spawn, spring, other words beginning with sp* (*probably not really)

The frogs have spawned again! My Beloved's response to this was 'That's brave of them - the forecast isn't good' (apparently there is to be more snow, depending on which forecast you look at). I'm not sure if he thinks the frogs consult the weather forecast before embarking on following their reproductive instincts. In any case, frog spawn is pretty robust stuff.

However, delighted as I am to see evidence of new life in our garden, I'm back to the annual worry about tadpole welfare. Our pond is tiny and is currently pretty much filled with frogspawn and not much water, as despite various batches of snow we haven't had much actual rain recently, and I suspect the pond 'liner', a plastic tub, may be leaking. So I find myself hoping for plentiful April showers so that they eventual taddies have somewhere to actually swim, and considering installing another tiny pond. Maybe eventually I'll have a chain of tiny ponds across the garden. Actually this wouldn't take long. I bought a magazine the other day that had a supplement called something like 'tips for small gardens' and on opening it could only conclude that their idea of small gardens and mine do not even feature on the same Venn diagram, let alone overlap.

In knitting news, I finished the green hat I started in January, and also the camera pouch.

And now I'm knitting a shawl (the Age of Brass and Steam Kerchief) from some Malabrigo Rios which I got a while back. I have reached the stage of eternally long rows but I want it to be a proper shawl rather than a kerchief (not that I'm clear what a kerchief is, but it sounds small) so I'm adding at least one extra repeat, so there is some way to go. Good telly knitting though!

Talking of which, in the interest of doing things as a family, even if it's only watching telly together, we are currently working our way through all the episodes of Scrapheap Challenge available on All4. Miss M is mechanically minded and the Boy is keen on science in general, and we'd watched all the Mythbusters and White Rabbit Project episodes available on Netflix so we were really pleased to find Scrapheap as well. Inspired by all this we finally got round to trying the Diet Coke/Mentos thing last week - we completely forgot to take pictures, but they would have been rubbish anyway as we were falling about laughing!

More frogs

So this is the picture I took yesterday morning, with the amazing zoom, from an upstairs window:

The other two I took were slightly blurry but I'm more than happy with how sharp this one is. And then this morning I went out and had a look and there's another pile of spawn, though no sign of frog or frogs. Our pond is just a plastic garden tub sunk in the ground with gravel, aquatic compost and plants added. It's not big or fancy - in fact it's probably only about 50cm across - but year after year it gets spawned in. That's quite flattering when you're trying to make your garden wildlife friendly. As far as I know none of the tadpoles matured last year, but this year I managed to clear some of the old sludge and weed out of the water before the frog returned so there's a bit more space and I hope that will help. Although I read somewhere that frogs like shallow water and will even lay their spawn in puddles, which seems staggeringly short-sighted of them!

It turns out my blog-composing issue is in Firefox (probably an outdated version, though to be honest I can never see why something that always has worked should suddenly not work) but not in Chrome so I've used Chrome for this. It's very much easier than trying to post from my tablet, so I'm glad I figured it out.

Spawned

Frogspawned that is.

I can still post from my tablet but that means using the camera on my tablet, which is a shame because I took a picture of the spawning in action this morning with my actual camera. From the Boy's bedroom window, i.e. upstairs. The zoom on that camera is amazing! And I was really pleased with the pictures I got but I haven't time to mess with html just now so I'll just go with this one. Thus spake the Frog - Spring is happening!

In other news, I've been missing studying so I'm doing a free online course about moons (it's an OU one but I'm doing it via Futurelearn), and it's fascinating. I've had an interest in space and astronomy for a long time, and already had a favourite moon (Enceladus), but not much of a science background academically-speaking, so it's interesting and pushing me a bit. It's supposed to take about three hours studying time a week, but the first week took me much longer because there were some things to do with orbits that it took me a while, and some juggling of apples, to get my head around. The second week was more geology-related (what the moons are made of*, and craters) and I found that much easier, probably thanks to my dad's interest in geology. So I think the study time will very quite a bit from week to week.

I suppose I'd better go and feed the family now..

* Green cheese with a core of Stilton and a Brie mantle. Of course.

The Frog Returns

Well, I seem to be having problems posting to my blog from my computer, so apologies if this looking funny - but, yay, the frog is back! It seems I cleaned out the pond just in time and hopefully there's enough water in it for her! I do have a picture waiting to be added to this post but it doesn't seem to be letting me, for reasons I can't fathom yet.

Edit: I've finally added it the old-fashioned way of my youth, using actual HTML. And a chisel probably. I hope it looks okay. I'm off to whittle something..