The card was a joker

Today’s picture, sent by Dropscone, shows the French town of Puy l’Eveque near where he is on holiday.

Yesterday’s snow had vanished like….like…let me see if I can find an appropriate simile….ah yes, like snow off a dyke.  I was able to walk along snow free roads to get various pills and potions from the chemist before returning to have a cup of coffee with Sandy.  It was his day off and we thought we ought to make good use of the sunny day so we went to Gilnockie in his car and walked a circular route along an old railway line with a diversion into the woods with a return along the road.

The diversion into the woods was to see if we could find a small waterfall that was marked on the map.  The wood was hard work as every little stream has carved extremely steep banks into the soft clay soil and we had to make many diversions to get to the other side of these slippery little gorges.  When we finally found the waterfall after much huffing and puffing, it wasn’t worth all the effort being nothing but a puny trickle with the added annoyance of a fallen tree halfway across it.

The woods were very picturesque though and I took a lot of pictures some of which might have been well worth putting on the blog if the card hadn’t taken against me when I tried to put them on my computer and deleted the lot.  Fortunately you can see many fine pictures of the walk if you want to by visiting Sandy’s blog.  As you will see if you go there, it was a lovely day and we enjoyed the walk a lot even if the waterfall wasn’t up to much.

We spent some time when we got back sorting through a large collection of photographs passed on to the Archive Group by my neighbour Liz.  Many of them have dates and names on which is very useful as there is little point in putting pictures into our database that can’t be found by searching or which don’t tell you what there are when you do find them by chance.  Note to anyone with a paper based photo collection: go and put names and dates on them now before you get too old and can’t remember anything.

I was just going to have a good rest after all this work when Mrs Tootlepedal suggested a short cycle ride to Wauchope School and back.  It was very nippy in  spite of the sunny weather so we had to spend some time getting well wrapped up but we enjoyed the ride.  Luckily I had sandycam in my back pocket so I can at least add one or two pictures to today’s post.

Wauchope Schoolhouse

Mrs Tootlepedal demonstrating winter cycling chic

We just got home before the sun went down.

In the evening, we went to the choir and I conducted the first half of the session which I enjoyed very much and then sang for the second half and surprisingly enjoyed that a lot too.  I am getting used to the songs we are singing and soon may be actually able to sing some of them.

I was so annoyed by the loss of my pictures that when I got home I took the camera out into the garden and tried to shoot a passing planet.

Hand a bit wobbly sadly

I tried again with the tripod.

Slightly better

Then I had a go at Orion’s Belt which was very clear in the sky.

The only constellation that I can easily recognise.

Then I came in and took a picture of my useful electric keyboard which plays the harpsichord for me and produces practice disks for the choir.  It has been a a very good investment.

It’s not quite a flying bird but it was the best that I could do.