Pears

Posted on July 21, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Food, Fruit, Garden, Gardening, Life, Nature, Pears, Photo, Ripe, TreeLeave a comment

This year we have a good crop of pears on the tree again, the tree almost fell over last year because of the weight of the crop. It now has a post unfer the trunk to support it. The pear cro is already ripening with the skin turning slightly yellow.

Our pears are usually quite big, we collect them in September generally, but they might be ready earlier than that.

With pears they are generally unripe, unripe, unripe, unripe, ripe, mushy. They go from being hard to soft virtually overnight. I’m thinking of poaching some of them. Should be nice.

It’s a tight fit!

Posted on July 20, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Back yard, Blogging, Colour, Flowers, Gardening, Hanging baskets, Life, Overgrown, Plants, pots, Random, Sunshine, TreesLeave a comment

The yard is now so full of flowers you have to walk sideways down it to see all the plants and water them. There is a great variation in leaf size. I noticed my hubby has snuck in a couple of oOak trees and an Ash tree. I keep telling him we don’t need anymore. I have a friend with a large field. She has offered to take our walnut saplings and I think she will take these as well.

As the season continues more mad things appear! Hubby has put irises in hanging baskets and sunflowers to bring more colour into the yard. Morning glory seedlings will go out this week if the weather picks up a bit. Some of them have started to throw out tendrils that are clinging to the ferns in the bathroom.

Second idea

Posted on July 19, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Art, Bright, College, Drawing, Experiment, Fireworks, Fun, Illustration, Life, Picture, VariationsLeave a comment

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Fireworks. That’s what this is called. This is my second variation using four initial A6 images on an A3 page. I played with the background I did yesterday, with more black ink, more shading, but I added iridescent white to brighten plus thin strips of paper to try and make little explosions to brighten it.

Next step may be to swap a couple of images. I might cut into one or two of them. We will see….

Masks

Posted on July 17, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Covid 19, Illness, Life, Random, Relatives, Take care, Thinking, Vaccine, Virus, Wash hands, Wear a mask2 Comments

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From Monday people will have to wear masks in shops here in England. That doesn’t bother me, me and my hubby have both been wearing face coverings of one thing or another since lockdown began.

What does bother me is the outcry against them. A Tory MP tore up his membership card because of it.

Now our Prime Minister is saying it could all be OK by Christmas!

This is after over 45000 deaths that have been attributed to Covid 19 since it arrived here.

I’ve had a couple of family members that have had it. One is still affected a couple of months later. They told me it’s nothing like a touch of flu. That it’s really bad, and they didn’t get it badly.

Now I’ve got one friend telling me it’s all fake, not real, all a conspiracy! Another said she wouldn’t have a vaccination or allow her daughter to have it. Why? Why would you put your granny, or uncle, or child at risk because you don’t believe in a virus? Why would you not wear a mask to protect others?

And why would you not take a vaccine if it was safe? When Edward Jenner came up with a vaccine for Smallpox maybe the people in his day were against it. But why now? How many people are alive today because they were vaccinated. In this age of Fake news we need to use our brains. Not believe the first thing that someone says on the Internet. We need to fact check maybe.

But most of all we need to be safe and wear a mask and wash our hands.

Carrier bags

Posted on July 17, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Austerity, Blogging, Carrier bags, Covid 19, Foodbanks, Help, Life, Peasants!, Poverty, Sad, Unfair, VolunteerLeave a comment

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I was asked to give some carrier bags to the local food bank today. I’m very bad at remembering to take bags with me when I go shopping and I didn’t want to throw them away to go in landfill.

I handed them over to a friend outside the local supermarket. She had started a couple of years ago getting almost out of date, unsold food, and dry goods. But as austerity had increased and now the devastating effect of covid 19,she has found herself getting food for people seven days a week! She is a volunteer and decided she must do something as the local Councillor is not at all helpful.

I asked her how she copes, she’s been ill recently, she says she just has to. She cannot give up on people.

I wish I had her commitment. All I did was hand over a few carrier bags. I have to ask why people are in this situation. How have we got to this. The sixth wealthiest country in the world? But cruel to people in poverty. Who are seen as useless and not worth the money. Another Councillor has called people from my city ‘peasants’ this week. Remind me to tug my forelock!

When did I become captain sensible?

Posted on July 16, 2020July 16, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Caring, Hubby, Illness, Life, Living, Mental health, Sensible, Thought, Time6 Comments

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I’d like to be silly, daft, funny, have a laugh. But recently I’ve had to become, as my hubby calls me ‘ captain sensible’.

The thing is I’m his carer. I don’t like thinking about it but he has mental health issues and I have to keep a level head to keep him safe. But I don’t like it. I have to negotiate with him when he has manic ideas. I have to think through what he can do. I sometimes feel like a jailer. And yet I’m being sensible. I don’t think he should go and find a newt and put it in the pond, or buy another three bicycles to add to his collection of ten he already has. Or come home with another tree for our wooded garden. Some things are simple negotiation. Others are confusing. He buys ornaments we don’t need. He spends money in one particular shop on stuff that’s basically junk. But he’s happy. But they must see him coming… I worry about some of the things he declares he’s going to do. I won’t discuss them here. I can’t describe the anxiety he goes through every day, over things I would call trivial. I try and hold it all together and then live my life on top of that..

Round the corner

Posted on July 16, 2020 Posted in Sketching, UncategorizedTagged #uskstoke, Art, Back yard, Drawing, Flowers, Gardening, Life, Plants, Urban Sketchers, Usk Stoke-on-TrentLeave a comment

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Today’s Urban sketchers challenge Stoke-on-Trent was ’round the corner’ so I drew the yard looking out of the back door.

The yard is full of hanging baskets and pots as you will have seen on a previous post. I guess I could have gone out and drawn the main road round the corner from my street. But this is a more pleasant view. Hard to draw all the leaves and flowers. You find yourself losing the detail as you draw more of them. I have to bring my mind back and fight against going into autopilot mode. Controlling where the pen moves instead of just scribbling.

Camouflage

Posted on July 14, 2020 Posted in Cat, UncategorizedTagged Abandoned, Black and White cats, Blogging, Camouflage, Cats, Family cat, Golden eyes, Life, Lovely, Photo2 Comments

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Cat hiding, but not very well. His eyes give him away. Golden and gleaming. He’s getting well fed and sleeps in the shed. I’m trying to get our own cats inoculated so they can go out in the garden and meet him. I hope they will all get on. Then he will have to go to the vets and be inoculated too. The plan is by winter this abandoned cat will be part of the family. We can’t get anyone else to take him in and he deserves a home. In the meantime he’s having a good life.

Zoom 🎶 singing

Posted on July 14, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Cheerful, Choir, Friends, Fun, Humour, Laughter, Life, Music, Online meeting, Random, Singing, Webinar, ZoomLeave a comment

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Last night we had fun trying to sing together as a group on Zoom. It was a laugh, we all tried to sing together but the delays on the line meant that most of the time we were badly out of sync with each other….

Then my cat jumped up and kept getting in the way. She was walking backwards and firwards in front on my camera, so I grabbed her for a couple of minutes, I must have looked like a Bond villan! My friend who was hosting the meeting, tried to play music for us to sing to, but we couldn’t here it. At one stage he had three screens and two mice and keyboards on the go trying to get it to work. I admired the effort as it was the first time he had tried to do it!

Next week we will have another go, but it might be best to mute everyone and just sing along with someone leading the choir. As it was we were too busy falling about laughing instead of trying to sing the tune. I’ve never heard Molly Malone sung like that except as a raucous chorus in a pub on a boozy night out. It was a fun night though with friends.

Water

Posted on July 14, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Ground, Life, Mineral water, Minerals, Rocks, Spring, Spring water, Tap water, Thinking, Time, Water, WateryLeave a comment

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I’ve just been reading a Facebook post discussing whether spring water is better than tap water, on the premise that tap water had more minerals in it.

I know that in Britain the water quality is regulated and that government checks that quality regularly.

Water from springs perculates through rocks with minerals in them. Over thousands or millions of years they pick up the minerals as they are dissolved by the water (rainwater will also contain dust particles from the air, and organic matter from the ground before it gets into the rocks). Then it depends on the geology. That’s why we have hard water and soft water. In some springs the water can be hot. Some were used by the Victorians as purgatives as they contained high levels of things like sulphur. They were used as cures and remedies, the idea being that they cleansed the body.

Modern tap water contains a few additives like fluorine. But in measured amounts. My dad used to call it ‘corporation pop’. Not dangerous.

Mallaband-Brown

Tag: Life