Over the last year or so I’ve been part of Karen’s postcard project. It’s a lovely feeling coming home after a long day in the office and finding bright rectangles of card on the mat. I’ve covered one board thoroughly, and the latest are stuck to my whiteboard. So when the Daily Connect today sent me to this random connect, I immediately thought of all these cards. Join us here, if you will.
On Sunday it was very windy, and when we got to Niall’s mum’s for lunch she pointed out into her garden and we saw piles of unripe apples scattered all over the grass. Oh dear. After lunch we gathered them all up and Niall wondered whether they could be made into jelly like the crab apple jelly his mum used to make. I didn’t see why not, so I ordered a cheap kit off the internet to strain the juice, some wee jars and a jam funnel.
When I weighed the apples there were nearly 3 kilos – wow, that’s a lot! I was hesitant about my jam making abilities (I’d only ever helped mum before, and that was a long time ago). So on Monday I cooked up a kilo of them until they were a mushy pulp and left them straining overnight. Yesterday I took the pint of juice that resulted, added sugar and lemon juice and … made apple jelly!
It’s a bit firmer than I’d ideally like (I left it a bit long), but it tastes lovely. We had some with our tea last night and Niall said it might even be nicer than his mum’s crab apple jelly. So tonight I’ve cooked up the remainder of the apples and the juice is gradually dripping through. Tomorrow I’ll make more jelly and hope it’s at least as good.
This week Kim’s challenge is about collections. Well, there’s an obvious thing that everybody’s collecting at the moment, but what else? I’ve collected frogs since I was a wee girl, and I also have a fair collection of Doctor Who artefacts on my bookshelves (oh, yeah – I’ve got a lot of books), and then of course there’s my collection of ukes and my burgeoning postcard collection. And last but by no means least, there’s our cats Cagney and Lacey.
Here’s some of them collected into Canva. What do you collect?
I know, I know – it’s Saturday. But yesterday was busy, and then it was sunny so we walked to the pub after work. And this morning I’ve been upgrading my PC to Windows 10 and reading offline.
My Find Five Friday (F5F) this week:
That’s five of my regular “go to” apps online. What are your favourites?
It was dry again at lunchtime today so I slipped my camera in my pocket and headed out again. As I wandered through Professors’ Square I spied a crow hopping around. He obliged me by staying still just long enough for me to take this:
I was aiming for the Lion and Unicorn staircase outside the Uni chapel, as a colleague had reminded me of it:
I walked around and stopped on the South Front and looked over at the Art Gallery:
Then down the stairs past loads of willowherb:
stopping halfway to look at the bandstand:
and then down to Lord Kelvin:
Crossing over to the other side of the park I noticed this statue of Carlyle – like a butterfly emerging from his chrysalis:
Then back up the road past Pearce Lodge gate (apparently the oldest building on campus):
and back to work – past more wild flowers in a flower bed:
Over the last couple of days I’ve written and posted about 24 postcards as part of Karen’s postcard project. That’s a lot of writing! I’ve got lots of ideas about making cards, but it’s been ages since I did any, so this time I used some cards I had given to me a while back – and I had a lot of fun matching cards to everybody:
Then I logged into my online postage account. Well, I don’t know if the Royal Mail have hiked their prices right up or if it’s yet another effect of Brexit – or both – but post to the US is an awful lot more than last time. Last time I sent cards I am sure they were only £1 each to post – this time the same option was £2.25 – which worked out to quite a lot. So … there was a cheaper option of £1.37 – and I think these are truly described as snail mail as apparently they will take up to 42 days to arrive. Luckily this project is not time bound then!
Edit: later, when I Googled for UK – USA postage rather than going through the Royal Mail links, I did find air mail for £1.05/£1.33 for letters of 10/20g So that’s annoying and a relief!
It was dry at lunchtime today and I had my camera with me, so after eating I headed out to Kelvingrove Park for a walk. As I walked along by the river Kelvin I noticed how many flowers were in bloom:
And how the Uni tower kept peeking through the trees – like here:
and here:
Until I reached a bridge over the river where I could see it clearly:
As I wandered back up the hill I noticed this wild flower garden at the back of Disability Services:
Then back to work, better for clearing my head.
Off to lunch with Niall’s family today, so I tried to cram as much into the morning as I could. First I made raspberry ice cream with some of the berries from our garden. Yum – it’s lovely (will have some for our tea tonight):
The I ventured out into the dreich day to look at the garlic we’ve been growing – not a big as we’d like, but really not bad:
Lots of them had these little nubbins just above ground level:
As I was pottering around outside I picked up my window boxes and put them on the kitchen and study windowsills (sorry, cats):
I am now sitting at my desk looking at the floods of rain:
Pretty flowers though 🙂
I caught a fascinating conversation on Twitter yesterday about various issues around remixing. Here’s some of it
Today we decided to take up Scott’s suggestion and start a Google Doc to share our collective thoughts about the types of considerations we should be making when we remix others’ work and what is acceptable/unacceptable practice. I don’t expect to get any easy answers to this, but I do think there’s a valuable conversation to be had, so here’s an openly editable Google Doc for us all to talk this over. In case the embed does not work for you, it is also here. Please join us 🙂
Friday was our last full day on Mull and it rained ALL DAY! At first, having a quiet day to do some PhD stuff was appealing, but neither of us really settled to it, and by late afternoon we both had cabin fever. So I got tea ready to cook later and we wandered up the road to the nearest pub – a mere 45 minutes away. It turned out to be a fairly nice evening, and after a few pints we headed home. As we walked down the road Niall pointed out this postbox – it looks as if it has hair growing out of the top of it. These weeds are tenacious little things:
Wandering further, we noticed a familiar silhouette perching up above. Buzzard!
By now the sky was glorious – I half expected the hand of God to reach through these clouds 😉
Then back to the cottage where Niall pointed out a bush growing through a fence post – bizarre:
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