bit of a tramp

Gill and I did a geocache at Wimpole. it turned into a bit of a tramp but we did see some lovely examples of old fashioned fencing.

ex-pheasant

I came around a corner and this dopey female pheasant wandered under my car. I didn't swerve, but I eased off a bit. The view in my rear view mirror was like a cartoon - a gently settling set of recently used feathers. Luckily no damage to the car...

handy seed planning tool

I came across this yesterday. It helps you plan your planting around the frost free date for your area.

Acer Aspire One

I've been playing with one for about a week. Crazily, this actually counts as work as I'm using it take a look at the latest Ubuntu Remix release (which is specially designed for NetBooks) and to do some benchmarking. I will be writing up my experiences, but wanted some pictures of it in use. My short summary is good software and applications (I will use it to write my article) but rubbish battery (slightly over 2 hours of wifi and work) and a hot chip.

Anyhow, here it is in my greenhouse, where I've started to to get ready for planting this year's first seeds. My wifi didn't quite stretch far enough for it to stream live BBC Radio 4 to me so I made do with my wind up radio instead.

made us laugh

Driving to work in driving rain. We see a figure on a bicycle cycling towards us wearing a Tesco bag on her head, the loops tied together under her chin.

[Worth a haiku?]

gruesome discovery

No photo for this one. Pottering around outside, I emptied the water out of the bottom of a bucket and inside, drowned, were two perfect little grey mice.

haiku

playing with photo effects

 

I downloaded DxO FilmPack and played with converting photographs to old film types.

what's a haiku?

I get asked this if I admit to writing them. I don't write that many and I have no pretensions that they're any good. However, I quite like the mental effort and I enjoy the fact that they fix moments in time into a few words. Each haiku I re-read puts me back exactly where I was when I first noticed the "zen" moment.

First you need a "zen" moment. Recently, our white scruffy, sideways leaning hen, kept escaping into the garden, where she kept stealing food from the wild birds and getting into my vegetable plots. This was irritating me, to say the least. We thought she was flying but she kept squeezing through a small gap in the 'chicken proof' fence. Gill found several of her eggs (the chicken's not Gill's), frozen solid in the hedge, out of arm’s reach.

Based on the sentences above, I cut them down a bit. Haiku should be simple and describe 'what is', not our feelings about them:

Scruffy, moulting, sideways leaning Amber
escapes through a gap in the fence
frozen eggs in the hedge, out of arm’s reach

Not a bad start, but needs trimming - a haiku should be a 'single breath poem':

the sideways chicken slides (6)
through a gap in the fence (6)
leaving frozen eggs out of arm’s reach (9)

It doesn't follow the 5-7-5 syllable rule. Not a hard and fast rule, but something to aim for, so a little more tweaking gives:

the white chicken slides
through a small gap in the fence;
frozen eggs out of reach

This gives me 5-7-6, close enough. When I posted it (here), I tweaked it again.

Christmas lights

I tried again, this time with a tripod...

Esther

Esther Cropped
Originally uploaded by David Rusling

I'd like to expand my photography and do more people. Esther volunteered and this is the result. She was leaning on a gravestone for this, but I've cropped that out.

New Year's Eve

 

This is David Brash's dog Todd - he seemed to enjoy New Year's eve too.