Peace and Goodwill to All Men

As the sun starts its northward journey bringing warmth and light back to our hemisphere we wish all of our friends, wherever they may be, Peace, Health and Joy.

Embarassing but Necessary!

Yesterday was my 61st birthday and this is what I look like! It's pretty bad, isn't it?

I had my grand weigh-in:

210.5 pounds

15.04 stone

95 kilograms.

It could be worse - I could have posed naked!!!!

Weight Loss for Wildlife!

I’m hoping you can help me. I’ve been trying to lose weight this year, and have failed miserably! The trouble is that I can’t find a good incentive. I’m well aware of the health benefits of losing weight, but that doesn’t seem enough to motivate me. So this year I’m going to try something different.

I’m asking you to sponsor my slimming effort by pledging money to help a wildlife cause. In the U.S. the money will be given to the Columbus Audubon Center, and in the U.K. it will be donated to the Shropshire Wildlife Trust Lapwing Appeal. If you live elsewhere, I will ask you to donate to an environmental charity in your country.

Here’s the plan: On December 17th, 2006 I will have my first weigh-in. I will then attempt to lose 1lb a week until December 17th, 2007. I would be ecstatic if I could lose 50lb (22.5 kg or 3.5 stone), but even 20lb (9 kg or 1.5 stone) would make me very happy. Progress reports and updates will be posted on this blog. If you decide to pledge and support me, I will let you know at the end of the year how I did, and I will be asking you for your contributions in January of 2008.

Please consider joining me in this effort. Even a penny a pound will make a difference and a dollar or a pound for a pound would be absolutely wonderful. If this is something you’d like to do, please send me an e-mail to let me know the good news.

Thank-you for your support and best wishes for 2007 ….. Joan

.... Turn, turn, turn .....

Well, the seasons are turning again. After a long, colorful autumn winter is coming in with high winds and lots of rain. Our stream was higher than we'd ever seen it before and water just poured off the already sodden hills and down our valley in gushing torrents.

As soon as it cleared up a bit we took a hike up the Cardingmill Valley to see what it looked like upstream. The three photos on this post are from that hike. The Cardingmill Valley is the one we live in, and John has decided that it's going to be his birdwatching "patch".

However, it's the centre of the Long Mynd National Trust region and is the place where most tourists come when they want to explore the hills around Church Stretton. In the summer and at weekends it's quite crowded, so we don't often walk up there, then (unless we fancy a cuppa and a scone at the National Trust tea-room!). We usually choose walks that take us up other valleys where there aren't so many people.

This time we walked up the Cardingmill valley and then turned left to visit a side valley that has a nice waterfall at the top. The waterfall is called "Light Spout" - I don't know why. The Cardingmill valley is so called because there were woolen mills in it once. Most of them are gone now, but there is a block of holiday rental flats in one old mill building and there are lots of dams and impoundments which they used to power the mill equipment.

The bracken ferns are now dead on the hillsides and make huge brown patches, but in sheltered places and beside streams they are still green and beautiful. There's still lots of green vegetation about and the gorse is still blooming with its bright yellow pea-flowers.

Up on top of the Mynd (where we've been for a couple of walks with Ella) the heather looks pretty dry and dead and the whinberries are just stalks with no leaves. The wind up there is vicious and we were caught in an icy rain-shower when we went up there on Saturday.

But down here in the valley it's pretty sheltered. We can hear the wind up at the top of the drive and we can see the trees whipping and bending, but down here we don't get hit by it any where near as much as our neighbours do.

People round here are now turning to indoor pursuits for the long winter evenings. Quiz evenings are very popular. People form teams and get together to do quizzes, coordinated by an official quiz-master and marked by the quiz-master's partner. Usually there are refreshments (and/or you bring your own) and the entry fee is donated to a charity. Last week we went to one put on for the Food Fayre Volunteers. The quiz had a food theme and although one of the local deli owners was at my table our team came in last! It probably didn't help that people had brought along several bottles of wine!

At home we've been pottering about in the house. The weather has discouraged us from the badly needed clean-up chores in the garden. I've done some work on a size and colour look-up table for the Bird's Egg data base that should speed up our identification work in the museum. John is getting ready for a quick business trip to Montreal and we're both gearing up to send out our Christmas cards.

I can't believe it's less than 3 weeks till Christmas! They're starting to play Christmas music on the radio, the shops are full of lights and glitter, the Christmas tree in the town square has been lit and the main streets of town have coloured lights strung along and across them. It's time for me to haul out the old baubles and do something creative around the house, I suppose.

Winter is bringing changes in the local wildlife, too. The most noticable change is in the habits of the badgers. They have become far less predictable in their habits. They do come out and get the peanuts. but they've stopped digging up the lawn and we don't often see them before we go to bed. At first we were worried, but we looked it up and this is normal for the time of year. Apparently they go a bit torpid in the winter and only go out if they have to - ie. to defecate, get a dring of water and eat a little bit. They store up lots of fat in the autumn to enable them to do this.

The pheasants have begun to gather in groups. We've had a couple of stray males wandering about (there were three one day) but Mr. Dark has driven them away, we think. The females are gathering too. We get about 7 most days although the three who were here all summer tend to hang about together and don't always behave very nicely to the others! Yesterday we were amused to see one of our more tame females taking a dust bath in some dry soil under our huge Lawson cypress. She dug away all the needles, vines and roots and then scooped out a hole in the dry soil. Then she sat in the hole and kicked dust all over the place. Several times she rolled over onto her back, kicking and fluffing up her feathers. Twice another hen came over to investigate and she ran off a little ways till the other hen had moved away, then she came back. She kept this up for about half an hour. Each time she left the hole she shook herself and clouds of dust rose up around her! I think she must have been pretty itchy to do this for such a long time.

It's time to go over to visit my neighbours and cadge a cup of tea from them. I'm going to take my Jungle Band to show Marjorie. I hope she thinks it's funny and not a big wast of time!

Stay in touch, please!

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's Thanksgiving day and John and I have just finished a wonderful dinner cooked by John. His pumpkin pie was to die for!

Here we are, sitting in our easy chairs in the living room, "protruding our stomachs" (as my Mum used to say) and sipping our home-made gooseberry liqueur. Life has been good to us this year and we have much to be thankful for.

We're happy, healthy and comfortable. We have a lovely warm home and a beautiful garden. We live in one of the most beautiful spots in the country and we are surrounded by kind people. In addition, we have many good friends scattered all over the globe who write, phone and e-mail and thus bring us great joy. Our pleasure is compounded when they come to visit. Several have come this year and we're looking forward to welcoming others to our home next year.

So, as the rosy glow of our dinner takes us into this rather rainy evening in the borderlands we want to wish all our friends, wherever they may be, a very Happy Thanksgiving!

And ..... don't forget to write!

Animated Cat!

This is a test to see if I can put an animation on my blog. I think I can, although when I uploaded it loads of copies were uploaded too and there were dozens of cats rowing away on this page.

The animation was made with a sequence of still photos of an automaton that I made a few years ago. The cat is smuggling cans of tuna fish! There is a handle at the bottom which you turn to get the cat to row the boat. The whole thing is made of thin card which is preprinted with the design. You cut it out and glue it together.


The reason I wanted to test this is that I have just made another one and I want to post a similar animation of it. I didn't want to go to all the trouble of photographing it if I couldn't put it up.

Stay tuned..................

Catching up with the news

The weekend after we got back from York we had yet another set of visitors! These people didn't come from as far, though. They were John's sister Joy, her husband John, her son Nick and Nick's girlfriend Sam. On the left is a picture of Sam and Nick with one of the carved bears on the Allen Coppice trail. Nick is a real ham and a good mimic, so he's always doing and saying very funny things. We had a lot of good laughs over the weekend.

I've put pictures of the carvings on previous posts, but we still love to take that trail and search for new things. The artist is David Bytheway. Some of his things are nature inspired, like the otters running down a log and others are mythological, like the green man hidden in a crack in a tree.

We had a good walk along the trail after lunch at the Long Mynd Hotel and then we wandered around the shops for the rest of the afternoon before coming home to a smashing roast pork dinner and an evening of badger watching. The next day we all went off to Rhyadder to see the feeding of the red kites.

The next day the painting of the outside of the house started. This necessitated some work by us to remove the vines and branches that were growing all over the house and the upper garage. Here's a before picture of a mass of jasmine and clematis that was clambering up a trellis between the living room and dining room french windows. There's actually a light under there, but we'd never seen it and just a dappled glow would come out of it at night!

I had a helluva time getting this stuff down as it had grown up under the roof tiles and into the soffits and vents under the eves. I've cut it right back to the trellis now and will have to try to keep it under control. I hope I haven't killed it completely! I shouldn't think so, everything seems to grow like the clappers in this climate.

Here's an after picture of the same part of the house. That's Adrian Dann the painter man up the ladder. He's quite a character and we've enjoyed having him around the house for the last couple of weeks.

On the picture you can see the newly exposed light. It's VERY powerful and now we have a floodlit patio! It's also rather old and ugly and we're now starting to think about how we want to change the outside lighting around the house. We have a couple of security lights that are on and off all night because of the badgers and foxes - so they are a bit of a nuisance - and they're also very bright. They're too bright really and tend to blind you as you approach them. In addition the lights around the house don't cast a nice glow, they tend to give you bright spots and leave the rest in shadow which is not good. Then, also, the lights up the driveway end too early and leave the top of the drive and the garage up there in darkness! So I think we're going to have to get the electricians in fairly soon to get this all sorted out. And I suppose, while they're at it, we'll have them run electricity to the other end of the garden so we can have power in the shed and a possible water feature in the pond that we're planning.

The painting is now pretty well done except for a couple of patches on the fascia boards where there was some rot. We're waiting for the builder to come and replace the wood and then Adrian will finish off the painting.

We decided to leave the trim white as we have the white patio doors, but we changed the color of the garage doors a bit from green to bluey green - kind of a teal colour. Terry Olive would love it!

One of the benefits of the new bright light on the patio is that we can see the badgers much more clearly. They don't seem to be bothered by the lights, in fact we've seen them ambling by quite casually as we've been sitting at the dinner table or watching the telly after dinner. We don't even bother to turn off our indoor lights any more.

So the other night I attached my quick cam to my laptop, put the quick cam outside on the step, closed the curtains and waited for them to come for their peanuts. I was amply rewarded! I got lots of pictures and a few videos. I wish I could post the video because it has sounds and you can hear the badger sucking up and crunching down on the peanuts!

So that's all the major news. We're settling into a quieter winter routine now. We try to get out for walks between showers, and of course we're starting the winter clean-up in the garden. Work also continues at the Museum, John has become the web master for the Food Fayre and on the actual day I will be working with the Crafts People at the fayre, although at present I'm just a volunteer doing anything they ask me to.

John has gone back to cataloging his slides and I'm making Christmas cards. This is a coloured pencil drawing I did of some holly and a computer modified version of it will appear on our cards this year.

So that's all for now! It's a great relief to have caught up with all this - jobs like this become daunting when you leave them for a while and then realise how much you have to write! Now I feel guilt free and very relieved! My next task is to try, yet again, to catch up on all my e-mails!

Stay tuned and write when you can!

Our Trip to Yorkshire

As promised in my previous post, here's the sequel to our October adventures:

On Wednesday October 18th we headed off before dawn. Our first stop was Manchester airport where we dropped Julie off for her trip back to Columbus. Then we carried on across the country and further north to the City of York. Our main purpose for that trip was to complete another part of my 60th birthday present, but we decided to combine it with a few days at a B&B and some exploration of this lovely old town.

On our way to York, completely by chance, we stopped in a very interesting country park - The Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Outside, the grounds were full of sculpture, including a good few Henry Moores and inside there were several exhibitions and installations. We really enjoyed our afternoon walking around and exploring the various exhibits.

Our B & B was very good. Clean, comfortable and welcoming with a smashing breakfast. We'd recommend it to anyone. It's called the Bloomsbury. We were able to walk into town and back each day with no trouble at all.

On our first full day we walked along the river to the National Railway Museum. Then we spent the whole day there! It was absolutely fascinating. There were trains from every era of the railways and from all over the world. In addition there were special trains, like the carriages used by the Royal Family and other equipment used by the railway industry.

This first picture shows the complete time span. In the foreground is a full sized model of Stephenson's Rocket. The first steam train ever. The original is in the Science Museum in London.

Behind that is the lovely, streamlined Mallard. This is also a steam train although it looks like a diesel because of its streamlining. It holds the world steam speed record set in the 1930s.

In the back ground you can just see part of Eurostar. This is the train that runs through the Channel Tunnel. In fact there's even a piece of tunnel so you can see how it's made and what goes into it.

Another fascinating thing about this museum is the storeroom and workrooms. A lot of these normally "behind-the-scenes" places are open to the public, so you can wander around a vast hall full of railway memorabilia which still have to be put on show or are just waiting for their turn in a display. If you click on the picture to the left, you'll get an idea of the scope of the store room. It's actually a panorama from three images.

In the workshops we were able to see the famous "Flying Scotsman" engine. But you wouldn't have recognised it - it's been stripped right down to its chassis. The wheels are in one corner, the carriage is somewhere else and the whole thing is being renovated.

Next day, we headed off for our big adventure. This was the trip to the skidpan. It was great fun and a terrific thrill to drive a breakneck speed and learn how to control skids and use ABS brakes. I don't know if I'll remember everything we learned, but it was really exhillarating to do it.

In the picture to the left, I am in the car with my instructor, Andy. As you can see, I have a crash helmet on, but they told us it was almost impossible to roll a car doing any of the manoevers we did.

We did the course on an airfield and the track was laid out with cones, so even if we did go out of control we couldn't actually do any damage. Well. of course we went out of control. That was the point of the thing! It was such a blast! I could do that every week and not get tired of it.

In this last shot I'm doing a "controlled" (sort of) skid around the track - spray is shooting out from the back wheels and if you could hear it the tires would be screaming!!!!!

The rest of our trip was quite tame by comparison, but we did enjoy it. On the Saturday we spent the whole day browsing around the shops and on Sunday we made our way back home via Mytholmroyd where we met up with Pam Jordan (my college flat mate), went for a walk in the Pennines and had a very nice Sunday dinner in a country pub.

So that's it for the Yorkshire trip. I tried to load a few more photos to show you what we've been up to since then, but the blog site won't let me, so I'll save them for the next post.

Take care of yourselves, and don't forget to write.

Waiting for the results

Tonight we're up late, we're going to turn the tv on at midnight so we can see how the US election is going. I thought I could pass the time by catching up on my blog a bit. I'm afraid I've rather let it go over the last few weeks.

I guess I'm going to take you back to mid-October and the end of Julie's visit. After loafing about in south Shropshire for a few days we took Julie off to stay with Joy and John in Nuneaton and then on up to Lancaster to visit Barry and Sheila. These were the people who made up the crew of the Narrow Boat "Serenade" when we did our momentous tour in 1993 with Ken and Julie and they were anxious to see Julie and reminisce about the great time we all had.


The first picture is of Joy, Julie and the two Johns in front of the moated manor house at Baddesley Clinton. We visited it and then went on to Packwood House. Unfortunately, we were too late to tour Packwood, but were able to wander around the lovely gardens. This is just one snapshot taken there.

Up in Lancaster we took a long walk along the canal (of course!) with a nice drink at the far end!



The next day we drove around a bit of the Lake District, visiting Grasmere and Windermere. The weather wasn't wonderful, but it didn't rain and so we were able to get out on Grasmere for a voyage on beautifully restored Victorian steam gondola. Here's a picture of that.

We drove home after that, and spent the next day lolling about and packing ready for ........




That's the next story ..... stay tuned!

And please stay in touch!

Gottit!

The plant I showed you in my previous posting is Nandina domestica - heavenly bamboo. However, it's not a bamboo, it's a member of the berberis family. Thanks to Mark Duffell, who is a horticulturalist living in Shrewsbury for a very quick identification.

George Black - please write again with your e-mail address. I tried to reply to your note and my e-mail bounced.

Sorry to post a personal note like that, but I have no other way of doing it.

Gotta rush - have to clean house for some more visitors. After they leave I'll post a more lengthy account of our doings over the last few weeks. There's lots to tell you!

Stay in touch, please!

My problem child!

Hello all you plant experts out there! I need some help with a plant which is growing right outside my patio door. I have no idea what it is, and no-one who has visited and looked at it has any idea either!

To see more detail, you should be able to click on the pictures and expand them.

My first picture is of the whole plant. It has a woody stem and grows slowly during the summer putting out compound leaves. These leaves stay green through the winter and the bottom ones fall off after a couple of seasons (I think, I haven't been there long enough to know for sure). By the end of the winter the leaflets have reddened edges. The petioles are red where they join the main stem, too.

The plant is about 3 ft or 1 m tall at present, but I don't know how old it is. The pheasants have been digging around in the roots, so that's why we've put the stake in and surrounded the plant with stones.


My next picture shows the branched inflorescence and leaves more closely. I've been waiting for it to flower as the leaves seemed to look like pea-family leaves and I was expecting a pea-like flower. I was wrong!

The leaves are multiply compound and alternate or possibly spiral up the stem (they're definitely not opposite).






Now for the flowers! They are just blooming now in early/mid autumn. The "petals" (they could be sepals - I'm not a great expert) are white and very short lived. Once the flower opens up they fall off very quickly.

During the dry weather the "petals" seemed to recurve before falling off, but now in this very wet period they seem to lift up from the base and fall off the top of the pistil! The lowest flower in the picture is doing just that. I think there were six "petals" when I was able to count them before they fell off.

The petals open to reveal six very long, fat anthers which are yellow with brown backs and a fat green pistil.

I haven't seen any fruit yet. I don't think it flowered last year, so when we moved in (September 2005) there were just the dry shriveled remains of what appeared to be the previous year's berries. I suppose it could have flowered earlier last year, the drought has really messed up the timing for a lot of plants this year.

If you have any ideas, questions or comments please e-mail and let me know. I've spent hours going through books and can't see anything that is just right.

Thanks ..... Joan

Boo hoo!

Yesterday we said a sad farewell to Frankie (I think John actually shed a tear as she drove off up the drive with Dolly!).

But, there's still lots of good things going on around here! On Tuesday, Julie and I went on a hack together. Doesn't Julie look small over there? I think it's a trick of the perspective, but Barney really is a VERY BIG horse!

See that wet concrete? Well, I couldn't get my leg over the saddle when we got back and I fell off Barney and landed on my butt - I'm still a bit sore, but we all had a good laugh and there were no bones broken.

The ride was lovely, across pastures and through the woods. It was very "atmospheric" (translation, foggy) which was a pity as we couldn't see the views, but the rain kept off and we enjoyed it.

We had a day in Ironbridge, too. Here are Julie and John on the actual iron bridge. This is the first iron bridge to be built anywhere in the world and this valley is the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Now it's a pleasant, sleepy valley full of the ruins of blast furnaces and pottery kilns.

Stay in touch!

A restful weekend

Well, we're having a lovely restful weekend. We've had lots of heavy showers so it's not been good for outside work and I've taken advantage of that. Here I am relaxing in the living room with a glass of wine and Frankie. I've been reading quite a lot, lately, too - a sure sign that the depression is lifting. The new drugs seem to be working, thank goodness.

It rained a lot last night and this morning the stream was running strongly. I don't know if it will keep going this time, it hasn't been flowing continuously for more than hour at a time since mid-July!

The rain is helping the badgers to find the worms, I think. The worms come up to the surface when it rains and so they don't have to dig up our lawn to find them. This explains why we rarely find worms on the paths in the morning like we used to in town.

This morning it was raining so hard that the squirrel couldn't climb up the bird feeder to steal the sunflower seeds. He'd get up half-way and then slide back down. In the end, the skies opened with a downpour and he took off in a hurry, making for the shelter of a nearby tree!

The rain doesn't seem to bother the pheasants very much. Sometimes the male comes out in the rain and just sits in the middle of the lawn looking miserable! One of our females has developed a new feeding technique which I have captured in the photo on the left. She is perched on a dish feeder about 3 feet off the ground and is taking seeds out of the tube feeder. These birds are more intelligent than I realised at first.

Unfortunately, this feeder became the breakfast buffet for a sparrow hawk. The greenfinches actually sit at the tube feeder and eat the seeds, they don't fly off with them as the tits do. This made it easy for the hawk to pick them off and we watched it do this several times. It lands on the ground with its prey and just holds the little bird down till it passes out. Then it flies off to consume it at leisure up in the trees. A few weeks ago we had crowds of greenfinches on the feeders, now we just have one or two.

Frankie and Johnny!

Those of you who have heard John's rude comments about cats will be amused by this picture of him snoozing the afternoon away with Frankie by his side. Frankie is visiting right now and she's really taken to him. She's a sweet cat - no biting or scratching from her! She loves to while away the afternoon on a lap, watching the birds outside and occasionally rubbing her head against your hands. During the day she finds the pheasants particularly interesting and in the evening she's been watching the badgers with amazement.

We're not terribly thrilled with our badgers right now. They've been digging the lawns up. Every morning John goes out, puts the grass back in the holes and does a bit of seeding. Maybe it will help to improve the lawn in the long-run, but in the short-run it's really frustrating to wake up and find all those black holes in the lawn.

It's now edging over from summer to autumn. Actually, it started back in August. It was so dry that a lot of our flowers were over before their time. Then it started to rain and got a lot cooler and windier and we thought that was the end of the good weather. But the last few days have been very nice, with sunny skies, light breezes and highs around 21 or 22 (70F).

On Sunday we decided we needed a day by the sea and went off to Aberystwyth, which is the nearest sea-side town to us. We spent the morning wandering about the town and along the front, then went on to a really nice RSPB reserve on the Dovey estuary called Ynis hir. We're planning to go back again in the fall when all the migrants will be there. Later in the day we went to Aberdovey and after walking around the town had a supper of fish and chips before heading home. It only takes about 1.5 hours to drive over there so I think we may be going back more often for a fix of sea air and different scenery.

Today we woke to pouring rain and after a while the stream started flowing again. Unfortunately, it still can't keep it up and now that the rain has stopped we have a dry bed once more. The water table must be very low and we have to wait for the aquifer to get full before the flow will become continuous again.

There must be enough water in the soil for the plants as they are thriving again. The trees and shrubs are full of hips, haws and berries, and some of our cooking apples are rotting on the branches. And the lawn - it's growing like the dickens! In some places the blackberries are small, dry and shrivelled, but in other districts there are big, black juicy berries just waiting to be picked and made into jam or blackberry and apple pie.

As you can see from my coloured pencil drawing on the left, I have fruit on the mind right now. I've been really impressed by the quality of the fruit we get here, even in the supermarkets. The pear you see was a conference pear. These are very hard and tasty. The nectarine was ripe, juicy and delicious - neither of them lasted very long after I had drawn them!

The other thing that impressed me was the length of the strawberry season. We started off with strawberries from the southern islands in May and ended up with berries from the northern Scottish islands in August - and they were ALL ripe and delicious.

Well, it's time to go down to the living room and read a bit. Since I started on the anti-depressants I've been less nervous and guilty about taking time to relax and I've been sitting down with a good book or two or three!

Stay in touch, please!

One year on!

Well, it's now one year since we moved over here. I still have no regrets, although every now and then I find I'm missing something - like a good Turkish restaurant, NPR, the book club, the dinner club, the polymer clay guild and all our other good friends.

However, we do have lots of good friends over here, and one of them visited us this week. This is Dolly with her cat Frankie. Dolly and I are exactly the same age (born on the same day, in fact) and we were flat mates in Hamilton when we did our Master's degrees at McMaster. She worked in Canada for a while and then came home to the UK. We went to the US, but we've stayed in touch ever since (it's nearly 40 years since we met!).

Dolly is a brilliant artist and is also keen on natural history in all its forms, so we have a lot in common. We talked almost non-stop for two days! This was helped on Wednesday by rainy weather, so we stayed in a lot of the day

On Thursday the weather was lovely and we had a day out. We started off by driving up the Burway, parking at the top and having a bit of a walk on the Mynd. In the picture below we're looking eastwards across the Stretton Valley to Caer Caradoc. The colours up in the hills are lovely right now. The whinberry bushes are turning reddish brown, the bracken is bright green and the heather is purple as it comes into full bloom.

We didn't have much of a whinberry crop this year. Whinberries are the local, wild, blueberries. They are very small, but quite delicious. Unfortunately, the drought came at the wrong time for them and there are very few fruit.

Many of the wild blackberries are looking dry and hard, too. In some places there are tons of them and in others there's nothing. It all depends on just how much water there was in that area. However, we've promised ourselves that we'll take a plastic container with us wherever we go so we can harvest berries when we find them. There are lots of cobnuts (hazelnuts) about too and I'd like to get a few of them before the squirrels have them all!

After a smashing lunch in a pub in Wentnor, we carried on into Wales to Rhyadr. This was to visit the Red Kite feeding station at Gigrin Farm. It was definitely the highlight of the day, with a spectacular show of these lovely birds. The photo to the left shows John and Dolly at the farm and all the birds you can see in the sky are Red Kites. I took lots of pictures, but none of them are very good, so I think you'll get a better sense of what happens here if you visit their web site.

Yesterday was REPATRIATION DAY!!!! The first anniversary of our arrival in the UK. Next week will be the anniversary of moving into Peel Wyke. We celebrated by having dinner at a Thai restaurant in Shrewsbury after we'd worked in the museum for a few hours.

Yesterday was also the day I started on some new drugs to cancel out the side effects of the Arimidex. This is something I hoped I'd never have to do, but they got bad enough that I'm now on an anti-depressant and something for my digestive upsets. I really don't want to move away from the Arimidex although an alternative drug was suggested, so we're trying to cope with the side effects rather than risk a whole different set of them! Oh well ... only another 4 years to go! In the meantime, while I get used to these new drugs I'm wandering around like I was stoned for most of the morning! In fact, I think I've got the munchies - maybe I'll go get some lunch and have a nap!

Stay in touch, please!

Our on-again, off-again stream!

Hello everyone!

This is just a quick post to let you know that we've had a fair bit of rain over the last few days and the stream has come back temporarily a couple of times. Unfortunately, it has disappeared again now, but we continue to hope!

By sheer fluke we were actually looking at the stream bed when the water started to flow down it. It was lovely to be able to hear it burbling away again. I really miss it when it's dry.

Last weekend, Barry and Sheila visited us. We had a very nice day at Ludlow, visiting the market, lunching at the Unicorn and walking around the town and then in the evening they took us to the Studio for a wonderful dinner. On the way home we heard Irish music coming from the King's Head so we went in for a nightcap. What a smashing day!

On Sunday it rained a bit as we managed to get lost on the Mynd, but still had a good walk up Townbrook Hollow and back down Ashes Hollow for lunch at the Green Dragon in Little Stretton. We all had faggots! As usual, they were delicious. For those of you who don't know what they are, they are a VERY LARGE meatball made of liver, onions and other stuff. They were served with lovely brown gravy, root mash (mashed potatoes, carrots and other root vegetables) and peas - YUMMY! The walk home from Little Stretton to Church Stretton was a bit fraught as we'd all managed to get stiff and sore from our walk, but we made it and spent the evening "vegging out" in front of the telly and watching the badgers.

On Monday, B & S left and we had major hedge work done along the stream bank. It looks a bit bare right now, but it'll soon grow and it's inspired me to do a bit of work outside. Margaret arrived the same evening for an overnight stay. We had a lovely visit, catching up on the news and doing a nice short walk on Tuesday morning. We took Margaret up to the Long Mynd Hotel where she and John and all the other first year geologists had their field trip back in the mid-60s. The place rings no bells with either of them. Either it has changed beyond recognition or they were having such a good time that they failed to notice any architectural details!

Wednesday Dave and Pam had us up to their house for dinner. It was steak and kidney pie and absolutely fabulous. Ella was very pleased to see us, offering up some of her favorite toys for inspection - yuck.

Thursday we had a real sustained rain for a while and it's brought us some much needed moisture. Hopefully some of the plants that were wilting will now perk up a bit. I spent the afternoon drawing the Blist's Hill waggons. I posted a photo of them earlier on. Here's a copy of my drawing:


On Friday John went off to the Bird Watching Fair at Rutland Water. I think he had a good time looking at all the displays, buying books and a birding vest and other goodies and attending lectures. He got back at about 1 am on Saturday morning. I'm glad I didn't go with him, I would have cramped his style! Instead, I had a neighbour lady over for what turned out to be a very boozy lunch. Really enjoyed it and the left-overs have been splendid all weekend, too!

Got out into the garden today and started some tidying and clean-up. John is beginning to look at books about ponds - I can't decide if a pond will make more or less work in the garden. I don't know if this will end up being a major engineering work or just a wildlife "puddle". Of course, we do have a great resource in Nick, our nephew, who now has his own landscaping business. We may well hire him to do all the work and help with some of the planning.

John has been working on our taxes this evening. He consulted with Sheila about it last weekend, but had pretty much worked it out for himself anyway. So far, he's pleased that the forms are very well set up and quite easy to follow and I think he's pretty well done with it for last tax year (2005-2006). We have now renounced our American resident status and will only have to file UK taxes next year, so there will be one more mixed filing and then it should all be a lot easier. We have to set up some sort of savings account so we can save our tax money as we transfer our income over from the States. Otherwise we'll be stuck with nothing to pay the bill with at the end of the year.

By the end of next week we'll have been living in the UK for a whole year! I think John is planning some sort of celebration. I'm planning to do a budget and expenses calculation and make sure we can still affort to continue in this life of luxury! I think we've been spending rather more than we expected to, but some expenses were due to moving and so I'm not quite sure how we're doing at this point. I'll feel a bit better once I've sorted it out and categorized it so we can see if we have to cut down on drinking or whether we can continue to live like profligates!

On the subject of greedy buggers, the badgers have continued their nightly visits, but have been coming earlier. They're also back digging in the lawn and tearing up my plants for bedding. GRRRRRRR!

We've got loads of baby birds about - especially large flocks of blue tits, chaffinches and green finches. There are at least 10 species that we know nested around here and have brought their babies to feed: blackbird, songthrush, robin, greenfinch, chaffinch, bullfinch, blue tit, great tit, coal tit, dunnock. Some of the youngsters looked very confused when it started to rain. If they were from a second brood, they wouldn't have seen any since they were born! In addition, there have been crows, magpies, house sparrows, wagtails and an immature female pheasant around. The local buzzards wheel about over head and scream a lot and we've heard tawny owls at night on several occasions.

Well, that's all for now. Take care of yourselves and please stay in touch!

Early August in my Mind and in the Garden

I was sad to see our Aussie visitors leave on August 1st. When we returned from Sweden and as we worked to get ready for our first set of visitors during June I found my depression had lifted and I was able to work and enjoy myself in a way that I hadn't done for months.

July was so busy I didn't have time to get worried or anxious or depressed, but the last week has been a different story and I found Winston Churchill's "Black Dog" descending on me again. It's not helped by worry over the war in the Middle East, but a lot of my anxiety is irrational and unnecessary. I know it, but I can't control it. And the drug I'm taking to keep the cancer at bay is making it worse. I had a meeting with my oncologist a couple of weeks ago and she suggested a change of drugs. I'm waiting for a couple of weeks so that her letter gets to my G.P. and then I'm going to go in and see if we can get this sorted out.

In the meantime I can get out into the garden or go to work at the museum and that helps me to control my black feelings.

Let me share some of my garden therapy! As you can see from this picture of one of our apple trees the fruit are ripening in spite of the drought! It's still very dry and warm here. In the past few weeks we've had a few showers with a quarter or an eigth of an inch each time, but it has barely wetted the soil, really. We're only watering things that are truly desperate or which have been recently seeded or transplanted and I've been surprised at how well most trees and shrubs are holding up.

This apple tree is the only one that has any fruit on it. The others had very little blossom and even fewer apples. I'm not sure why. I'll have to watch the buds more carefully next year. We DO have at least one pair of bullfinches and they love to eat apple buds so that may be the problem.

We've already had bumper crops of blackcurrents and gooseberries and today I picked a good handfull of loganberries (sort of thornless blackberries) which I plan to cook up with apples to make a crumble. I've frozen some of our rhubarb and blackcurrents so we'll be able to enjoy them later on in the year.

This picture is of the hydrangea under John's study window. It's quite small, but the color is lovely. We have two others, one a white climber and another which is a blue lacecap. Their leaves are browning off a bit, but otherwise they are hanging in there!

This little hydrangea has had another role for the past couple of months, being the soft landing place for several baby birds which flew into the window. None of them have been killed, and only a couple were dazed enough to hang around for very long. The window strikes have stopped now, so we think they were due to the inexperience of the youngsters! Fortunately they weren't very good flyers either and therefore didn't hit the window very hard!

Boy have we had youngsters! It seems to have been a very successful nesting year. Last week we had up to six immature blue tits on the fat feeder at the same time. The babies are flying around in mixed flocks now, so we get droves of young blue, coal and great tits attacking the fat, peanuts and sunflower seeds. And down below them are several young robins, dunnocks and chaffinches waiting for the droppings. If you add to that our 3 pheasants, a pair of crows, several pairs of wood pigeons, two pairs of greenfinches, at least one pair of bullfinches, and a couple of magpies you can see that our feeders and bird baths are very busy indeed.

We haven't seen any baby mammals, but we have a couple of bank voles, assorted mice, a few pesky squirrels and the badgers, so we're doing ok on those guys too!

We took advantage of the dry weather to get down in the streambed and tidy up. We've trimmed shrubs and trees that were overhanging, pulled up some weeds (can't pull up too many as we don't want to weaken the banks) and taken out a bit of trash. I got really stung by nettles, too! One lot swung round and swiped my face and scalp when I was pulling them up and another lot got me on the arms. It's given me a bit of lymphedema in my left arm, but I expect it to subside once my remaining lymph nodes pump the poison out of my arm!

But, of course it's the big drought resistant plants that are loving this hot and dry weather. Here's a picture of our Acanthus plants. They are tall, strong and vigorous and look absolutely wonderful. The bumble bees love them, climbing up into the flowers and getting completely lost in them.



This picture shows John's old cacti out having a summer holiday on our gravel "beach" in the back garden. These cacti are about 50 years old. John planted the seed when he was a little boy. His Dad looked after them while we were in North America until Joy took them over on his death. She was very pleased to pass them back to us when we came home to England for good!

To give you an idea of their size, the tall one at the back is about 18" tall.









My last picture is a more general view of that beach area. Click on it to get an enlarged view.

It's really a sunny little gravel patio. Behind the table and chairs you can see pink Phlox, orange Crocosmia and the tall umbels of hog weed. This latter has a smell that reminds me of an animal barn - I wonder if that's why they called it hog-weed?

But, take a look at the poor grass in the front of the picture. You can see that there are several very dry patches. Some parts of our lawns are now quite dead - especially where they were made up of moss or some weeds (oh- lawns are supposed to be made of grass, you say?). We're not too worried about it. I'm sure the grass will grow back as soon as we get some rain. It would be nice for that to happen soon, however.

Well, that's about all the news there is, for the moment.

Please stay in touch - e-mails from friends really brighten our days!

July Continued!

To continue with out trip to Welshpool with Chuck and Hazel. ..... We also visited Powys Castle. The view on the left is of the castle as it stands on a high south facing bank. The bank is landscaped in terraces which are loaded with wonderful flowers. On our long summer days these flowers get the full force of the sunshine from early in the morning till late in the evening and they really thrive.

If you click on the photo you can see more detail and you'll be able to see the buildings set into the terraces. One of these is an orangery where citrus fruits wintered over (they would spend the summer outside in pots. Above it is a cool brick lined fernery. We revisited this castle later in the month when Ric and Jan came to stay with us. John and I snoozed and sketched amongst the ferns while Ric and Jan explored the castle.

Inside the castle was renovated in Victorian and Edwardian times. It is quite "modern" with comfortable rooms and plenty of luxurious furnishings. I particularly liked the bathroom with a lovely soaking bath - something I could use right now after a day of gardening!

Another feature of Chuck and Hazel's visit was the food fayre and ale trail in Church Stretton. These took place over a weekend and included other non-food entertainments like Morris dancing in the market square and a dog agility demo. in Russell's Meadow.

In the photo to the left you can see some lady folk dancers who are being introduced by the Shrewsbury Town Crier. This man must be at least 7 feet tall and he's well built to boot! He has a voice to match, too! He came to open a market here a few months ago and I could hear him from our road almost a quarter of a mile away!


The ale trail was fun. There were 12 pubs around the Strettons and surrounding villages and you had to get your "Passport" stamped in each of them to get your certificate of participation and your specially decorated pint glass. Busses were laid on to take revellers from pub to pub so there was no danger from drunk driving. The event lasted for two days. Some chose to do it quicker, but we did 6 pubs each day and tried lots of different beers on the way round. Chuck made careful notes on all the beers he tried. We also found some we liked, but were even more interested in trying out the various pubs. We now have a few more that we can take visitors to when they come here! In fact, we did just that for Ric and Jan later in the month.

And here we are with Rick and Jan! I'm sorry that Ric's face is shaded, but it was a hot and sunny day so everyone except me was wearing a hat. I'm so glad to have hair these days that I don't usually bother, although I do wear sun-block.

We're standing at Pole Bank at the highest point on the Long Mynd. From there you can see a long, long way in every direction. Mid-Wales is behind us and to the south you can see all the way to the Malverns and the Brecon Beacons. To the north and east there are good views over the Severn Valley and you can usually pick out the steam rising from the cooling towers at Buildwas power station in the IronBridge Gorge.

We went to IronBridge with both sets of visitors last month. This photo is of some wagons in the Blists Hill Victorian Village. It's good to have the village and the museums there because the gorge is now a beautiful bucolic valley, with wooded trails and the clear rushing waters of the Severn River. It's hard to imagine that 200 years ago the place was a hellish inferno of iron smelters, clay and china works, mines, etc. Boats plied the river with loads of coal, limestone, tiles, crockery, etc. and the air was full of smoke and fumes. It was here in the mid-1700s that Abraham Darby discovered how to use coke to smelt iron and the Industrial Revolution was born. The symbol of it is the Iron Bridge itself. The first one ever built and a thing of great beauty. The area is now a World Heritage Site and home to several museums and places of interest.

We did quite a bit of walking with Jan and Ric. Apart from climbing to the top of the Mynd (and then returning via Sunday Lunch at the Green Dragon in Little Stretton), we also walked a small part (about 5 miles) of the Offa's Dyke path which runs along the English/Welsh border from Chepstow on the Bristol Channel to Prestatyn on the North Welsh coast, climbed Caer Caradoc on the east side of the Stretton Valley (about 5 or 6 miles) and did a walk in Snowdonia National Park.

While the Aussies were here it continued to be hot and dry. The lawns dried up and died in places, plants began to wilt and most of the flowers faded off. However the summer roses were beautiful and there look to be good crops of grain in the fields.

I guess that's all for July. I still have some early August garden pictures to show you all, so I'll continue with another posting tomorrow. Now it's time for bed so we can get an early start on Museum work tomorrow.

July Summary

Well, July is over and August is well on its way. I can't believe that we've been here for over 11 months already!

I've been a bit remiss with my postings in July as we had two sets of visitors with only 10 days in between to clean the house, catch up on work at the museum and work in the garden. In my last posting I gave you a brief summary of our visit from Chuck and Hazel. I promised to add more about their visit later and this is definitely later!

It turns out that I don't have many good photos from their visit. So I have shamelessly ripped off a couple from Chuck and Hazel's backup which they left with us! These are they:

These pictures were taken at Hay-On-Wye where we spent a happy day exploring the many second-hand bookshops. I think you can see larger versions of these pictures if you click on them.

One of the things we all enjoyed was our day in Welshpool. Down below are some pictures from that day. Riding the Llanfair Railway was a real treat, especially for the guys who love steam railways. I enjoyed the ride too, but am not quite so enamoured of getting bits of grit in your eyes and breathing sooty smoke all along the line! Still the scenery was lovely and the Bara Brith (a Welsh fruitloaf made with tea, spread with butter and eaten along with strong cups of tea) at Llanfair was to die for!







I wanted to load more pictures here, but it seems the blogger is getting cranky and won't allow me to do so. I'm going to stop for now and publish this and try to add more in the next posting which I will probably do later tonight!

Don't forget to keep those e-mails coming!

Our Stream Has Run Dry

8:15 pm and I'm sitting out in the garden. It's way too hot in my study for me to work up there. Thank goodness we bought this laptop and have a wireless network!

I have lots to write about, but only a limited amount of energy - so some of it will have to wait for another posting. Here's a summary of the news for the last month!

The warm spell we experienced in Sweden continued in England for a while. We were able to catch up on some gardening and get the house ready for our visitors - Chuck and Hazel from the U.S.

I also took my first horse-riding lesson. One of two booked as part of my 60th birthday present from John. I really loved it, as you can see in the photo, and I have now had my second lesson and have booked 4 more. I just wish I'd learned when I was a teenager.

We had a great time with Chuck and Hazel and did a lot of fun stuff. As soon as I stop sweating I'll do a special posting on that visit. The highlights included a July 4th trip to Hay-on-Wye, with an outdoor perfermance of MidSummer Night's Dream at Ludlow castle to end the day, a day in Wales with a ride on the Llanfair Narrow Gauge Railway and a visit to Powys Castle, the Church Stretton food fayre and ale trail, and a visit to Ironbridge Gorge.

We're now preparing for our next set of visitors. Ric and Jan from Australia are arriving on Friday for about 10 days. We're hoping to do a lot of walking with them, so I'm praying for cooler weather.

Today temperatures got into the mid 30s (well over 90). This is supposed to be the warmest day, a cooler air-mass is on it's way. Unfortunately, it's only predicted to bring hit or miss showers overnight. This is too bad as everything is really dry and parched. A lot of the flowers are rushing to seed as quickly as possible so they can propagate before they die and the whole place is looking green and brown without much colour.

The stream that runs through our garden dried up completely a few days ago. I'd only just discovered life in the stream, too - in the form of fresh-water shrimps hiding under rocks. From the fishy smell coming out of the stream bed I reckon they're mostly demised at this point.

One brilliant point of life and color is the Buddleia bush. I'm sitting beside it right now and it still has a few butterflies and bees sipping nectar. The smell is very pleasant and it's loaded with big purple spikes of flowers. When the sun was on it during the day it was loaded with butterflies and bees, including dozens of peacock butterflies and red admirals. It was a glorious sight. I missed this bush when I was pruning in spring and it's this one that has produced the flowers in abundance. I'm a bit puzzled about that as the accepted wisdom is to prune buddleias back hard each year.

The wind has just picked up a bit. It's still warm (about 27 C or 84F), but the wind helps quite a lot. I can now see some vertical development in the clouds to the east, but since the weather is supposed to come up from the south-west, this isn't very helpful...... John just came out to say that a new batch of storms is developing over Birmingham way. They will be the ones I can see. Come on, guys ..... head this way, please!

We're lucky here as there is no hose-pipe ban. We're being pretty careful, but we have been doing a bit of watering of the things that seem to be the most stressed. Our general philosophy is to let the garden plants sort themselves out. Since these conditions are likely to become more frequent in the future there's no point trying to keep plants that can't tolerate dry conditions. We're letting the lawns go brown, for instance. In this country they'll soon recover when we do get some rain.

In the southeast they have very strict rules about water usage because there is a severe shortage. The problem is not the rainfall of the last few months, which has been adequate, but the loss of water from the chalk aquifers which supply most of the southeast. People here are really annoyed, however, because the water companies are wasting so much water through leakages from the aging pipes. What really irks everyone is that the water companies are making vast profits in spite of the shortages.

Time to go in and watch a telly program.

Talk to you soon ...... bye for now .......

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!