My birthday, as is usual, was cold and damp. Pp had his first gout attack in over a year, poor bloke. Under the circumstances, we kept the walk short.


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Saturday was Pp's birthday. I had promised to make a cake and a meal, which I did, with some success in the most important department (taste) but less success in the visuals. I intended to make a chocolate tower-cake, but my tower proved structurally unsound, and even the addition of a bamboo skewer did not entirely prevent listing and eventual ( Read more... )

Card I painted for my mum's 80th birthday below.  She is having something of a Vicar of Dibley 80th, since EVERYONE wants to take her out to lunch but she seems to be being very effective at managing them all and preventing them from all supplying simultaneous lunches on the same day.
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Bullet Points of Random Things!

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But in fact I only got one good photo of a camellia, in the whole National Camellia Collection.  And it was a pink one, which is my least favorite sort: I prefer the dark red ones, or the plain white ones (only the white ones look so manky once they start to turn brown around the edges)
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I was 42 this week. This is apparently the cut-off date for youth, as my mother gave me one of those magnetic arthritis bracelets*, and my optician expressed amazement that I did not require reading glasses. My mother in law, however, gave me a very welcome fifty quid to spend on clothes, and I am tempted to spend some of it ordering a t-shirt with ( Read more... )

It was philmophlegm's birthday yesterday.   I thought it would be nice to make him a birthday cake.  And then I thought, would it not be even nicer to make him a cake that was a GOLDEN FIRE DRAGON???
( Dragon photos beneath the cut )

When we arrived in Looe last week, it was freezing cold with a steely grey sky.   I was pleased I'd resolved to walk in the woods rather than along the coast. 
( ... with photos of woods, hounds, food, cake, and a blue hat )

1) Apparently in our house the answer to the eternal question: 'there's a rat in the kitchen what amma gonna do?' is 'catch it using the two-wellie-boot technique, escort it, enbooted, up the lane through the stygian darkness until the torch begins to  die, then turf it out'.  The Deliverer of Rats was Yama Bungle.  I hope he's not going to make it ( Read more... )

My birthday on Monday was not the best day for photography as it was rather grey and drab.  But we had lunch at Louie's cafe on Kit Hill, then went down to Whitsand Bay with my new zoom lens anyway.   I wanted to experiment with putting the focus in different places by twiddling with the aperture settings.

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