Geese
You're probably all very bored with the very idea of more snow, still, yesterday we had a good fall, probably about six inches in a few hours. The Arts Correspondent, who knows about these things, said it was powdery snow, and thus a good thing. Certainly when we went to visit our neighbours who live a couple of bothys along from the one Lewis Grassic Gibbon lived in (before he moved to Welwyn Garden City, and died), the snow was deep and crisp and uneven all along their track. Safer in the circumstances to leave the car at the top and crunch pleasingly along the path.
I took this picture of snowdrops in their garden, it's amazing that something so fragile can cope with the toughest of conditions.
As I came home in brilliant sunshine this morning, I noticed that one of the fields was absolutely rammed with Canada Geese (the thin brown line across the centre of the photo), it's common at night to hear distant chatter, either as they fly over on a mission to somewhere, or as they roost. More rare, in my experience to see so many on the ground. Mind you, in this weather it is a whole lot easier to spot some of our wildlife, either because it stands out against the snow, or because hunger has driven them inland. We get great flocks of Oystercatchers in the fields some days, for example, and there are always loads and loads of crows.
playtime on the beach
We had visitors over the weekend, and I was able to go for a walk on the beach with them, while the rest of the country was buried under a blanket of snow and ice the local microclimate did its mysterious thing.
The spontaneous art tendency has produced these tepees.
cheese eating bucket monster...
I had a minor culinary disaster yesterday, a phone call and a lapse of concentration and I created a flambed leek soup, rather than the leek and potato I was aiming for. Happily I had some watercress lurking in the pantry and was able to throw together an alternative. Later inspection revealed that the soup wasn't quite as ruined as I had previously thought, and I set it aside for the morning. As the kitchen is sub-arctic I didn't worry about decanting it into a pot and fridging it, just pushed it to the back of the stove and forgot about it.
When I got up this morning to make the coffee, I was aware of my soup lurking in a soup like way, and continued to ignore it. The cat, I should perhaps explain, is, like the rest of us, beginning to come to terms with his christmas over indulgence. The vet, when I took him in for his booster, was a little terse; 'No, it's not big hair, he's a bit porky.' So the boy is restricted to 60g of griblets per day, scientifically weighed on an electronic scale. As it is still frozen solid outside, his opportunities for takeaways are somewhat limited, so he is reduced to piteous wailing and supplicatory paw waggling whenever he has an audience. As I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I fed the cat his breakfast, which vanished like snow in the sunshine, and wandered back to bed with the coffee. The cat followed along shortly after, to claim a few moments duvet time.
Some time later, The Arts Correspondent went for the top up, and came back looking confused: 'Have you been eating the soup?'
I answered in the negative, but there was indeed a large lacuna in the soup pan, roughly the size of a small tomcats head. The cat drowsed on in innocent sleep (see pic of cat in innocent pose). He does indeed seem to have developed a taste for cold leek soup, the only positive is that he doesn't seem to get wind from it.
