Today is Easter Saturday. The lull in the eye of the Easter liturgical calendar storm.
I’m saying its a day for a tiny bit of resurrection. Continue reading