More cherries…

Posted on July 6, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Branches, Cherries, Cherry tree, Food, Fruit, Gardening, Life, Nature, Plants, Sunny, Sweet, Tasty, Tree, UmbrellaLeave a comment

Used a hoe to pull the branches down and caught all these cherries in a brolly today. It was sunny for a couple of hours and the wind had dropped so we took the chance and dodged the rain showers. Picked loads, but there are loads left on the tree.

Now I’ve got to decide what to do with them. I might add them to some gin. Or I could make cherry pancakes.

This is a glut of cherries. If we were not in lockdown I would be sharing them with friends. It’s the biggest crop we have ever had from the cherry tree. If I could freeze them I would but I think they would spoil.

Cold and grey

Posted on July 6, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Col, Fun, Grey, Heat, Ocean, Poem, Poetry, Rhyme, Sea, Sunshine, Warmth, WeatherLeave a comment

Cold and grey, day

Not got much to say..

Yet,

Grey as it can get?

You bet.

Till tonight’s sunset?

Maybe

We will see

Unless the sun does shine

Fine.

Then happiness will be mine.

So clouds roll away please,

Give us warmth and ease

Some pleasure we can seize

Till we can visit seas

And oceans.

Give us notions

Of calm and peace

Please.

Windows

Posted on July 5, 2020 Posted in Cat, UncategorizedTagged Black and white photo, Cat, Heart murmur, Life, Photo, Surgery, Time, Ultrasound, vets, Windows5 Comments

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Sitting in my car on a sunny day. Waiting for an appointment with the vets. They had to phone me while I was outside because I wasn’t allowed inside with my cat. The problem was that my phone signal wasn’t good. I was ten foot away from the vet and she couldn’t hear me! I stood outside the car and shouted, she still didn’t hear me. But I know the layout of the surgery. Beyond the door is a short corridor, at the end is the consulting room. If she had opened the consulting room door, she would have heard me. Meanwhile my cat was quiescent in his travelling bag. We’ll, eventually the vet came out. The cat was carried in. Then half an hour of waiting. That’s when I took this photo.

Next stop? Ultrasound scan on his heart next week as he has a heart murmur. Also antibiotic liquid, that was fun. It took ages, but I got him to take it in cat milk. Cats don’t know what’s good for them!

Fingers crossed he will be a bit better when he has the scan.

Posted on July 5, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Bees, Blogging, Earth, Ecology, Flowers, Insecticide, Insects, Neonicotinoids, Plants, WorldLeave a comment

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Bees…

Apparently they are more and more at risk. Bees pollenate the vast majority of flowering plants on the Earth, and their counterparts including hoverflies are also under threat.

What with? Insecticides, that are used to control insect pests. These include Neonicotinoids that have been found to disorientated bees (as well as killing them) so they cannot find food. Without them we would not have fruit and vegetables. But unfortunately big pharmaceutical companies keep wanting to sell insecticides. There have been court cases that stopped their use. But they fight back.

If only we could use non invasive alternatives. Biological treatments that would eat pests. Like nematode worms, for instance. The problem is humans need quick solutions to save crops from things like locusts. But I think we should use these things sparingly. There are many ecological and moral questions and problems. I hope we can sort it out.

Playing with photos again.

Posted on July 5, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Art, Design, Duplication, Facebook, Fun, Images, Instagram, Mirroring, Photo, Photos, Playing2 Comments

Take a dramatic photo, mirror and duplicate it, and you can get some interesting effects.

These were done in the layout app I downloaded. It’s linked to Instagram and Facebook so you can post your results to the feed of both of those platforms.

Yard sale at cherished chimneys.

Posted on July 5, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Cherished Chimneys, Chimneys, Delphiniums, Gardening, Lavender, Longport, Pelagonium, Plants, Reclamation yard, Staffordshire, Stoke-on trent, Yard saleLeave a comment

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Cherished Chimneys at Longport, Stoke-on-Trent is a reclamation shop which specialises in chimney pots and tea pots. They were selling cups and teapots, chimneys and books, plants and beautiful ceramic decorations for roofs.

We bought a chimney stack and a zinc bucket for planting up. I want to plant the delphiniums we got in one of them. I also bought a lavender plant and a pelagonium. When I’ve tidied up the yard I will post photos, but I need to cut back the neighbours bramble / blackberry bushes that are growing through our side of the fence. I don’t mind the ones with flowers on as I can pick the fruit later in the year.

Light

Posted on July 5, 2020 Posted in Sketching, UncategorizedTagged #uskstoke, Art, Colour, Drawing, Felt pens, Light, Permanent markers, Sequins, Sketching, Urban Sketchers, Usk Stoke-on-TrentLeave a comment

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Urban sketchers Stoke-on-Trent challenge today, Light. I had got some new permanent markers so decided to do something colourful. I did use a fine liner pen and a 6b pencil. Also used an almost dried up pale blue felt pen to add some shading to the window frame. The standard lamp has a lampshade covered in sequins. (speckles on the drawing). There will be another challenge in a couple of days. I wonder what it will be….

Ride a white horse…

Posted on July 5, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Ditties, Fun, Getting old, Humour, Memories, Nostalgia, Nursery rhymes, Old memories, Opies, Poems, Random2 Comments

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Ride a white horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.

I’ve started to remember old nursery rhymes…

See saw Margary Door,

She shall have a new master

She shall earn but a penny a day.

Because she can’t work any faster.

They just popped into my head. They are things I used to recite or sing to myself when I was about six or seven.

I’ve asked my hubby and he remembers

“if you stand on a nick, you’ll marry a brick and a beetle will come to your wedding’.

And ‘I wish I was a wooly worm, with wool upon my tummy, into a honey pot I’d squirm, and make my tummy gummy!,”

Nostalgia!

There was a couple, Mr and Mrs Opie that collected them and they lived in Salford, near Manchester, England. There is a whole collection of this type of verse there. I only remember this vaguely. They worked out that a rhyme could travel from the south up to the north of the country (Britain) in a week because of children repeating them. If I remember rightly. But I am getting older.

Deleting old photos.

Posted on July 4, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Deleted files, Image, Mb and Kb, Mixed up, Phone memory, Picture sizes, Settings, Thinking, WordPress2 Comments

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Every so often I delete old photos off my phone. Then all the photos that are left get mixed up and I discover old photos like this one that I really like! Basically I do this because the photos are taking up most of the phones memory. I have thousands of pictures. Today I got rid of a couple of hundred old pictures of grey skies and trees. And I also got rid of duplicate images because when I post to Instagram it saves an extra picture.

Another issue is that my phone camera takes Megabyte, not kilobyte sized pictures. It means that when I save them to WordPress the media files take up a lot if space. I’m on about 78% on my plan, and I expanded that earlier in the year. So, how do i reduce my file sizes without losing image quality? The answer is I let my anti virus software review the pictures and replace them with smaller versions. It doesn’t stop my phone taking large files though and I would like to find out how to do this. Must be in settings somewhere….

Sorry if this is boring…

Drawing in April

Posted on July 4, 2020 Posted in Sketching, UncategorizedTagged #uskstoke, Art, Drawing, Food, Life, Lockdown, Nerves, Nervous, Sketch, Tense, Thinking, Time, Two months later?2 Comments

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22.4.20, about a month into lockdown. I wonder what was going through my mind? I don’t think I was as nervous then as I am now. I was thinking about food. Now I’m thinking about not going out, despite the pubs opening up carefully and hairdressers and other non essential shops. Do I feel like going out? No, I think this is too early. Especially where alcohol is involved. I’ve seen groups of four or five men walking past the house, looking like they are off for a ‘good night out’.

What can I say. I understand people need to escape. I feel so tense I’m shaking. How do refugees and people in war torn areas survive? We are lucky. The problem might cause massive problems with wealth but I want people to be safe and survive this. Ah well, maybe I will do another drawing x.

Mallaband-Brown

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