Four Photos: Nearly a month out of date

This year I actually made something out of the sour, pointless red currants from the allotment: fruit leather.

It's horrible.  It gets stuck to ones teeth and no one likes it.  I only made it because Vom Smallhausen and Count Podgkinson foolishly picked some currants after I'd taken them up the allotment (fruit leather was the least complicated recipe I could find that used the most red currants).  The red currant bush is getting dug up this winter!

 

View up Northrepps Road

 

Parasol mushroom

 

Escaping the heat - and Bitey - was this toad.

 

 

 

P. S. Apologies for my absence, I have been busy with summer and taking photos for the Grand Gardening Competition in October, or sooner??

 

  Oh, no, wait.  That wasn't me.  That was Ms Scarlet.

  While I have been busy with summer and taking photos for the Grand Gardening Competi-  I mean, Garden Photos Event, I have also been sorting out the garden & allotment, engaged in a few social activities (pah!), exhausted myselves trying to eke out some sort of service from a couple of companies so-called "customer service" departments/teams, and have been lumbered with nieces and nephew far more often that I would have liked!

 (Except for the toad, these photos are from 2nd August and I started this post on the 8th!) 

 

  Also, Ms Scarlet had locked me in her attic without food nor a bath mat - but that's a story for another time... 

Four Photos: Elephant!

Last month, we found this in the red greenhouse

 

It's an elephant hawkmoth

 

And last week The Mother discovered this on the lawn.  Well Bitey discovered it and The Mother went over to see what he was staring at. An elephant hawkmoth caterpillar (she thought it was a poo!)

 

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrgh!*  It's going to devour us all!!!!

 

 

*It may or may not be a pirate. 

Four Photos: Wishful Thinking?

A hummingbird hawk moth drinking from one of the buddleias in the Hexenhäusli Device gardens this afternoon.

 

Oh my gods!!!  They're almost holding hands!  They're going to do It*!!!!!!

(Two of my three favourite** lowest of the Lower Deckers - Fin*** the super-hot, pretty boy human med tech and Charlie**** the adorable Andorian engineer - from the first episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4, "Twovix".  I took this photo back in April as I couldn't take a screen shot and couldn't find one online [I have found one since then, though] - I wanted it for research purposes, the end result of which will probably be posted here at some point.)

 

Bitey on the beach on Wednesday evening.

 

Someone in this house had this for tea on Wednesday - and it certainly wasn't me!

 

 

* According to First Officer Jack Ransom (in "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place"), the Cerritos is the "horniest ship in the fleet" (and doesn't have any married couples on board).

** The third is Buddy the Vulcan, as featured here with the other two.

*** He's not named in the show as he's just a non-speaking background character, but he looks remarkably like my backup lifeguard at the pool I swim in, so I've given him the same name.

**** Again, unnamed in the show, but someone has named him Charlie.  I'm going with it for now as I haven't thought of anything better.

Four Photos: Bat!

 

Look what I found crawling up the inside of the carport on Tuesday morning: a tiny bat!

Probably a pipistrelle of some description.  Unless it was a young 'future predator'...?

 

An hour or so later it had disappeared - probably having climbed high enough to launch itself into the air and fly away to somewhere more hospitable (and darker) than my carport.

Art vs Artist

 By popular demand-

 What? Since when was two people showing a polite, vague interest "popular demand"?

 Since now.  Go and interfere somewhere else.  This is my post!

 I think you'll find it is our post.  After all, whose name is on all those header images further down, hmm?

 Oh, hush.  Why don't you go and see to that ever widening Cusp interface before someone - or someones - falls in!

 Fine.  I'll leave you to your little doodles, then!

 

 Right.  Now that Witchface has gone, here is the Art vs Artist thingy I mentioned in the last post. It's something I saw on BlueSky so I thought I'd have a go, too.

 The majority that I saw are 3x3 square grids with a photo of the artist in the centre square surrounded by eight pieces of their work, so I followed the same pattern (it's all Star Trek stuff as I rarely produce any other kind):

 

Top left to right:

Four Photos: The Drier Side of Britain

 

Something for Ms Scarlet to consider...

(Proof of North Norfolk's dryness compared to Devon's - well, Cornwall, as Bude is the closest weather station to Ms Scarlet's neck of the woods) 

 

 

Stinking iris or roast-beef plant (Iris foetidissima)

 (A native to Britain, but "exotic" in New Zealand - the tables are turning, Dinah!)

 

 

A practise pose from 2021's Hallowe'en Star Trek Art Challenge

(I've included this as a reminder for me to concoct an Art vs Artist collage)

 

 

An unused photo from 2023's Salt Rooks

 You know, to show how dry it is here and all that...
 

Four Photos: 4

Male broad-bodied chaser dragonfly

 

 

A Triffid!!!  Agave montana flower head

 

 

End-of-the-Line

 

Friday evening

Four Photos: CCGH

Ceanothus (last featured here)

 

 

Copper beech

 

 

Gorse

 

 

Hawthorn

 

 

 Just a selection of colour seen while out and about over the past week.

Four Photos: Let There Be Light

 The first foxglove of the season - and it's self illuminating!

From six years ago

 

 

G&T time! (July 2023)

 

 

From Madam's Lane (June 2018)

Four Photos: Bee Edition

 "Four Photos" is an idea I've just had to help me get back to our little corner of the BlogWorld. 

 Rather than spend hours trying to work out what to say (if I don't have anything to say), or how to say it (if I do), I just need to select four photos that I've taken and slap them up here on my blog with as little or as much accompanying text as I feel is necessary or can be bothered with.  

 There doesn't need to be a theme, or anything that links the chosen photos, and they don't even have to be recent ones, but they do have to be photos I've taken.  (I'm considering family photos as well - just in case I happen to look at old photo albums and see something of interest.)

 

 This first set, you will see, does have a theme.  Well, the first three do, anyway.  Bees!

 Just over three weeks ago I was up at the allotment and noticed a rather loud buzzing.  Once I'd worked out where the noise was coming from, I saw the air over number 37 (next door but two to mine) was rather hazy.  Putting down my tools, I wandered over to investigate.

 

It's not readily noticeable in this photo, but the air was thick with honeybees - I didn't get any closer.

 

I don't know if they were coming or going.

 

You can't really make out the bees in front of the blackthorn blossom, but look at the sky between the branches and twigs.

: : :

 

Oblivious to the danger lurking under the swing, Bitey rolls around on the lawn.

(From 20th April)

: : :

 

 Should anyone else who is suffering from the 'blog uselessness' bug think that this 'Four Photos' treatment may help them, please feel free to use it.

GPE #3 : Top-Dressing with Hound

H O U N D

at the

 Gymkhana of Gardening

 Hound is not a gardener - he lives in Birmingham, for Christsakes! - but has seen fit to take part in this "gymkhana of gardening" (his own words) in his own inimitable way.  Let's see what he has to show us:

"Against my better judgement, a picture of me gardening"

 Now, Hound only sent me two images displaying his gardening 'skills' - the one above, and another that beggars description, quite frankly.  But, before we get to that one, I scoured his 2021 blog posts in an effort to find some greenery to pad this out a bit.  The results were... lacking, let's just say.  I found two pictures only very tangentially related to gardening - both from April:

"You love secrets. You want to marry secrets and have half-secret, half-human children."

 How has half the year passed by already?  How?!?

 Anyway, continuing on from the first quarter's update, here are the highlights of what I've read, watched and listened to from April to June:

Read

Yes we have books on a chair.  Why bother reading, otherwise?

∘ Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Lives of Dax, edited by Marco Palmieri - Again. For the millionth time (although I didn't read every life, only my favourites).

∘ Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding - Again, again.

∘ Star Trek The Motion Picture: Inside the Art and Visual Effects, by Jeff Bond & Gene Kozicki - I found this to be a rather fascinating read, and I had no idea of the time pressures and obstacles the production was up against.  Although, I'd've liked a few more pictures.   Actually, I should be more specific as there are loads of cool pictures, it's just that many of them are quite small (in order to fit them in, I should think, otherwise the book would be the size of a car), and I would like to see even more photos of the V'Ger model (because I'd recently found some that I hadn't seen before online somewhere, so I had my expectations up).  All that being said, there are some gorgeous full & two-page spreads of photos and artwork that did not disappoint.

∘ Star Trek: Living Memory, by Christopher L. Bennett - I love the 80s Star Trek movie era, Uhura, and Christopher Bennett's Trek novels, so I'd got my hopes way up for this one.  While it employed the exacting and precise writing style of his previous novels, easily recognisable characterisation, and an excellent use of continuity-weaving as always, Living Memory fell rather flat for me.  I couldn't "hear" Uhura (although the other characters came through easily) and I'd like her to have featured more than she does.  I thought the conflict conversations between Uhura and Shastri, and Kirk and Janith-Lau/Arcturian Warborn were too much like speeches - all civil and reasonable - and so I found them unrealistic and rather dull.  However, I did like the elephants (more please!), "meeting" Uhura's family, the look at Denobula, and the inclusion of Clark Terrell and the Reliant (from ST II), and Joel Randolph (from ST IV).

∘ The Flight of the Pterosaurs, a pop-up book by Keith Moseley - Rather spare on text, but beautifully illustrated.  The pop-ups are rarely of the pterosaurs, strangely - instead they're of plants and insects in the scenes, mostly.  Although, the final pop-up is quite spectacular - two Quetzalcoatlus northropi soaring over a sauropod corpse.

∘ Star Trek: Dwellers in the Crucible, by Margaret Wander Bonanno - I hadn't read this one* in a LONG time, and had almost forgotten how "grown up" this novel seems - mainly, I think, because the Enterprise crew barely feature in it.  The story is based around the kidnapping of a young human woman and her Vulcan would-be friend, and how they bond while in captivity.   Some of it is rather harrowing, and not everyone gets out unscathed (or even alive).

* You'll have to scroll right to the end if you click the link, and even then you're bound to be disappointed...

Isn't It Drafty In Here?!

 It was while dragging a draft post about books into 2021 and getting it fit to be published, that I noticed that there were 1300 posts on this blog.  But, upon closer inspection, 16 of them were drafts, so it'll be at least a couple of months before I hit that nice, round 1300 published posts.

 I pondered deleting the drafts as some of them are bloody ancient, but I thought I might actually finish them off one day and publish them.  Then I got to wondering if anyone else has a load of half-finished (or less) posts languishing in their "drafts" folder.  So, do you?  If I show you mine, will you show me yours?  I hope so, because here are mine:

 Out of these first five, I'd just about managed to get "Books" in some sort of order, but I've ruined it with some questionable font/size choices, so that's going to take some unravelling.  Then, I'm preparing for this years "Coven Awards" as I had an idea for a revamp which means taking note of things as they happen, rather than trying to remember stuff in a panic half-way through December.  There's also some preparation for a trip over the Cusp for "Ms Scarlet's Birthday" in March - but the rest of that post depends on whether we get this pandemic under control and the Cusp opens its borders.  Obviously, "Isn't It Drafty In Here" is this post, which just leaves "It's a Faake! prose" - which I will probably delete it as it's only a half-arsed Star Trek story that, despite the Jan 3 date, has actually been hanging around since at least Feb 2019 (which is the penultimate time that I edited it).  The only reason it's still hangning around is that I've been using it to upload images to my Blogger gallery, and Jan 3rd was the last time I did that...

Blue Bottom and Rainbow

 So, what have I been up to since The Year of Ferrero Rochering Dangerously ended and now?  (Other than that Tippi Hedren moment and Ms Scarlet's First Vinyl meme, of course - see previous post.) 

 Well, apart from work and wandering about the countryside surrounding Hexenhäusli Device, not a lot.  As these photos go to show...

 First up from 27th December, the titular blue bottom and a load of clay: 

Near the end of the End-of-the-Line is a blue bottom!

 

Don't worry, this photo was taken from quite a long way off.

This grey seal pup had just been disentangled from a discarded jacket, and was getting over the ordeal by lounging about waiting for its mum to return from the sea.

Stay, Destiny Foghorn!

 I've been half-heartedly working on a photo-post on-and-off all day, but my heart just isn't in it, so instead, here is my go at Ms Scarlet's meme: "What was the first vinyl single you ever bought?"

 Well, it was "Stay" by Shakespears Sister back in 1992:

 

 In fact, it was the first and only vinyl record I ever bought.  And the only reason for that is that all the cassette tapes and CDs had sold out (although, I'm not sure that I even had a CD player back then?).

~o~

 On a related note, I really wanted to feature French & Saunders' spoof of "Stay" (and "I Don't Care") "Destiny" by Dickens Daughters (which features in the first episode of their fourth series, "Misery"), but there's no clip on YouTube (however, for those of you in the UK, it is on BBC iPlayer!).

Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders as Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit

EDIT: Jon found the clip on DailyMotion:

 So instead (of the clip that wasn't on YT, but is on DM, and can now be found above, meaning that this bit is now surplus to requirements but I'm keeping it as its funny.  Well, I think so anyway...), may I present this exceedingly poor quality, much shorter clip - that I still find pant-wettingly hilarious - from The Mary Whitehouse Experience, performed by David Baddiel and Rob Newman:

 

~o~

Drat!  Perhaps I should have written out this quote for
Ms Scarlet's "Did I Win Yet?" Award/Quiz/Competition/Event thingy?

A Write Panic Reference: Things on Chairs

 This post is an accompaniment to the A Write Panic blog post, Things on Chairs (which was gathered together and written by me).  It's just a little reference list of the items that feature at the end of my part of the story.
 If you haven't already done so, I urge you to go and give A Write Panic a read.  It is a collaborative blog from the mind of Ms Scarlet (she also set it up and organised it, too!) which features ten talented and enthusiastic bloggers - oh, and me.
 There are no spoilers in this post, so the story won't be ruined if you read this first.  Particularly as these objects are what I imagined were the "things on chairs" at the end of my latest A Write Panic post, but as I didn't describe them with any definition (well, except for the fondant fancy and the Ferrero Rocher), someone else may depict them in a different way.

The spindle shaped vial containing that blue potion, is none other than the Elixir of Life as featured in the film Death Becomes Her.

[image missing]  Unfortunately, I can't show you the pink fondant fancy as it got et.
(I can tell you, however, that it wasn't a Mr Kipling cake, otherwise it would have been a French Fancy)

The towel - a spare on loan from the Beeblebrox Estate - a very useful object (and 100% Egyptian cotton, no less).

The "old clay pot with mould growing inside it" is Daughter of the Fifth House, Lwaxana Troi's, Sacred Chalice of Rixx.  I'm sure the Holy Rings of Betazed were on another chair further down the corridor...

The collection of sea glass is, of course, the glass island that featured at Ms Scarlet's.

The Bottle of Greed is another one of Ms Scarlet's creations, featured here.

The universe cannot be photographed convincingly, so may I direct you to Ms Scarlet's Portrait of a Universe, instead.  A far more comprehensible and erudite interpretation.

I couldn't get a good photo of the Ferrero Rocher because it was so awesomely perfect that Camera could only manage to capture the golden glare from it's exquisite foil wrapper.

And as for the books:

The Days Are Just Packed, a Calvin and Hobbes collection by Bill Watterson, featured here.

Fucked-up Fondues, by that spiteful cow Delilah Smythe, featured here.

neue mobel 6, by Gerd Hatje, featured at Mago's, here.

The Visitors, by Sally Beauman, featured at Ms Scarlet's, here.

::

Read the continuing story of A Write Panic here.