Day 299~366

“Oh look at the dewdrops on the webs sparkling in the sunshine”, said Frego, “let’s go and shoot them.”

So we did.

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The Fraggle Report~ Spidey edition

When practicing photography, a piece of advice that is often given, is to do a study of something, take pictures of it at different angles, with different lenses different times of the day.  So I did the first two yesterday morning. All these webs are the work of one busy chap. I used my fuji XT1 with 18-55mm zoom, and 60mm macro.

House of Spider
House of Spider
The Extension
The Extension
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Christmas lights

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The Webmaster
The Webmaster
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Not a tangled web
come into my parlour...
come into my parlour…

So tomorrow am having a day out with Sophie yay! and we are taking our cameras to Howick Hall,which has some amazing gardens, not been before so really looking forward to it. 🙂

laters gaters

😉

 

The day after Sunday post.

Ho hum, late again, 🙂 Another week with crap weather so not many photo ops. Still a few animals found, should have posted this one last weekend but forgot, these are the famous cows of Milton Keynes ~The Concrete Cows in Milton Keynes, England are an iconic work of sculpture, created in 1978 by Canadian-born artist, Liz Leyh. There are three cows and three calves, approximately half life size.The Cows are constructed from scrap skinned with fibre glass reinforced concrete donated by a local builder.

The Cows of Milton Keynes
The Cows of Milton Keynes

This week I passed O’Briens, a shop in Boldon that sells garden sculptures, usually plaster Venus’s or Caesars and stuff like that, but also these…..

The Giraffes of East Boldon
The Giraffes of East Boldon

I mean, would you?? I also see an elephant in the background, so if anyone wants a static safari park in their back garden, you know where to come. 😀

I did manage to catch the sun going down at the beach at South Shields, it was bloody cold but I sat on the beach dunes and took some shots of the guys trying to surf. The waves are not really great for surfing as far as I can see, but a couple of the guys managed to get on their boards, but slim pickings really and they must have been freezing their particulars off!

inappropriate shoes
inappropriate shoes
getting up
getting up

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and the view over to Tynemouth Priory was nice with the sun angled low.

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Friday was the 3rd anniversary of Yoyo’s death, still miss this special little guy, full of character and made us laugh a lot.

Yoyo
Yoyo

This weeks best web..

WWW.
Webmaster
covering the angles
covering the angles

Laters Gaters 🙂

 

 

Sunday Afternoon

Which it is here at the moment, and quite sunny, but cold now autumn is passing and winter is looming. I’ve had a week off work which is great, but also not so great as it’s the last day and am back to work tomorrow. 😦 I do like not being at work, a lot. The weather has not been so kind though and I have not got out much which is a shame as I’d fancied a few walks with my camera, but I did read a lot, I finished the series of Jack Reacher novels, and am into book 4 of C.J.Sansome’s Shardlake series, set in Henry the 8th days and as we are currently watching the HBO series The Tudors ties in nicely with that.

My visit with Helen last week inspired a trip to ASDA where I purchased a slow cooker, and last Monday cooked pulled chicken which was lush, forgot to take pics of the end result but here it is in action!

Slow cooking
Slow cooking

Helen also gave me a cutting from her bamboo plant, and I spent yesterday potting it and also moved all my herb pots indoors to protect them from frost.

Bamboo
Bamboo

Have also been doing stuff around the house, sorted out my spice shelf which was in a bit of disarray!

spicey
spicey

Phil is quite shocked at my domestication! Not sure how long it will last.:D

 

On Wednesday night we had a spectacular sunset over Wardley, so I hung out of bedroom windows to get some photos of it, it was glorious.

Front window view 1
Front window view 1
Front window view 2
Front window view 2
Back window view 1
Back window view 1
Back window view 2
Back window view 2

Friday I had a meeting with Rory from our head office to get some new equipment for work, and to learn some new test procedures, it was a long day and my head was at exploding point by the end of it, but worth giving my day up to get the training.

On Friday night Phil and I always have ‘music night’ where we play loads of discs, get quite merry, and sometimes I get a live performance!

Phil playing the Thunderbird
Phil playing the Thunderbird
Thunderbirds are GO!
Thunderbirds are GO!

So today it’s sunny as I said, and I would love to go out with the Nikon, but I have to learn all the stuff I did on Friday, ready for tomorrow. Practice makes perfect and all that. But I took a couple of pics in the garden for my fix.

Waiting in the wings
Waiting in the wings
Spidey still going strong, somewhere.
Spidey still going strong, somewhere.

Laters Gaters 🙂

 

 

A woeful week

It started off well enough on Monday, with lovely blue skies and nice drives out in the country to see some far flung clients.  On Monday I spotted the snail~mail and dumb~phone combo on one of my journey’s

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snail~mail & dumb~phone

 

and on Tuesday I spotted this field, in which the lake pond thing, I think, is a consequence of the heavy rainfall we’ve had over the past couple of years.

field lake thing
field lake thing

Lots of farm land has been flooded over the past couple of years and some of the resultant ponds have never quite retreated. You can see a fence trotting out into the water going nowhere, and those trees started out on dry land!

Then on Wednesday I started feeling a little off during the day, and by the time I got home, I was absolutely poorly 😦

poorly pills
poorly pills

So for the past 5 days I’ve been miserable, full of not nice stuff up my nose and on my chest. I had 4 days off, the weather was glorious and I couldn’t do anything but mope and read my books. I don’t get poorly much, yes I get aches and pains, and niggles, but colds/flu etc usually pass me by. Not this time though!! I mean, my eyes were so stingy and runny I couldn’t wear make-up for 3 days!!!! So I couldn’t go out of the house, couldn’t do shopping or photographing, and was a total recluse. I tried to cook dinner for Phil and made a total cock up of it and resorted to toast and take-outs instead. (Take out WAS yummy though – curry 🙂 )

I had to miss visiting Phil’s family gathering as his younger sister and hubby had come up from the Isle of Wight to visit and were staying with his older sister, so there was a big get-together, with buffet, and I would have loved to have gone and taken photo’s of everyone, but Phil had to go alone and I had a snooze instead.

Sophie wanted to go on a shoot on Sunday too and I just could not do that either, so all in all a rubbish week.

So not many photo’s for the blog, I did manage to try and catch the sunlight in my spider webs on the bird feeder (those spidey’s sure are prolific!)

Spidey suncatcher
Spidey suncatcher
spidey web
spidey web

and also hung out my bedroom window to catch the lovely cloud formations. It would be so much nicer if I could bulldoze the rest of the houses out of my view, but you have to work with what you got sometimes.

cloudage 1
cloudage to the right
cloudage to the left
cloudage to the left

Anyway, in spite of still being a bit crock, I went back to work today (more fool me) and struggled through. I had to really as Phil is on nights and needs to sleep through the day, which would have been nigh on impossible for him with me coughing like Calligula’s nephew, and I may have ended up with the same fate if I had!

I suppose the good news is that this is a shorter post than usual for my dear reader to trawl through 🙂

Laters Gaters x

 

 

It’s not Sunday

So, posting today because I’m off and away to Folkestone to the Euromilitaire Military model Show. Phil is taking a few of his models to put in the competition and I’m driving us down there. It’s always a fab weekend and we get to go to our favourite Chinese restaurant, twice! 🙂

Here are the models Phil is putting in the figure section.

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Steiner
Steiner

We won’t be home til late Sunday night as it’s a 6 hour drive for us.

In the meantime this week has seen my bird feeder being taken over by the spider community of the garden, and most mornings I’ve gone to the kitchen and some new web has appeared, and the previous ones disappeared. All that work for just a few hours fly catching!

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