Thanked for a pleasure!

We've had Laura&Nick living with us for the last few months, while they're between homes. We're bereft as they've now gone so the house is quiet, empty & tidy! It's been a pleasure, an added treat was

these arriving on the doorstep today from Nick's parents: a wonderful reward for a pleasure!

Lessons again: photoshop

To keep my brain a bit active, I've signed up for Photoshop classes at the local adult education centre. It's complicated, but I think I'm winning. We have homework each week, and have to go through and understand our tutor's excellent notes.

This was our first week's project, layers. Basic but essential, and seasonal.

This week "cropping" and it's use to do things like straighten horizons and make tiled patterns, borders and a start on lettering.

The last two are from my own  photos.

London&44

We visited London, mainly to meet my niece and great nephew and go to the zoo, but I made time to wander along the South Bank a bit too.

 By chance it was Malaysia week, I chatted to a young lady making rice pictures, a slightly modernised traditional art.

There was also a surprising  baobab tree, not that I have a fixation about them.

We took the bus to Camden (44, used my old crock's bus pass for the first time!) and walked along the canal to the zoo, always pleasant but even better seen through the eyes of an excited 20 month old, all those boats, water too, and ducks, bridges...

Dartmoor, technical hitch!

Just back from another brilliant DofE weekend on Dartmoor helping to train a gold group. I'm annoyed not to have taken my camera, the forecast while I was packing was dire, so I left it out and due to non arrival of a train from Guildford, had to go straight from the station with no chance to reconsider: it was of course blue sky, nearly from ear-to-ear, a small rain storm and brief hail. Our other group only 1/2 a mile away fared far worse. The light was wonderful for most of the time but you can only speculate as to the wonderful pictures I might have produced.
The technical hitch is that I've run out of photo storage space on this blog, so you'd have had to wait anyway until it was sorted!
I'll post some photos from last week's trip to London Zoo wit Laura, my niece and great Nephew in the next few days with luck.

Clever, Hibernation, Green, Colour?

Autumn brings a sort of "spring clean" to the garden, old & dead stuff has to go to make space for the spring. This means the tomato plants have to go too, along with the pesky white fly. A canny spider popped into the bag for a good sheltered web while the flies were panicking around, meals-on-wings to his home!

My fruit cage wasn't so productive this year, the weather was too awful, but after weeding and mulching I'm optimistic about next year.

                                      

Surrey is notorious for its huge number of trees, partly as a result of this lawns are terrible unless you devote all day to them. moss is nice & green, but not hard-wearing so I've seeded the bald patches. they're starting to sprout, reminding me that spring will come eventually. At the moment it looks like a pre-adolescent Green Man's upper lip, first shave in the spring.

                                      

Colour perception is odd: if you ask what colour the Colchicum is, people say "purple", if you ask about the cyclamen it's "pink", but see how similar they are together.

Green:Help!

We've run out of summer, the stalks are starting to die back, anyone got a good recipe for green tomato chutney?