Didn’t take any shots much during the week, and what I did take is on the yawn side of boring, so lets skip right to the good stuff. I worked Monday – Thursday and so on to Friday and my day off. 🙂  I went into South Shields town as they have a junk market on to see if I could find anything photogenic and cheap.
South Shields Market Place
I bought a little wooden inlaid box for £2.50 and 3 glassware candleholders for £1. The best bit was it was full of mature couples looking for things they can take to an Antiques Roadshow at some point, and I heard a market stall  holder telling a lady the little pots she was looking at were made in the 1920’s, and she bought them straight away. Also there seemed to be lots of people on mobility scooters. Now these things drive me batshit. Nearly everyone I see on them is capable of getting off and walking, and everyone of them is at best overweight and at worse really really overweight, and I’m like duh?? I am sure there are genuinely immobile people who really need these things, but no-one I’ve seen as yet. Rant over.
South Shields high street was surprisingly full of people (Bargain Hunters!) because when I go on a weekday it’s normally quiet empty. The recession has taken it’s toll on high street shops in lots of places, and empty spaces where shops used to be is a sad sight to see but hey!! good news……..
good news?
A shop full of trainers and tracksuits. Yay. Just the regeneration it needs. Sigh. That lady was rocking her scooter 🙂
I love the old architecture in Shields, the Lloyds Bank Building is quite impressive..
Lloyds Bank
There was also a really nice young chap busking with his guitar, he had a great voice and sang really well, I was going to take a shot of him but this silly old lady person in a bright green dress and pink cardigan started dancing right next to him and in front of him, I was quite annoyed on his behalf, they were romantic songs and not dancy anyway. Â I mean, how rude! Â I didn’t want to then encourage her by letting her think she was being photographed, but I suppose if I was more journalistic I should have taken the shot.
On Saturday we had Cal come to stay over, and he is a ball of energy (which we are not haha). We decided to take him out to Saltwell Park for the afternoon and he had a great time, and I took some nice pictures of him and Grandad. Cal can’t say Grandad, so calls Phil ‘Dawdaw’ which amuses me greatly.
First stop play area,
Slide
then bouncy castles, £2 for 10 mins across 3 castles, not bad value, Cal loved it.
Bouncehappyness is a bouncy castle
Then onto the lake and a trip in a dinosaur peddle boat, £5 for 30 minutes, best bit of the day for me, love being in boats 🙂
to infinity…
next up a trip on Thomas The Tank engine
and beyond
then we went home
homeward bound
and after tea we baked cakes.
alien cakes
today we entertained his Lordship til Mum and Dad came to get him, and then have just been toodling around preparing for work tomorrow and cooking a sunday lunch. I was supposed to take a shot for the sunday challenge group, but am too worn out! There’s a reason we have kids in our 20’s and not in our 50’s 🙂
Well the week started off Ok with nice weather, and I have made a decision to take some form of photograph every day, which isn’t always easy when work is so busy. Somehow I forgot to do one on Monday 😀 so that was a great start!
Tuesday Â
This was my first day at a new clinic starting at Age UK Gateshead. The shop is in quite a rundown part of Gateshead, but the lady running it is lovely, I had a nice quiet room to do my tests in and both my clients had too much wax in their ears for me to proceed!
Tuesday
I was quite taken with the name of the closed up pub opposite Age UK The Moon & Sixpence, I googled the name and it’s actually the title of a book by W.Somerset Maugham, about an english stockbroker who abandons his wife and children and runs off to Tahiti via Paris to be an artist, and it’s loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin. Why a pub in Gateshead should be named after this book is beyond me, as far as I can find out Mr.Maugham never came near the North East so has no connection, but still, it’s a nice name and thats what drew me to take the shot. The other building I took a shot of is in Sunderland, The Harbour View (because the view is of the harbour of course) which apparently is a great place for live music, and good food, though I’ve never been. What caught my eye is the graffiti of what looks like Dean Martin on the wall of the pub, I don’t think he ever came to the North East either, but hey ho, it looks fab.
Wednesday
another busy day so all I took a picture of was my lovely chicken salad I had for tea haha and I’ve stuck it in the Tuesday collage! In truth I had the same tea on Tuesday so it still fits.
Thursday
Oh Thursday- day of doom! I should have been a day off but went to work for most of it and managed to take this shot of the church next to where one of my clients lives
but that was the only good thing about the day really as it all went to ratshit when I got home.  I had an email frenzy for 2 hrs as there are a lot of problems with works new processes, I’ll spare you the boring details but it drives me mad and makes work harder than it has to be. Sigh. After that I decided to sit and have my tea and read my latest book, when I thought I could hear the rain start pattering on the conservatory roof, but on looking out the kitchen window the sky was clear and blue with fluffy clouds. So I went to the conservatory and holy guacamole the place was full of bazillions of flying ants, copulating all over my windows and blinds!  It was the most horrible of sights and I hate buggy things at the best of times, let alone a gazillion of them.  Of course this was the one night The Hubster had gone out on a schoolboys reunion so I was on my own with it. I shut the conservatory door and googled  flying ants to discover they are really ordinary ants who once a year grow wings and mate like crazy fofr a day, then go back to being normal ants. How bloody bonkers is that!??? Why can’t they just mate like normal bugs inside their own homes?? So, I also learned that to kill them I would need some mega poisonous bug killer (which I didn”t have) or could use a solution of 1 part vinegar and 1 part water as the acid in the vinegar also causes them to expire. On the whole I do not like killing insects and stuff, but this was too much and I filled up my orchid sprayer and became The Exterminator!  I did not take pictures of this as it was just awful. I sprayed and sprayed, for over an hour and bit by bit they ceased to live, but still some survived, When I ran out of vinegar I used bleach, but still there were loads left.  In the end I got quite distressed with the whole thing so shut the door on them and got my camera and went drove to the coast where I consoled myself with breathing in the sea air, and lovely skies and sea.
Phil got home before I got back and thought I must have had fish and chips for tea as the place stank of vinegar! When I got home we decided to leave everything till Friday.
Friday
Apart from having the killing fields to contend with, my poor back tyre has been going down quite quickly and I’ve been having to pump it up periodically to keep it going. So in the morning I took her up to my local garage and a very nice smiley young chap put a new valve in the tyre, and all is well with the Rav again. Then I came home and got to grips with cleaning the conservatory, I stripped everything out and went to work sweeping up the corpses, there were still plenty of surviving stragglers that I had to bash over the head with the dustpan brush, but eventually they were all gone, the place was spotless, and nippon has been put into any cracks around the floor til Phil gets chance to go round with filler. Â What a bliddy nightmare!! For dinner we had another disaster, Peri Peri chicken. It said MEDIUM heat on the sauce bottle (you can also get hot and extra hot!) and it nearly blew our heads off! No way would I try extra hot. Hmm in retrospect maybe I should have used that on the ants. Finished the night off with a movie Thor 2 which had amazing special effects and visuals, and Chris Hemsworth had is shirt off at one point which is never a bad thing to see :). Then we sat in our newly lovely conservatory and chatted and had a few glasses of cheer before going to bed.
Friday
Saturday
a much lovelier day, Phil and I did gardening! We went to our local garden centre to get some lawn feed, and I bought some new herbs for my pots, forgot to take a pic of them, but here’s one of Phil weeding the front bit, I took this sneaky out of the bedroom window.
and then we had a mini ODE (which is oudoor eating experience, a euphemism for BBQ because whenever BBQ is mentioned, it rains).
My Trendy Hubby
yummy cheeseburgers cooked by my trendy guy! Then we watched a really good British movie  Closed Circuit, with Eric Bana, the watched a couple of music dvd’s. Phil has been transferring our old music video’s to dvd and they’ve come out really well, so we did Bon Jovi New Jersey followed by Bryan Adams, great stuff but we didn’t get to bed til 3am!
Sunday
Today has been another cool day, wet weather but nice anyway. We got up late of course, and had a leisurely breakfast, then I did a photo for the Sunday challenge group- which was to make a maade up advert for something.
Shelley and Cal came to visit which was fun
and then I cooked a lush Sunday lunch.
Beefcake meets beef!Sunday lunch
and that was the week that was! Start all over again tomorrow, bring it on!
This is my best one yet, so think I’m on the right track, love the softness and light that the polaroids can produce. Like a little bit of magic, click the button, whir whir spit & out comes the film, stick it somewhere dark for 40 mins and hey presto!!  These eggs had to be photographed as they were given to me by my friend Helen who lives a long way away, when I visited over christmas. She has two chickens, a Rhode Island Red, and a black one too.  They are a)huge, b)spotty ( 🙂 ) and c) the most tasty eggs ever. I had one for my lunch at it was glorious. So much nicer than shop bought ones. Of course I want chickens now, but hubster says no 😦 he’s probably right, but still, I like dem eggs!
One of my projects for this year us to do a ’52’ with my polaroid equipment, am going through the (expensive!) learning curve at  the minute though, am getting the hang of the camera settings just about but a bit unsuccessful with my first attempt on the instant lab, which converts iphone shots to analogue polaroid shots.
iPhone shot of HerkyConverted with Instant lab
I t hink I forgot to choose which type of film I was using so another test shot coming up.
Ah my poor long suffering hubby Phil is always my target when I’m in need of doing some portrait photography. Â This year someone at his workplace gave him a Reindeer Snood for a Christmas present. Â He is such a good sport to model it for me as I wanted to practice with my new camera, a vintage Polaroid land camera. Â Unfortunatley I hadn’t got the hang of the exposure setting so the picture I took with it was blown out, as you can see :).
I’m not giving up though and my polaroid successes will be added to my Adventures In Film page in the menu above, 2 in there already 🙂
fraggle ~ rocking a camera across the Universe 
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