*phew*

Computer is fixed - well, for now at least. Hurray for My Beloved and his tech skillz! I finally got to look at my holiday photos and thought I'd mention the day we went to Kellie Castle, which is an NTS property fairly near Pittenweem, should anybody be in the vicinity. The kids were fairly unimpressed with it as a castle and to be fair it's really more of a tower house with bits added - to them a castle is something like Stirling Castle or Bothwell castle, spoilt brats that they are! I'd been there once before, years ago when I was a student and my parents were visiting and took me out for the day. It was the middle of winter and only the garden was open, but even at that time of year the garden was enjoyable to visit. To see it in August was pretty amazing. It's just my kind of garden - masses of plants, new things to see around every corner, and a formal structure with enthusiastically informal plants.

We wandered around for ages and to be honest I could have stayed for a lot longer, but the kids' patience in gardens is limited. So far.

*sigh* Not much to say, I'm just enjoying looking at the flowers again! I should have taken my good camera with me but I was already laden with other stuff (sun hats, sunglasses, umbrella...) so just had my little compact camera in my pocket. It's an excellent little camera but has acquired a mark on the lens that I can't remove and I assume is a scratch, so some of the pictures appear a bit smudgy in the middle.

After we'd mooched round the garden for a while we went and found the adventure playground, small but excellent, and the kids were able to burn off some energy. Then we headed in to look at the house itself. Miss M, thankfully, decided to do one of the picture quizzes which was great because it really slowed her down and let us have a proper look. It's an interesting house and worth taking slowly.

And that's it really! A nice day out, especially as it was sunny and the garden was looking beautiful.

In which Terrible Things have happened (disclaimer: not really)

Oh dear, a whole month off blogging. Well, that was unintentional, but mostly a result of it being the school holidays and me just not getting much time on my real computer as opposed to my tablet, which is not ideal for blogging from. Alas and alack, that's what I'm having to do just now because Real Computer has succumbed to something which Heroic Tech Husband, aka My Beloved, may be able to fix or maybe not.  And as my typing is rubbish on a tablet pkease ignore any weird typos, or enjoy them, as you please!

We spent last week in St. Andrews and I have a squillion photos I uploaded to Real Computer on Saturday night, but which I didn't actually get a chance to look at properly before it shuffled off this mortal coil - so frustrating, and thus is the reason that this post is illustrated with the three bits of seaglass that were in the pocket of my jeans and photographed in my garden using the camera on my tablet. The photos are safe because they're still on my camera card and will (should) have been saved to the computer's backup drive, but I can't see them on a sensible sized screen. Oh well.

The summer has been not great in terms of weather but pretty good fun otherwise I think. There was much pottering around and being lazy, and the kids and I had a few days in the Highlands with mum and dad, as well of course as the St.Andrews trip. Ah, St.Andrews, so many silly memories of that small grey town. The day we arrived coincided with the wedding of an old acquaintance to which loads of people I knew, including my brother, had been invited, so I got to spend an hour on the beach with two old friends I hadn't seen in decades (and my brother who I saw a couple of weeks ago) and caught up with another later on, and I've decided that if at all possible I'll go to the next reunion ball, sans kids, and catch up with people because Facebook's not quite the same. Unless the next reunion ball involves people handing each other postcards with 'why don't you play Candy Crush?' written on them and passing around comically cantankerous cats.

I have no idea if this post is readable, I can only see three lines of it as I type, and I'm usually a great one for re-reading as I go, so apoligies if it's gibberish. Normal service to be resumed, er, eventually.

light levels

I've been playing around with my camera some more thanks to a quick how-my-camera-works masterclass (or idiot's guide) from my brother. The fun thing about photography is that when you accidentally completely mess up the settings you can still get kind of pretty results, such as the over-exposed bee above, and the underexposed flower below (you'll see it better if you click on it, the white background on this page doesn't help).

Don't you think the bottom one looks like a book-cover? Some kind of gloomy literary fiction I think.

While tidying up yesterday I found the book I bought when I first got my camera - an Idiot's Guide or a For Dummy's one, can't remember, for my particular model of camera. So I've been flicking through it, reading bits that seem relevant. I should probably read it properly, cover to cover, though that I don't find that kind of book very easy to read to be honest, so probably dipping in and out and playing with the camera is my best bet.  Miss M is often a fairly willing model when she's in the right mood, as is Cat2, so I can play with different settings on more or less the same pose and see what works.

In other exciting news, I got my Open University course results yesterday and got a Distinction, which I'm really pleased about. I knew my assignments had been Distinction level, but the final big assignment which counted for half the course was not hugely enjoyable and I honestly didn't know how I'd done on it. Turns out I'm a really poor judge of my own abilities when it comes to assignments!

summery

I have things to blog about, I know I do - things flit through my head all day, so why do I go blank when I sit down in front of the keyboard? And it's a beautiful keyboard too! Darn.

Summer is happening - we've had actual warmth. My thermometer said 22.6°C today, which is far lower than further south but plenty warm enough for me, thank you very much, given that it's also horribly muggy. Poor Cat1 is a large boy with thick fur and has spent most of the day lying around. In honour of summer happening I bought myself a summery yellow stripey cotton scarf the other day, because I'm a sucker for yellow stripes and I still had birthday money to spend. I'm not sure yellow suits me but it makes me happy so I can live with that.

I have been knitting - thick cosy socks for Miss M naturally, just what everybody knits in warm weather. They're the ones I started back at the end of April-ish. The first sock was very quick but I just haven't been knitting much recently, too many other things on the go I suppose, so the second sock has been languishing at the toe stage (which, given that it's a toe-up pattern, isn't good). Miss M insists that the first sock is 'fine' but it's tight to pull over her heel so I'm doing the second one looser and fully intend to rip back the first one and reknit the heel when she's not looking. She has no idea how much her feet will have grown by the time it's cosy sock weather again! 

I think I need to sleep now..

Favourite Things

Raindrops on roses poppies (yes, the school holidays have started with torrential rain again)..

Whiskers on kitty..

Dum-di-dee, dum-dee,
Warm woollen mittens, maybe.

Er, can't remember.

Day One of the school holidays and aside from torrential rain, there has been shopping, pottering around, the making of optician's appointments, and, best of all, the receiving of a call from the dentist saying could I come back in so they could refund me because they'd accidentally overcharged me for my root treatment last week. I had no idea how much root treatment cost never having had it before and to be honest I was so spaced out at the time that they could have requested the contents of my bank account, a kidney and my firstborn and I probably wouldn't have noticed. But yay, refund!

So why the singing of Favourite Things? Because this evening I discovered that the freezer door was ajar, had been for some time, and its temperature was 8 deg C. So not so much of the freezing. All of which necessitated clearing everything out, chucking a whole lot of it out, and mopping the floor. And more than a little teeth-grinding, along with quite of lot of stomping around with sotto voce swearing.

Oh well.

Here's a rather brilliant favourite thing though:

My friend L in Vermont has been clearing out her late mother's stuff and has been rehoming all sorts of linens and things, including these beautiful boudoir pillowcases which have come to me. I need to make some small pillows/cushions to fit them, though they're so pretty that part of me would just like to frame them! I may be a total scruff but I do appreciate the pretty stuff too.

day four in the garden

 Pond buttercup

 Sea pink

Still sunny. Well, not now, it's eleven o'clock at night. But it was sunny, all day. It's all been a bit weird. There were loads of things I was going to witter on about but typically, now that I'm actually sitting down at the computer,  I can't think what they were. Ah well, enjoy the pictures!

three days of sunshine

Three consecutive days of sunshine. School sports day went ahead the other day and was a success (thank the weather gods - last year it had to be cancelled due to torrential rain). Miss M won the running and came second in the egg and spoon. The Boy, being uncompetitive, just had fun. I 'helped' on the PTA juice stall*  but owing to having been at the dentist for root treatment that morning and the numbness just wearing off, mostly what I did was entertain our Chair's baby daughter.

Today is glorious. I have been laundering and gardening, Cat 2 has been slinking and prowling, but thick-furred Cat 1 has been sleeping in a cool spot indoors almost all day. Yesterday he wouldn't go out until I hung the washing out and he could sit in the shade of damp sheets.  I don't know what he'd do in a hotter climate.

I have a mystery plant. Don't I always? It's doing very well but I don't have the foggiest what it is. For any experts/Dad, it's in the next two pictures and the 'flower' is about as big as my thumb nail:

* That's the Glaswegian use of the word juice, before you go thinking phrases like 'juice bar' and 'freshly squeezed'. 'Juice' is squash, 'fizzy juice' is a fizzy drink. The kids got squash and an ice-lolly. The parents got coffee or tea. I got a headache.