A Sunny Day At Last!

Some good size spuds coming from the poly-tunnel. These are
probably just good ol' Roosters. I don't recall buying any fancy
seed potatoes this year. 

A nice short post this time as we have done precious little except hunker down indoors looking out feeling all 'meh' at the drizzle and rain. We have been restricted to indoor jobs except for a bit of digging spuds in the poly-tunnel. They always do well in there despite my worries about lack of moisture. I never water to a degree that I would call 'enough' but these plants must be able to get roots to the sides of the tunnel and catch some of that rain dribbling down the sides. Some of these tubers were 250 kg and more.

Plum Jam

I also got out and picked all the remaining plums off that over-loaded tree, especially when I spotted that the magpies were starting to peck and the fruits and some of the fruit were splitting in the rain. I got 7 kg of good fruit (and the pigs got half a bucket of 'out-takes') and found excellent jam jars at 50 cent each (inc lid) in a shop in town which sells bee-keeping stuff and hence honey jars. I often have a problem getting jam to set and this batch was true to that form. I have created 25 jars of plum 'slop' but, hey, it'll get used up.

The dogs enjoying Kiltybranks. 

Then today, out of no-where, a nicer, sunnier day. I got a chance to walk the dogs while NOT wearing rain wear and took them down to my favourite off-lead walk site, Kiltybranks. The dogs can charge around here, diving into bushes and down ditches with no risk of them getting among livestock. It is so flat and the vegetation so low that you can see any neighbouring horses or cattle for miles, so there is always time to get the dogs rounded up to walk past the stock on leads.

An almost moribund white-tail queen looked OK in the pic
but I don't think was long for this world. 

It is a much more pleasant stroll for the dog-walker, too as three little 10 kg muscled up lunatics are not pulling you in 3 directions at once. Towser may be the strongest forwards-charger for this but Poppea is my Nemesis - the worst walkee EVER. She'd be deadly on the M25 with her random changes of lane, speed and direction, her dead stops for no apparent reason and then her stops-to-poo/pee with no notice what so ever. I swear one day she will trip me right over by slamming on the brakes right in front of me.

On the left the new size 32 gigabyte camera memory card.
On the right the old-size "card" now relegated to adaptor or
"holder". The micro-card slots in at the bottom. 

I am always amazed by new technology but I am in awe of the latest miniaturization move for camera folk. Our lovely "new" digital cameras take a card which is about an inch square which could fit about 8 'Gig' of data (8,000 Megabytes). My camera, on current settings, takes pictures which have a file size of around 5 Kilo-bytes, so the old cards would fit about 1600 pictures. All well and good. That used to last me about 6 months.

That little fluffy gosling is now that huge
guy at the back here.

I would download the pics by copying but keep them on the card out of some old fashioned need to retain a "hard copy" like on photo-albums of old and then more recently write-able CDs / DVDs.

Cider apples wet with rain.

In a recent shout out on FB and Twitter for anyone who knew of a filing system/method for the used cards I received only howls of derisive laughter and people saying I should 100% trust the soft-ware versions - save them to "the cloud" or back them up to memory drives etc. Ah well. I still like the physical object in my hand. Old fashioned, I guess.

Heather at Kiltybranks

Then last week I went to buy the next 1 inch-ish square SDHC card and found that I can now buy (at the same price) 32 GIGABYTES of memory on a tiny micro-card no bigger than a finger-nail. The old card that fits my socket is now relegated to just a carrier/adaptor into which the micro card slots and the tiny flake of genius holds around 4000 pictures which is the same amount of pics as I have taken so far, on the camera, in the 2-3 years I have owned it!

Most of the roses are suffering in the rain ("balling") but
this peachy one survives.

When I think that back in the day we'd get those pics back from TruPrint (who remembers them?) and I'd store about 200 in an A4 size, thick, hard-back photo album. I still have about 20 of those albums taking up window-sill space upstairs. Now I can get more pics than that on a flake of cleverness as small as my little-finger nail.

Scabious at Kiltybranks.

Ah well. This 'short' post seems to have run amok again. Sorry about that.