Snowed in

Today’s picture, sent by Bruce, shows a very nice rainbow in Hawick.

We have had a good variety of weather recently with rain, wind, sun and mist and today we added some snow.  It started very gently…

..but it soon became more determined….

…and as you can see, the birds were taking things seriously too.  I had to refill the feeder several times through the day making me think that the birds know that cold times are coming.

None of this was of much interest to me, although I would have liked to be out and about with my camera, because I was trapped indoors by the need to make some significant progress on my talk.   I spent from ten in the morning to five in the evening hard at work (with the odd break for coffee or toast) which is about five and a half hours more than any work I usually do.

The result of all this straining over a hot computer was fifteen pages of research (easy to do) and about four minutes of the opening of the talk (much harder).  The talk is about Robert Burns, a very well worn subject and one about which it is hard to find anything new to say.  My sister Susan, who has done a lot of family research, has pointed out to me that our great-great-great-great grandmother actually met and corresponded with the poet and that a great-great uncle has written a published book about him.  This was news to me but it has given me renewed energy to make a good job of the talk.

I did break off, as I said, for refreshment from time to time and the camera was always handy when I did.

A colourful collection in the snow

A chaffinch looking very noble

Another trying to get a bit of shelter from the snow

As you can see, the snow got thicker as the day went on and for a moment, it looked as though we were going to have a proper snowfall…

…but in the end it didn’t come to much and by the evening, the snow had turned to fine drizzle.

Mrs Tootlepedal went out for a walk in the afternoon and found it very gloomy.  She met Sandy out with his camera and you can see what he was up to by visiting his blog.

Although it was a gloomy day, the snow gives off a bit of light so bird feeder shots were quite possible.

In general though, the snow was just enough to be a nuisance and not enough to give that childlike excitement that a good fall brings to those who don’t see snow regularly.  I have to go to Carlisle tomorrow and I am past the age where driving in snow is fun.  I took this picture from the bedroom window just before the light gave up altogether.

Those are the footprints of the gardener taking a look round.

After I finished struggling with the talk, I set about using some new software for reading scanned music and turning it into editable music files.  It is always a battle to get to know new software and I made many mistakes which involved me having to go back and start again but I was so impressed with its possibilities that I have bought one of the two programs to get the full range of features that were not available on the demo version.  I will buy the second program when my trial period runs out.  As I am not a pianist, it will be very useful to me to be able to easily realise accompaniments which will let me practise sonatas and singing pieces.  I might even improve.

As a result of all this, I have spent the whole day sitting in front of my computer and may well find when I have finished this post that my bottom has become welded to my chair.  My sister Susan has also been working hard on her computer making her family website into a printed book.  She worked so hard that her keyboard caught fire and expired.  I didn’t quite go that far.

A flying bird obliged.