Well, that was a long day!

Starting with being rudely awoken by two alarm clocks half an hour apart, only one of which was mine. I'm just not a morning person. But the sun shone (somewhat surprisingly - the forecast was for 100% cloud cover), and I even got out into garden briefly in the afternoon to take a few pictures, so not all bad!

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Blimey, that was a longish blog break wasn't it? I'd got quite good about blogging reasonably regularly too! But we had a long weekend up north visiting my parents, and since the kids went back to school after that I feel as if we've barely had a chance to draw breath. Phew..

So, Reasons To Be Cheerful - well 1) naturally is having a wonderful few days with Mum and Dad. Even better, my brother visited them for a few days just before us, so we overlapped by a few hours - it was the first time we'd all been there at the same time for several years.

The weather was pretty mild for the Cairngorms in February so we got some outdoors time.

Miss Mouse with Granny and Grandpa

Even some blue skies:

At Ruthven Barracks

It was surprisingly lush in places, such as on the roof of the playhouse in the playground at Revack Estate:

And the top of this fence-post just makes me think of tepuis - those amazing lush South American plateaus (plateaux?). It's a proper miniature Lost World:


2) Reason 2 is not unconnected to photography. Actually Reason Two is My Beloved, my tech guru, who has got new stuff for my 'puter (hard disk and I dunno what else), installed Linux for me, and and and has bought me a new compact camera to replace the one that I lost/was nicked. *happy sigh* The new camera is the newer version of my old one and is very nice indeed.

3) Reason Three is Pleasant Surprises in the garden:

I was mooching around in the garden on Friday, trying to get to get the cats back inside probably, and spotted a patch of blue in a pot. I thought it was a gale-shredded bit of the cover from the trampoline poles, but no, it was a flower. It's an iris, isn't it? My garden's a bit boring at this time of year - just some tiny snowdrops (pretty but easy to miss) and a few white crocuses - so this was such a Pleasant Surprise. Can't wait for the daffodils, but this'll tide me over for now.


So that's the last official Planet Penny Reasons To Be Cheerful. However as it's a while 'til the end of winter in these parts and there are likely many dreich days to come, I think I'll continue doing the odd Reasons To Be Cheerful post, just to keep myself going. Many thanks to Penny for thinking this meme up, it's been fun!

Burning yer boats

Hurray, January's finished! And it finished on a Tuesday meaning that last night was Up Helly Aa, always the last Tuesday in January, so I was over at my brother's house watching the webcast of the procession. There were technical issues (possibly at our end, or possibly due to the volume of viewers) so it was a bit laggy and the broadcast failed just as the torches were about to go into the galley, but despite that it was the next best thing to Being There. I took some more pictures of the tv screen (that one above is about the best) but they didn't come out well so I'll give you a link to some pictures on the BBC news website, and the Shetland News article on the event (if you scroll down to the bottom there's a link to Billy Fox's pictures of the day too). Considering that the procession and galley-burning is just the start of a very long night of celebration (one of my friends updated Facebook to say she was just off to bed at 6 o' clock this morning) it's very impressive that there are pictures online already.

So, that's January gone. Thank goodness. I lost my camera on Sunday. I think it fell out of my bag on the train into Glasgow. Nobody has handed it in to Lost Property at the station. I would if I found a camera, but perhaps I'm in the minority. I hope the git that's acquired it enjoys my pictures - my daughter posing proudly with her dance exam certificates, for example. I hope they're bored to tears by my photographs of apple crumble and of streetlight reflections on icy puddles. I'm a bit peeved. I'm using My Beloved's camera now and it's just not as good. *sigh*

February has started with my daughter's class assembly - their topic was Chinese New Year and they did an excellent presentation. It was lovely. They all looked so tiny, but there they were reciting quite complicated lines, and they all spoke so clearly and looked as if they were having fun. It cheered me up no end. Also it's a cold, clear sunny day, and that helps no end!

Splash of insomnia

I've had a bout of insomnia and have felt like a zombie - ironic really when Rogerborg shopped for a zombie apocalypse and failed to notice his own wife shambling around, blank-eyed (though admittedly not slurring 'braaainsss'). So I've not been capable of sensible blogging and missed the rest of January's Splash of Colour. Never mind, I'll add to it now - the day we took our Christmas decorations down and packed them away:


I'm always quite glad to take the decorations down again, though I love having them up for a bit. Before having the kids we used to put our decorations up quite late, but as the kids have got older we've done it earlier each year, so really by the time New Year has come I've had enough of it all! Bah, humbug, eh?

The big excitement of the week has been the arrival of my new camera - there she is:

I was quite ridiculously excited about this - I've really missed having a compact camera for everyday use and this is very much pocket-sized. I took loads of completely pointless photos that day, but here's one from a few days later when it had snowed again. I'm really pleased with the results from such a tiny camera.


This is about as creative as I've got during my zombie-stage - I just couldn't concentrate on knitting or anything else really. Thankfully I'm sleeping better now and feeling much more human, and even managed to do a bit more on my log-cabin blanket last night. Yay for sleep!

It was, of course, inevitable.

If I were a paranoid person I'd be getting suspicious about now.

Yes, we were given a packet of Marks and Sparks cupcakes. They are very pretty, and they taste okay. But they're just little cakey things aren't they?

Anyway never mind that. I am excited! And also feeling faintly guilty. I have ordered a new compact camera. Now I am lucky enough to have a really nice DSLR thanks to a bonus MrBorg got at work a while back - and it's brilliant (and actually I really should get the manual out and learn some more of its technicalities) but heavy. My five-year-old Kodak compact which I carried everywhere as my everyday camera finally gave up the ghost a few months ago. I took it to a place to see if it was fixable but unfortunately they said it would cost more than the cost of a new one to fix! And I was quite sad about this as it was a cracking wee camera that took a lot of abuse one way and another and had charted the adventures of the Boy since his nappy days, as well as covering the arrival of Miss Mouse. It did its duty alright. MrBorg took the opportunity to have a look at its innards - actually I was curious too.

There you go.

But after much searching through Amazon, various photographic review sites and so on, I managed to find something. This was very stressful - I got totally wound up with the details. Which is silly because my old camera being 5 years old, just about anything new I get is bound to be of higher spec than the old one. But anyway, it's on its way. I don't know when it'll get here but I'm hugging that Calvin-waiting-for-his-beanie feeling to me just now knowing it's on its way. I'm so excited. I hope I like it. I hope it likes me.

It's a quarter to midnight now and I have a 'hello from last year' e-mail to send to New Zealand, so Happy New Year faithful reader(s)!