Ma!

I actually thought I was too sleepy to blog tonight but Cat1 has fallen asleep on my legs as I sit at the computer so I may be here a while. And as I'm here, I'll show you pictures from a walk the Boy and I took this afternoon. It was a really lovely day (and why couldn't we have got weather like this yesterday morning during the eclipse, eh?), one of several lovely days this week and it's definitely feeling spring-like. We'd only been walking for five minutes when we heard bleating and as we came round a corner saw a field of ewes and lambs. The lambs were running around shouting 'Ma! Ma!' ('Look at me Ma!' 'Yeah, whatever' says Ma) and generally having fun.

We stood and watched for a bit then moved on.

The light was beautiful as it was quite late afternoon.

And we stopped and admired the view, noticed interesting things and took photographs. The Boy is excellent company on a walk.

Actually he's excellent company any time! I'm aware I tend to talk more about Miss M because she does more activities and is generally more outgoing, but in his quiet way the Boy is lots of fun too. He has a very quirky sense of humour! One of the best things about this week has been watching Stargazing Live, which they timed this year to coincide with the eclipse, and what's been even better has been watching it snuggled up with the Boy who has been keen on space for years. He'd watched bits of Stargazing Live in previous years but this was the year he started to really enjoy it and understand it - not all of it obviously, some of it's pretty technical and way over my head, but it's the enthusiasm of the presenters that carries it.

Ah, pretty good week! Apart from the bits at the dentist. We won't dwell on that.

eclipse day

So, a partial solar eclipse and despite the the almost inevitable cloud (this town is notoriously cloudy), I got a photo! The cloud thinned just enough for the sun to be visible. It's not a great picture compared with many I've seen, taken with a small compact camera and through a window, but I'm very proud of it.

I took quite a few pictures outside but it's difficult to capture the murkiness of a partial eclipse because the camera compensates for it - the one above is probably the best and that was earlier.  The west of Scotland is frequently overcast so in some ways it was like a particularly gloomy and murky morning, but I think the quality of the light is a bit different because the murk is not to do with dark rain-heavy clouds. I don't know if that's scientific but that's the way it seemed to me! One of my online buddies down south where they had clearer skies said that the birds did a second dawn chorus after the eclipse, but I don't think the birds here noticed the difference!

I took several pictures of these daffs in a pot in my garden during the eclipse, just to see if there's much difference (there isn't).  Later on though, in the afternoon, I got this picture of the frog in our tiny pond.

I spotted it yesterday but couldn't get a picture so I'm incredibly chuffed with how nicely it posed for me today. So there you go, solar eclipse and small amphibian in one day, what could be nicer?

Reasons To Be Cheerful

I've got to say, I'm struggling with Reasons To Be Cheerful this week. There are Reasons To Feel A Bit Swamped, Reasons To Be Mildly Anxious, Reasons To Need More Sleep, but.. Reasons To Be Cheerful? Well, it's not coming naturally. That's not to say I'm feeling depressed or anything, there's nothing wrong, I'm just Not Cheerful as such. I've even been Too Tired To Knit.

However, there are Reasons To Smile.

1) Watching Warehouse 13 - our new addiction. We'd seen the Eureka/Warehouse 13 crossover ('Crossing Over') so thought we'd try Warehouse 13 itself, and very enjoyable it is too. Fun programme with plenty of geekiness. Yes, just right. We've watched Seasons 1 and 2 in about a week and a half.

2) Daffodils. I have a pot of Tête-à-Tête daffs that I bought in a supermarket last year, and after they'd finished flowering the pot just sat in a corner outside the back door. I'd intended to re-plant the bulbs in the garden but the pot got shoved behind something else and forgotten about. Until a few days ago when I noticed green shoots coming up from that little pot. I brought it inside on Wednesday and on Thursday the first flower appeared! Yay!



3) Apple crumble. Mmmmmmmm.

4) Just thought of a fourth Reason. It was beautifully clear last night so the kids and I went out (well wrapped up, it was baltic out there) in the back garden to look at the stars just before bedtime. I've finally got round to buying a planisphere so we have more idea where to look and what we're looking at. The Orion nebula (fuzzy blob in Orion's sword) was more obvious last night - usually the light pollution here makes it hard to see - and the Boy was really pleased about that. Miss Mouse just likes looking for patterns and making up constellations! I also found our binoculars which was helpful - I can't see a thing through a telescope but if I shut one eye, binoculars work quite well for me.

hearts and stars

I made a heart yesterday. I'm not sure if it's a very small pin-cushion or if I'll attach a ribbon and hang it up somewhere (Miss Mouse has her eye on it - she wants it to be a pillow for her teddy, but it's really too small for that). The idea was to brighten up miserable January with a bit of colour, and I thought a few hearts in cheery colours might do the trick!

It was cold and clear on Sunday night so the Boy and I went out into the garden to look at the stars. We didn't have a hope of seeing the aurora as the glow of Glasgow is to the north of us, but we did get a good view of Orion and I was pretty pleased with myself for finding Cassiopeia. And as he was interested, yesterday I showed the Boy various aurora pictures online - some cracking ones on the Shetland News report and Paula Moss Photography. When I was a kid I used to find the northern lights a bit creepy - I remember standing at our door once watching it then having the urge to run back inside. It does look a bit like a dodgy special effect in a film I suppose! I do kick myself a bit now, that I lived in a place with reasonably dark skies (though the flare-stack at the oil terminal did affect that) and more opportunity for aurora-watching than most places in Britain, yet I didn't stand still, watch and make a point of remembering these moments. Especially when so many of my friends now I'm on the mainland say that they'd love to see an aurora. There's nothing like being irrationally irritated with your former self!

More reasons to be cheerful!

I'm always slow with my Reasons To Be Cheerful (Planet Penny usually starts the cheerfulness ball rolling on a Wednesday or a Thursday) so today I'm going to cram in three super-quick reasons while having my coffee, before going to get the kids from school.

*deep breath*

1) Stargazing Live - granted I didn't get to watch it actually live ('Kids! Go. To. Bed!') but either on delay or on iplayer, but ah, how I enjoyed it! Thought-provoking, funny, fascinating, intriguing. Shame it's so often cloudy here, particularly in January.
Oh, I took this picture last week on a clear evening (well, afternoon really).

I watched the 2nd programme on iplayer with the Boy yesterday and he was mostly fascinated and is quite keen that we take his telescope up to Granny and Grandpa's next time we go as we'll get more of a dark sky there.

2) Flowers! Yes, more :-D. My tulips are past their best now but I've hung onto them for their weird sculptural shapes and rich colours:

but I've also got some daffs! Excuse my excessive enthusiasm for a moment but I love daffodils - the colour, the shape, the smell:
.. the shadows they cast on themselves..

Buying flowers is a bit of an indulgence but so worth it when the sun comes out briefly and the windowsill just lights up with colour.

3) Shade cards:

That's the Jamieson's one

All those colours, all those possibilities! I've been playing about with knitters' graph paper this week, doing some Fair Isle/colourwork designs. It's not something I've really done before (the designing that is) but is very absorbing. I've got a few ideas in my head at the moment so the shade card, aside from being a thing of beauty in its own right, is a way of focussing the ideas a bit in terms of colours and how they work together. And seeing the colours is quite inspirational too. Sorry, went off in a daydream there..

Right, gotta go!

January splash of colour : fire

I have no pictures actually from today because I was out most of the day - I went into Glasgow to investigate the sales. Specifically I went to look at what wool was in the sale at John Lewis, and the answer is quite a lot and quite nice but nothing that I needed. Never mind - I do have plenty in my stash and several projects on the go already! So today's picture is from the other night.

It's cloudy here. Again (though the snow melted again over night so not all bad). One of the Boy's Christmas presents was a telescope - he is space mad - and due to a combination of that and Stargazing Live on the Beeb we're quite desparate to get out and look at the night sky. Except there is no night sky, just cloud. It's probably a little known fact to the majority of my friends that at university I was in the Astronomy Society (or Astrosoc). In fact I was VP one year, or was it for two years? - sounds impressive, but it mostly involved taking the minutes of committee meetings! I didn't understood a vast amount of the technical stuff at the talks, being an anthropology student, and some of the talks were very technical, but I suppose the interest in astronomy relates to the interest in anthropology - the night sky being such a rich source of myth-making for cultures everywhere.

Every now and then I get all enthusiastic again, often when there's a meteor shower, and I go and lie on a blanket in the back garden, wearing eighteen layers of clothes, trying to block out light pollution and find a gap in the clouds. What I should do is time my visits to my parents in the Highlands to coincide with meteor showers, taking twenty-eight layers of clothes and a flask of coffee out to the golf course or up the glen. I have never seen stars as clearly as I have in Badenoch - it's really phenomenal. Orion looks as if he's actually striding about the sky, whereas here his belt looks fairly clear and the rest are a bit difficult to make out. Even when I still lived in Shetland which you might think of as more remote there were problems with light pollution, such as the flare-stack at the oil-terminal! I did see auroras though - as a kid they freaked me out a bit, they are quite spooky.