There are days and days. Today I woke up tired; not physically tired but mentally tired. It isn't an inspiring way to start the day, is it? Anyway we decided on a walk in the woods at Nymans to see how the bluebells were coming along (not particularly well, I am afraid - they are going to be late) and to feed the ducks. They, of course, were glad to see us and spent a frantic five minutes flapping around, quacking and squabbling and swallowing as much bread as possible. At least the weather was nice, even if that wicked and cold breeze is still troubling us. The sun is warm enough but when that icy zephyr cuts right through you, you realise that it is darned cold still. Back home and it was time to mow the lawns. At least that is the good thing about the colder weather - it is holding the grass back a bit. This has to be a good thing otherwise I will be cutting grass like last year when the darned stuff didn't pause growing because of the oodles of rain we had. That is about it. Nothing fantastic has happened and I didn't even bother taking any photographs today - I just put up a video slideshow of what I had achieved over the month of April. Tomorrow we are going to be up with the birds at about five a.m. because it is May Day and we intend to be up at Chanctonbury ring watching the local Morris Dancers perform their spring dances. Then it is over to Woking to help a friend out. Hopefully there may be a better blog entry as a result of the day's doings and with a bit of luck, I won't be so tired either! ![]() The Natural History Museum The day went well. We got up at a reasonable hour, we arrived in Horsham at a reasonable hour, we found the £3 all day car parking that has magically opened up near the station in Horsham (a little known secret) and found that we could take advantage of the cheap day return ticket for me some forty minutes earlier than the website had announced we could. The train departed on time, arrived on time, the sun shone. We sailed into the tube at Victoria, stepped onto a train as it arrived at the platform at the same time as we entered onto the scene, got off and walked to the Natural History Museum which is where we met our first short delay as we had to queue to enter the building. That was OK because it gave me the time to snap a shot for my 365project for the day. A swift walk around the Dinosaur and Ecology sections of the museum before our timed tickets for the Sebastião Salgado: Genesis exhibition and all I can say is "Wow!". I have never been so gobsmacked at such beautiful pictures before. Even when I went up to Greenwich to see the Ansel Adams exhibition and was amazed at that, this was really something else. The stunning beauty of this chaps photographs just take your breath away. If you love photography and black and white pictures in particular then this exhibition is a must and worth every penny of the £10 it cost to get in. I came away from the exhibition clutching the £45 book of the exhibition which Donna bought me as an early Father's day present. This really has been the highlight of my year so far. This is more than I can say of the British Museum's Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition which we also visited. That was unmitigated tosh, a total waste of time and so dumbed down, it makes me wonder as to the value of keeping our British Museum membership up. Still, with the photographic exhibition to buoy me up this has been a good day. See you all tomorrow. Sundae Stroll from Christina Lu on Vimeo. ![]() Like Father, like sun. Sunday's do come around in very rapid succession, don't they? OK. On the domestic front we are pleased to say that ffoulkes has responded very well to treatment for his poor sore paw and is zooming around as if nothing has happened. Having said that, by the end of the day, he is favouring it a little so I think that it gives him more grief than he lets on. Last night we had another one of our mini WWF Earth hours and had a delightful roast meal with bottle of wine. We then spent a lot of the remainder of the evening reading and listening to music. We don't do this often enough and Donna has suggested that we dedicate at least one evening a week to such activities. It was marvellous because I ploughed through several tens of pages of the latest novel by Joe Abercrombie and good old-fashioned story telling it is too. I'm looking forward to our "reading" evenings. Today we put another brisk seven mile walk in and found somewhere new to us - St Leonard's Forest. Having lived in the area for twenty years, we were totally unaware of this place. We trolled along one of our favourite walks and crossed a particular road before finding ourselves right in the middle of this awesome and magnificent bit of forest. There were plenty of dog walkers and horse-riders about plus several groups of cubs doing map reading exercises but this stretch of forest is just loaded with bluebell filled copses and long tracks which in the sunshine today were blissfully warm. We even got a little lost but neither of us cared. Having set up my smartphone to track where we had been, it was easy enough to backtrack. Back to the real world again we have booked our tickets for the Sebastião Salgado: Genesis exhibition at the Natural History Museum for tomorrow and we are going to do the British Museum's Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition too. So I don't know if there will be time to write a blog entry tomorrow. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I will be able to do a photograph for my 365 day project either! Oh well... With that (I don't think that I will bother with an International news summary) I will leave you for today with some of those irritatingly useful "Life Hacks" ![]() Tourist herding. We had conducted out business in Horsham yesterday so there was no need to go into town today. Thus when we woke up and saw that the sun was shining we thought that it would be a splendid idea to go for a walk. Seeing as we had not take a stroll on the south Downs for a few months we decided that our usual seven mile round trip was an excellent idea. As ever, our drive to Chantry Lane in Storrington was punctuated with conversation. I don't know why but our conversations can take the most amazing and obscure twists, We decided that we didn't know why the bird "Swallow" has the same name as the act of swallowing. We also decided that the seeing as we had an excellent evening yesterday that Bluebell Railway could run a whole variety of food themed nights. In particular we decided that there should be a "Curry Special" and a school dinner special with gristly rissoles, yellow cabbage, processed peas, lumpy mashed potatoes, swede with the bone left in it and follow it up with semolina pudding! Commencing our walk we got about a mile down range when we decided to take a detour off the footpath and stroll up to the top of a nearby Iron Age fort. That was when we were met. We passed through a gate into a sheep filled field and they scuttled away, as all sheep do. We strode on until we became aware that we were being followed. We glanced around to find that the complete flock had come up behind us and were dogging our footsteps ("sheeping" our footsteps?) Nothing would make them desist from this and the air was filled with plaintive "Baaas!" We can only suggest that the farmer pops up once a day to visit his charges and gives them hay or sheep nuts or something. Moving onwards and leaving our sheep behind to resume their grazing, we passed several fields where plump pheasants roamed until we came to one huge, ploughed field where the air was filled with the song of Skylarks. I have never heard so many Skylarks at once, nor have I ever seen so many! Almost all were males vying for territory and I hadn't realised just how vicious they can be when a stray male pops up in their territory. Our walk finally ended just as the rain began. Nothing serious, just a fine spray of drizzle. With that we wended our weary way home, satisfied that we had done our exercise for the day. Last night's trip? Well we took the Bluebell Railway all the way to East Grinstead through the newly repopened section and had a fine time. Here's a video clip I have created for you. No time to do anything frivolous like blog writing today. We have done all the necessary things that we wanted to do - Donna ironed, I planted out my runner bean plants which have gone berserk, I have done my photogeaph for the day (see above) and now I have to get ready to go out for a fun filled evening on the Bluebell Railway described by them as "Fish & Chip Specials 6.30pm departure from Sheffield Park Station for the hour and 45 minute return journey through the Sussex Countryside. Enjoy a Fish & Chip Evening Supper Special including a dessert on board one of our historic steam hauled trains. Booking is essential due to limited seating. A selection of drinks are available for purchase on the day. Fish & Chip vouchers are also available. They are valid for a year from the date of purchase." So there! Right time for a shower and to get myself all prettied up for this gourmet supper (Fish, Chips and coal smoke!). I will tell all tomorrow. Have a quick video about the making of a maple and walnut bowl. ![]() Nooooooooo! So today was part two of the tree cutting experience at OEs place. I had tried to pick up a new chain for either of my chainsaws but unless I had ordered one over the Internet and I had actually managed to get it delivered in time then it was a forlorn hope that I could manage to pick one up in the local area. Sure, Homebase has various chains for various models but not for either of mine despite the fact that one of them is the most popular model on the market! Never mind. I went over to see OE, did the other minor tasks first and then tackled the tree. My goodness but it was a job but in the end, after a lot of effort and swearing I stopped for a breather, leaned on the trunk and heard the smallest of cracks. I gave the trunk a more hearty shove and there was a more heartening crack but try as I might I could not budge the trunk. However, almost as if I had managed to defeat it, a quick extra cut with the saw and the trunk fell to the ground! Score one for the Everest! Apart from that, I have been enjoying a rather unexpectedly nice, sunny day with little else to report other than Donna has the day off tomorrow so we are going to have a leisurely sort of day and a trip on the Bluebell Railway tomorrow evening on one of their "Fish and Chip" evenings. Have a weird video. ![]() Salt of the Earth. This morning I decided to pop into my bank branch to check the old account to see what was up and see what money I had left. Now I can do this from any bank machine but if I want to know exactly what I have spent I need to go to the LTSB machine and get a detailed mini-statement from it. That way I can see which standing orders have gone out and make a good judgement. So once I had dropped Donna off at the station I tootled into town to transact my business. At five a.m. there is always somewhere free to park close by and no huge queues at the bank, in the customer lobby. Except today there was. Tucked up in a grubby sleeping bag, in front of the cash machines was a very "fragrant" vagrant. Now I don't blame the fella for kipping down in the LTSB customer lobby because they keep it warm, it is indoors with no cold breeze blowing in and except when people like myself come in there is no change in temperature. I couldn't reach the cash machines without trampling on and waking the poor unfortunate nor would I have wanted to as his odour was very strong and unpleasant and I didn't wish to have it clinging to me afterwards (he was that pungent). I left him to it and came back into town later on to do my financial thing. At least with that chap he had some excuse for being whiffy to the max. What I don't understand is how otherwise normal people can go around like that. Donna tells me that sometimes commuters get onto her morning train and they stink to high heaven of sweat and other odours. Surely soap and water is cheap enough? What and what? SOAP and WATER! Given the fact that body odours have a nasty habit of impregnating expensive suits and being impossible to shift even with dry cleaning, surely it would be in your best interests to use a few pennies worth of bar of soap a week instead of shelling out hundreds of pounds on new suits? It isn't only the gentlemen either... I don't know about the fellas out there but I like my ladies to be soft, clean, powdered and lightly scented with a hint of delicate but expensive perfume. Personally I don't go for the girl who smells like she has just satisfied the entire team of chefs and waiters of the local Greek taverna. Call me old fashioned but a bit of cleanliness goes a long way in my book even if you skip the powder and perfume. "Nasty" is the only way I can describe it. Anyway, rant over so let's have something nice shall we? How about puppies struggling with stairs? ![]() I love my music. You know how it is. There are a zillion and one things to do but the weather is nice and so you want to drop what you have to do in favour of going out. Knowing that this would be the case, I knocked up today's picture very swiftly (click the pic to enlarge) and then went into the garden to kill two birds with one stone. In this case it was to rebuild my old chainsaw and get it working again (it is a much better chainsaw than the one I currently use) and to then use it to cut up some of the bits of wood that we picked up at OE's house the other day. That is when I found out just how hard Cherry wood really is. I had several portions of trunk to saw through and it took an absolute age. Small wonder that I wasn't able to cut the trunk of the tree in OE's garden the other day. I really struggled and that was when I could get a lot of purchase and use my leg muscles to help press the blade deep into the wood. Thankfully, once the chunks of wood had been cut then splitting them with an axe was a very simple task. Even so, it took me a good couple of hours of hard labour to saw, split and stack the logs and there is so little there that we will still have to have more wood for next winter but I am not turning my nose up at some useful wood, no matter how hard it is to deal with! ffoulkes isn't very well again today. Yesterday he had a slight limp that entailed a trip to the vet. Today he had the use of three legs only and he couldn't even dot his left front paw to the ground so he had to go back tonight. That was a journey from hell. Everyone in the world seemed to want to drive through Cowfold tonight so we had to queue up from about two miles out. We eventually scraped it into the surgery with about thirty seconds to spare rather than the fifteen minutes that we would normally expect. Poor ffoulkes has ripped a claw and pad quite badly after his monster scrap with a younger tom cat last week and he has had it all cleaned up and some pain killers and anti inflammatory drugs administered. He isn't allowed out for a couple of days and that is the bit that is hurting him the most. We had a very pleasant surprise to day when our friend HH dropped off a rather splendid looking Saffron cake (which I think I can eat because it is low in sugar) and a pot of Cornish clotted cream. That went straight into the fridge and I can feel a real case of "Yum!" coming on but it will have to wait until tomorrow because today is a fasting day. Still, only another pound and a half to go and we can move onto a maintenance die to keep the weight off. Roll on that day! Have an animation to watch. "Stranded" STRANDED from Donia Liechti on Vimeo. ![]() Clutching at straws (or possibly "Phut!") That is the noise that a twenty two inch Samsung TFT monitor makes when it stops working all of a sudden. Yes, my beautiful widescreen monitor has died after many years good service. Now, I know that there is probably only some small electronic component that has gone "sizzle!" and given up the ghost but I can't find anywhere local that does Monitor repairs. Flat Screen Televisions no problem but monitors? It seems that the answer there is "throw it away and buy a new one", So I hunted around and found a company that specializes in Monitor repairs! Whooppee! This company also operates a fixed cost so I know that it is only going to cost £59 (excl VAT) to repair. OK, that doesn't sound so bad. Then comes the crunch. It is based in Stevenage. Ok, I go to see Mum and Dad in Hitchin just a way up the road but here's the crunch. With the price of petrol a trip up there and back to deliver it and a second trip and back to pick it up means I can add sixty pounds worth of petrol to the cost. OK, I can send it up by courier and have them send it back via their courier. That is going to add fifty pounds to the bill easily. That means I can go onto the Internet and buy a new monitor for cheaper than it is to repair it. What a day for this to happen - Earth day. I feel really guilty that I don't have the skill to diagnose, find and replace an almost worthless electronic component and save myself a packet. Even then i would need to invest in a new soldering iron, component clippers, solder pumps etc. No, it looks as if I am going to have to invest in a new monitor. It has certainly dampened my day and I have had to spend quite a chunk of time on diagnosis to confirm my fears. Here's some film footage of 1900 that has been given the modern video editing treatment to enhance it. It is described as "Edwardian" but seeing as Queen Victoria didn't die until 1901, it should be "Victorian" ![]() Smiling bollard is a bit sad. Today has been another glorious sunny day even if there has been a bit of a cool breeze blowing. Donna and I were up at a reasonable hour to make the most of it and took ourselves down to Woods Mill Wildlife Sanctuary near Henfield for a walk. Having never been there, it was rather pleasant to walk around in the sunshine and take the air and see somewhere new. It isn't huge but there are some nice views of the South Downs and some pleasing vistas of water meadows. Today was pond dipping day so there were a few families with kids, busily dipping into ponds with their shrimp nets, extracting wildlife and then trying to identify them. There were also kids playing Poohsticks so they can't all be bad. Back in the real world I see that the Remaining half of the Boston bombers is to be interviewed in hospital without being read his Miranda Rights. I think that this is very dangerous ground to tread on. If you want to see this piece of scum walk away from any trial and probably be able to sue the American government then this is the course of action to take. I think that to see justice done, he should go through the complete legal procedure. It might be lengthy, it might be costly but at the end of it, no bleeding heart lawyer is going to claim that he didn't have recourse to due legal process. Back to the real world again, the London marathon was run to day with thirty seconds silence for the victims of the Boston marathon. The race went without a hitch. Back in the real, real world, I had the chance to mow the lawns this afternoon - a great improvement on the first cut a few weeks back. Then Donna and I went to visit OE who had had a large cherry tree felled in her garden and we went to pick up the wood for burning this year. Most of it was ready to go but I had to chainsaw one large chunk in two before it would fit int he car. Unfortunately the neighbours who felled the tree left a large chunk of it still standing (their chainsaw broke) and my puny little Bosch chainsaw wasn't man enough for the job. I will resurrect the JCB chainsaw and go back and do the job properly (hopefully) this coming Thursday. What with the walking, lawn mowing and sawing, I am a tired bunny plus where it is a fasting day, I am a hungry bunny too and I am really looking forward to my victuals tonight. I hope that you all have a splendid week ahead of you, I have lots of things to catch up on so may be a bit tardy keeping the blog up to date. I never could use a skipping rope but this lass has it off pat. ![]() Strong shapes and colours. Well, what do you know? Brilliant sunshine when we woke up this morning. It was absolutely fabulous and means that we can start to think of spring like things. Mind you it was chilly with temperatures down below freezing point at seven o'clock this morning. Surely with May just around the corner, things must be getting ready to warm up a bit? After all its only eight more weeks and the longest day will have happened! Anyway, I am not going to complain about the sunshine today. It made the day seem so special. We were up and about shortly afterwards and that's when a special thing happened. We had out first two Housemartins of the year come and inspect the nests under the eaves. This is the advance party who arrive a couple of days ahead of the main flock. They seem to arrive, do a quick scan to make sure that all of the local nests are still standing and then report back to the main flock who normally turn up a couple of days later. Then it is down to who gets which nest first. Seeing the birds zip up under the eaves instantly gave me another task for the day. We don't wash the windows a great deal in the summer because we don't want to disturb the Housemartins so I make sure that I do them just before they arrive and also just after they leave us in September. So it was a case of "off to town" bright and early to give us a longer time for performing chores. That is when my trusty little Fiat sent us a warning message about oil pressure. I stopped, checked the oil level and it was right off the bottom of the dipstick. Not good. We aren't losing oil from under the car or I would have noticed it on the garage floor. This means that we are burning a bit of oil but given the fact that the car has almost one hundred thousand miles on the clock and that we are almost at his annual service, we have only used a pint of oil in the last twenty two thousand miles so I am not too worried. Anyway, we got to the nearest garage, topped up so everything is fine now. Then it was just a case of get the weekly fruit and veg, pick up some cardboard boxes so I can make the large head I told you about yesterday and it was home to do the chores. The windows have been cleaned and now I am settling down with a glass of beer as the sun goes down. A nice end to an idyllic spring day. What would the world be like if there was only one bookshop? This twenty minute short fiction film shows just this. ![]() Small tribute. I really hate is as I get older and things that were iconic in my youth die or slip away. Storm Thorgeson who designed and created the artwork for the "Dark Side of the Moon" album by Pink Floyd died yesterday. The picture on the right was my offering on the 365project.org website and I made it a tribute to Storm. I doubt if in forty years time, anyone will remember my picture the way that countless millions do for "Dark Side of the Moon" though. Come to think of it, I doubt if anyone will remember me in forty years time. Perhaps that is a good thing! I did my trip over to East Grinstead Museum to discuss their forthcoming temporary exhibition. It looks like it is going to be a lot of fun and it is going to involve a lot of paint. I am really looking forward to it. This year though there will only be one of the ladies from last year and myself doing the artwork plus a helping hand from the curator. This year it isn't only a small canvas to pant. It is two huge walls plus we have to make a rather large head of something but I can't tell you what it is all about yet. Needless to say as soon as I can, I will tip you the nod. Better still, you can come over and see for yourselves. Now... little cats like to sit in boxes but what about big cats? Another quiet day in the Everest household. I had a certain photogrpah in mind for today and try as I might, I couldn't get it to work. I need to rethink my methods and prehaps make use of the light a bit more. As it was, by a stroke of sheer luck, I came up with today's photograph whne I was cleaning the large, blue, glass friendship ball in my study. Because the morning light was in the right place, it reflected off my face and the ball so I rushed the camera and tripod out and whipped off this shot before it disappeared. Talking of sunshine and the like, I know that it is supposed to be warmer at the moment but all I can say is that it is warmer by comparison with this time last month. There is still a darned cold breeze blowing which is slashing temperatures in half - the car's thermometer tells me that it is fourteen degrees Centigrade outside but in reality it feels like half that because of the wind chill factor. It's not just me thinking this. A quick trip back from collecting Donna showed that people are still wrapped up in coats, hats, scarves and gloves. Tomorrow is the inaugural meeting about the new temporary exhibition at the East Grinstead Museum to which I have been invited and in which my artistic skills are going to be put to the test. I don't know if I can tell you any details of the project yet. Let's see what the staff say tomorrow. It will be nice to see some of the old faces again and hopefully some of last years mob will be available for art duty. Time to get my hair cut. Our peripatetic lady hairdresser, Nicki is due shortly to give me my monthly #2 skinhead haircut and to give Donna a more suitable trim. To be quite honest, given the coldness of the weather I ought to let it grow longer! Certainly any thoughts that I was entertaining about shaving my beard and moustache off have gone out of the window! Finally a fun video. "The Internet: A Warning From History" ![]() "Like my wall" collage. Well what a couple of days we have had in the news. First of all there has the been the horrors of the bomb blast at the Boston Marathon. A cruel, calculated attempt to injure as many people as possible. IN the nature of things, casualties have been small compared to civilian deaths from stray NATO munitions in Afghanistan but they could be deemed to be collateral damage whereas this is the act of a sicko or two to try an maim as many as possible. Right down to the timing when there would be more people milling around as it was near the centre of the field coming home to cross the winning line. I feel really sorry for the eight year old kiddy who died as do I for the other casualties and their families. The stupid thing is, if the Americans find out that it was inspired by Al Qaeda, North Korea or whatever, they will wreak terrible and costly vengeance in some form or other. It isn't going to help anyone in the long term. Our own home grown international event was the funeral of Mrs Thatcher. Love her or hate her, she changed the face of politics and of Great Britain. The cretins who are holding celebratory parties don't realise how wealthy they have become as a direct result of her policies. There are a lot of people out there who owe it to Mrs T for owning their own property when she gave them the right to buy their council house. I for one liked the way she did things, with panache. She also gave us our moment of world glory when she issued the order to boot the Argentinian invaders out of the Falkland Islands. That is something that none of today's leaders would dream of doing and is what sets her apart from the mundane, sameness of today's pasty faced politicians. The last thing for today is a rant against Horsham Council. For the last umpteen years they have been collecting garden waste from households, turning it into compost and mulch and then selling that mulch. They have now decided that they are going to charge for the benefit of having your garden waste taken away. It is only a lowly twenty nine pounds for this year but I know darned well it will be more next year and it seems like a stealth tax. The only problem is that we all generate a lot of garden waste. I can't help that this is a retrograde step as people will now have more bonfires, fly tip sacks of waste, put it in with their normal waste where it will then go to expensive landfill etc. The worst that can happen is that people will put their waste into your green recycling bin because they can't be bothered to pay or that someone will steal your waste bin because it bears the sticker that says "I can be collected because I have been paid for". Ho hum. Back to the era of stealth taxes. This is fascinating. We are more beautiful than we think. A forensic artist proves it. Do watch it. It really proves a point. Sorry! I'm a bit rushed for time tonight. So above you have today's picture showing the problem with teams and that is it! I will be back with a vengeance tomorrow.
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May 2015
AuthorPaul Everest - Shining wit (at least that is what I think they said) |