Oh, my aching feet!

Hello, y'all!

We've just returned from a week in Gothenburg (sorry I know that's the English form of the city's name, but I don't have the wherewithal to put in the correct spelling).

We had a smashing time. We went for the 6th International Conference on Urban Climate. We met lots of friends - I won't name them all, but I know that many of you will be interested to know that we met up with Gerald Mills who is hale and hearty and in fine form!

John presented a couple of papers and was in meetings most of the time, so I got to do a lot of wandering about and exploring. During the first couple of days, however, he had some free time and we were able to go about together. The atmospheric picture above was taken just before sun-set and shows one of the main streets of the town with a fountain/statue of Poseidon in the foreground and the towers of the central city in the background. As you can see there's a distinct haze over the city - IT WAS HOT!!!!! We waited for some time to see the sunset, but being that far north it took a lot longer than expected and eventually we left in search of more exiting things.

We found there were a lot of people out on the streets till very late at night. It didn't really get dark till after 11 pm and people stayed on in the outdoor cafes till long after that. This turned out to be especially true on World Cup nights. The night Sweden beat Paraguay the entire town seemed to be out celebrating - chanting, singing, yelling, driving around with horns honking. It was all very friendly and one didn't feel threatened at all - it was just noisy and fun.

John and I walked just about everywhere. And the only problem with that was the cobbled and uneven surface of the pavements (sorry, sidewalks). They really made your feet hurt! I did a little sketch of some of the cobbles one day when I was sitting down by the harbour.

The only time I took the tram was on my second visit to the Botanic Gardens when I was in the company of Janice Ching (I hope that's her last name - she's definitely married to Jason Ching and I never thought to ask if she had a different last name!). Taking the tram gave us more energy to walk around the gardens!

A brief aside here to mention that we had a late night coffee with the Chings early on in the conference and found out that they knew my cousins Peter and Brenda Saunders from the days when they were all at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. What a small world it is!

I really enjoyed the Botanic Gardens. The picture to the left is of the nature reserve part of the gardens. This was wooded with little streams and masses of little white flowers. The more formal part of the gardens was lovely as well. The beds are immaculate and the range of plants very good. We hit the gardens at a particularly beautiful time, I think. I was most impressed by the "Paper Handkerchief Tree" and was able to find the names of several of the plants in my own garden.

Other highlights of the trip included dinners and receptions, with one reception at the very beautifully decorated city hall. However, I think the most interesting was a dinner at Universeum. This is a science museum and we took an after hours tour which included a piece of the South American rain-forest complete with birds, fish and insects, dinner in a hall with sharks swimming alongside us and best of all for me a petting tank where we were able to stroke various rays. These fish actually seemed to like being stroked and scratched. They would swim around the sides of the tanks and wiggle their "wings"! If you put your fingers in the water they would swim up to you and rub against them and they allowed you to touch their backs and underparts. I didn't know that rays had rough skin till I touched it. What a thrill!

On the last afternoon and evening there was a paper session and dinner party to celebrate Tim Oke's retirement. John presented a paper summarizing Tim's contributions to Urban Climate - wow! The dinner was in an indoor market - the food was smashing and the company fun.

And so, it was time to come back. And what did we find? ............. a completely different garden. The late spring stuff had died off - rhododendrons all gone, forget-me-nots turning to seed, poached-egg plant over and done with - and the early summer stuff coming on like a riot!

I was delighted to see the first day-lilly blossom. I associate day-lillies with our time in Columbus. We seem to have lots of them ready to burst into blossom, but I don't know what colors they'll be yet.









Foxgloves are everywhere, especially on the bank of the stream. Along there they are accompanied by daisies, grasses and hypericums and they look like they're in a summer meadow.










And of couse, we can't forget the roses - white ones, pink ones, orange and red - full of scent and varying from the simplest of wild forms to heavy multi-petalled beauties. They're all lovely - scrambling over trellises and trees, cascading down from the bank and just growing in bushy mounds. They should be at their peak in a week or two when Chuck and Hazel come to visit.

Well, that's all for now - gotta go and unpack!

Stay in touch, please!

Summer is here at last!

I wish I could say that I could see this view right now, but I can't. However, summer has really arrived and it's hot for the U.K. There's a haze over the valley this morning and the sun is hot on your skin when you go out .

Out in the garden there is a stillness which we haven't seen before. There's very little wind and although the birds are singing and the bees are buzzing around, things seem very quiet. The stream has quieted down too - we haven't had any rain for a couple of weeks.

Our blue tit family are coming on in their house on our patio. They moved in almost as soon as we put it up. It's a bird house that my Dad put up originally at Ladycroft Walk, and it's really old. But it must be comfortable for blue tits because it's been used by many, many families over the years. It's now covered in Virginia creeper and totally invisible, but we can hear little squeaks from the house and the two adults are busy bringing food. This is good as there are a lot of insects and caterpillars that I need removed from my flowers!

We have a splendid show of rhododendrons right now - one of them must be 20 feet high and almost as wide. It looks like a huge waterfall of mauve blossom.

The lawn is a mass of buttercups (yes, I know that means that the grass is suffering and we'll pay for it later, but it's so pretty!). And there are yellow punctuation marks throughout the garden from buttercups and Welsh poppies. The overall color scheme uses the bronze, purple and pink pallette, so the yellow of these "weeds" really makes it pop!

In another couple of weeks we'll have a crop of gooseberries (if the birds don't get to them first). They're big and plump, but they are still hard so we have to wait a bit longer. We may also get a few strawberries to mix with the last of our rhubarb if we're lucky.

Last week we paid a visit to my old school chum Georgie and her husband Peter. They live in an updated row of quarrymen's cottages about 2 hours north of here. Their house is lovely, with a smashing garden and a view of almost the whole Cheshire plain. We had a lovely visit with some reminiscence, lots of walking, eating and drinking. We're hoping they can join us for a bit of walking and visiting in the fall, but they have busy lives and so do we, so it is sometimes quite hard to get our calendars to match up!

Joy came over this weekend. John was working on a paper so we two "girls" took advantage of the hot and sunny weather and rode off in her open topped car to visit one of our local stately homes - Attingham. It was good fun. We took the tours and learned about riches, corruption and bankruptcy in the Regency era!

To return to the picture of the palm trees. This is something I painted last night at art class. We're really just practicing with watercolor washes, but once I had the orange and yellow "sky" I couldn't resist putting in the palm trees!

The art class has been fun. We're learning techniques at present. First it was using pencils. It's amazing! We've all used pencils since we were little, but you actually have to learn how to use them to draw and shade things.

Now we're learning how to use watercolors. I'm actually quite exited about this and hope to be able to produce a competant piece of work at the end of it. I've never thought of myself as much of an artist, but I do think I'm a craftsman and I should be able to master the craft of drawing and painting.

The hard part is getting the creative ideas and putting them into a drawing, painting or sculpture. I've been hard pressed to have any creative ideas, let alone realise them in the last couple of years.

I did sit down with a pepper mill a few weeks ago and spent several hours working on this drawing. I'm quite pleased with the shading even though the shape is a little off. >

Newsy Bits!

I've just added two posts with pictures of stuff in the garden. I hope that satisfies those of you who are interested in how the spring is progressing over here.

In fact, it's still beastly cold. After a lovely few days of warm sunshine, the rain came back along with a bitterly cold wind. The stream is rollicking along in the way it did last winter - it's lovely to hear the water, but it's a constant reminder of all the rain we've had.

My thumb is a lot better now. I didn't understand that trigger finger is yet another variation on the inflamed tendon theme. Now I know that, I realise that the only way to make it better is to rest it. So all the exercise I gave my thumb was just making it worse. Keeping it splinted for a couple of days allowed the swelling to go down and it's far less sore now. It still "triggers" in the morning and the evening, but I can put up with that. Since the alternative is stopping Arimidex and raising the risk of a recurrence of the breast cancer I don't really have much choice anyway.
We've visited some interesting places lately. Last weekend, with Nancy, we took a walking tour around Shrewsbury. I didn't realise how many old half-timbered buildings there were, nor did I know that Shrewsbury has it's own style of such buildings characterised by rope carvings and recessed quatrfoils. Anyone who's interested and wants to know more can write or visit!

We also took Nancy to Wroxeter, to the site of the Roman town there. All that you can see are the foundations and some of the walls of the bath house, which was a huge basilica about the size of a football pitch. The town itself was huge, but most of it remains unexcavated. It was the 4th largest Roman town in Britain.

This weekend we went to a craft show at Dudmaston Hall near Bridgenorth. It was sunny during our ride there over Wenlock Edge and we enjoyed the countryside and the lovely views. The Hawthorne is in full bloom now so the hedgerows are draped in lovely white blossom. Along the sides of the roads the bluebells and primroses are mostly gone, but there is lots of cow parsley (very similar to Queen Anne's Lace) with its delicate ferny green leaves and large umbels of white flowers.

It was a small show, but we enjoyed it - met and talked to some very nice crafts people and bought a few items for the house. The quality was very good, especially in the tents put up by the Ludlow and Shropshire Crafts organizations. We had lunch outside the hall but didn't visit the house or gardens, although they looked quite interesting. We'll do that on a weekday when it's less crowded.

Well, that'll do for today. Keep those e-mails coming to: joanarnfield@gmail.com.

More Garden Pictures

After I deleted the first set of pictures, I decided to load them up in two attempts. This way, if one fails I haven't lost all my work!

To continue, this stunning Broom is up against the southeast corner of the house. We can't walk down the pathway, but who cares?

Another magnificent specimen is this tree heather. We actually have two of them. The foliage is acid green and the flowers are white.

And now for something completely different - the Poached Egg Plant. This is supposedly an annual which has just come out on our rock garden. If it really is an annual it must be self seeding. I hope so, I really love those blossoms and would hate to loose it.

We have rhododendrons and azaleas in various shades of red, blue, violet, purple and pink. This is a close-up of a particularly pretty one.

Garden pictures

I just uploaded a bunch of garden pictures and then managed to delete them all! So now I'm trying again - grrrrrrr!

This Clematis is massed on the trellis and clambering through an apple tree.

This one is larger than my hand ...

...and this Pittosporum flower is smaller than my thumbnail.

And here's a lovely red rhododendron which glows in the late evening light. This evening it didn't get dark till after 9:30, so we actually get a lot of that evening light.

Help!

Please help us name this bird!

As you know, we're volunteering at the Shrewsbury museum and working on their bird collection. Most of them are British birds and we've been pretty successful at identifying them. However, we've now run across a display containing several birds. Most of them are North American and we've got those, but this one has us puzzled.


Its main color is a beautiful purplish blue - the color in the upper photo is pretty close to the real thing. Upper back, upper wings and end of tail are black. Underwings are yellow and crown is irridescent light blue (similar to cyan in computer colors).

In the upper photo you can see John's arm. This is a small bird, about the size of a large hummingbird. It's wings are hummingbird-like also. In fact, John thinks it is a humming bird, but we have no idea which one. We've been searching the web, but have failed.

I'm sorry the pictures are rather poor, but we took them without flash in the low light of the museum. I have other (even worse) pictures and can send more details if necessary.

We'd like to name it in our database for completeness, so PLEASE, if you know what it is let us know at: joanarnfield@gmail.com or arnfield.2@osu.edu

Thanks.

A quick note

Hi all!

This is just a quick note to let you know we're OK. I haven't posted anything lately because we've had a visitor from the US - Nancy Fields. It was a smashing visit, but it could have been even nicer if the weather had cooperated. We've had buckets of rain over the last week or so.

And now, the bad weather (or some other unexplained thing) has exascerbated the chemo-induced joint problems in my hands. They are very stiff and awkward and I'm finding it hard to use the keyboard. My right thumb is particularly painful with "trigger thumb" so I've splinted it and that's making it even harder to type!

Sorry to be moaning, but I wanted to explain why I haven't a) answered a lot of e-mails and b) posted to this blog for a while.

If there's some sunshine tomorrow I'll try to get out and get some pictures of the lovely azaleas, rhododendrons and clematis that we have blooming in the garden at present. That is if I can wade through the jungle of weeds. All the rain is making everything grown like mad.

In the meantime, here's my e-mail address. I don't discard your letters, they just stay in my in-box till I get to them even though that sometimes takes months!

joanarnfield@gmail.com

One year later!

Here we are at the Studio Restaurant in Church Stretton enjoying a meal and celebrating the one-year anniversary of my last radiation treatment. This was last Saturday, and as usual the food was wonderful and the atmosphere warm and relaxing. We're very lucky to have such a good restaurant in our little town.

The garden is turning into a jungle - last week was warm and sunny, now we've had a couple of days of rain and everything is growing like the clappers! And of course, the weeds are growing fastest.

I'm not sure if we're going to win the battle against the ground elder (Bishop's weed) - when it first comes up it looks like a sweet little ground cover, but now it's starting to smother things and it's spreading like mad! John has his patch to weed and I have mine, but we're loosing ground, I think.

Right now the garden looks rather nice from a distance. It's very green as the trees and shrubs start to leaf out and there's a haze of blue from all the forget-me-nots. The heathers are fading and the daffs are pretty well gone, but the azaleas are just starting out and the rhododendrons aren't far behind. I'll be posting pictures of those later on.

In the meantime I wanted to share this sequence of photos which sums up canine bliss, I think.

These pictures were taken on a walk with Dave (our neighbour and Ella's master).










Yesterday it was sunny and warm and we took another walk up the hill you can see in the pictures from my study. Here are some photos from that walk.

I did try to take some pictures of our house from over the other side of the valley, but though I could see the house with my binoculars, I couldn't actually see it in my viewfinder and I must've pointed the camera wrong! When I came to look at the photos on the computer, I realised that I'd missed it completely. Sorry about that!

Computer fun!

One of the things I love to do with my computer is play with photos and other graphical images. Here are some of the things I've done in the last few weeks:

That's a picture of John with Ella in Townbrook Hollow. We took her for a walk a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I've been feeling guilty about NOT taking her lately. The photo manipulation came from Picassa (the free Google product). I was able to improve the lighting of the original to show more detail and to make the picture warmer than it originally was.

In the following set you can see the original abstract graphic (created with Windows Paint) followed by the manipulated image. The manipulations were done with GIMP which is a FREE Gnu opensource program which you can use with many operating systems including Windows and Linux.
Send me e-mail: joanarnfield@gmail.com

Gosh! How time flies!

I've just realised that it has been quite a while since my last post. We've been pottering away at various jobs and time just flew past.

The photo above is a Peacock butterfly. I first saw it feeding on a dandelion, but then it obligingly moved to warm itself on some gravel. It's the first butterfly I've noticed in the garden, though I'm sure there have been others.

Insect life has been steadily increasing. At first there were just a few gnats about, then the bumblebees started buzzing around. Now the place is humming with life: the Japanese Maple is covered in black aphids, there are queen wasps looking about for places to nest, the honeybees have started to gather nectar and pollen and I've seen a few ladybirds, moths and lacewings about the place.

A haze of green is appearing on deciduous shrubs and trees now and further surprises are revealing themselves on a daily basis. In the next picture you can see the blue of forget-me-nots and the yellow of forsythia (on the left and now nearly finished) and Kerria ( a vast clump of suckers from a very old original shrub that's the size of a small tree). We're still seeing new varieties of daffodils - we have so many different types it's impossible to count.

What you can't see in this picture are the black spots in the lawn where John has been fixing the badger diggings! Some parts look like the lawn has measles. Oh well! It's well worth the hassle. We actually had 4 badgers at one time on the patio one evening. One of them seemed much smaller than the others. It could be a cub, but seemed a bit too large for one of this year's cubs. I guess we need to do some more reading to be certain.

On the bird front, today is a red-letter day. We had our first Siskin (a life bird, in fact) and our first baby of the season. It was a little fat, streaky, dunnock chick - chasing its parent and opening a wide yellow rimmed gape for the input of tasty bits and pieces. No pictures of that yet, but John is now the proud possessor of a digital Nikon SLR camera. He also has lots of lenses to go with it from previous film cameras so I'm hopeful that we'll have lots of amazing bird pictures once he learns all its bells and whistles.

Our work at the museum continues on its way. We're both learning about the birds we catalogue. It's nice to have them in the hand so we can study the markings at close quarters. It's also good to get out once a week. We find ourselves talking quite animatedly on the bus going to and from "work" and at dinner afterwards. I think we both miss the social stimulus and gossip potential of having a job.

We had visitors on Friday: Barbara and Dick - old friends from Nuneaton. Barbara's late husband, Colin, was our best man and one of John's oldest friends. It was lovely to see that Barbara has been able to build a new life for herself and find happiness with a good friend. We had a very happy day, eating and talking a lot and taking a bit of a walk round the town. Barbara and Dick are both good gardeners and were able to help me identify a few more things.

I spend a lot of my time poring over gardening books trying to identify things as they come up. I'm enjoying that along with all the time I spend outside wandering along the paths, looking at all the stuff, dreaming about possible changes, wondering what will come up next, etc. Last week I took advantage of some warmer weather to get down on my knees and do some serious weeding. It's good to get up close and personal with your plants and the soil they're living in. Too bad I only managed to do such a little bit of work before I got tired, my back started to ache and I thought up a few excuses to come in!

Stay tuned ..... and send me e-mail: joanarnfield@gmail.com