bunn | Entries tagged with birthday

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 crackage.

We watched the Coronation (well, I went out and walked the hounds for part of it, but I got back in time to see the Drumming From a Horse, which was my personal highlight of the event. That and the mounties, who against stiff competition, I think had the best horses. )

The forecast was for rain, but in fact the sun smiled all afternoon. I mowed a lawn. I had intended to try for No Mow May, again (in which you don't mow till the start of June to allow time for the lawn to flower) but I think the wetter spring and dog pee combination had resulted in grass that was too lush to favor wildflowers. So I've mowed all but the spots where I have camomile and yarrow growing, and I have done my best to mow around those. I think I'll have to try to mow once in March next year, that might knock the grass back for long enough to let the wildflowers do their thing.

I have a bunch of plants in pots that I really must plant out soon. Still, a few more days won't hurt them.

The local street party was a fairly laid-back beach party on Sunday (due to the forecast for Saturday being dismal) so we dropped by that briefly to admire the fire and chat with a few people. After that, we went out on the river in the boat, and journeyed upstream on the tide many miles, to the very fringes of Haverfordwest. There was a fraught moment when we had to change the petrol tank and couldn't work out why the engine wouldn't re-start afterwards, but it was resolved happily. We do have an emergency paddle, but it would have been a long paddle home.

I've been oddly exhausted since Sunday and keep finding myself forced to stop and nap: unfortunate, since today I was dealing with a wrangle with the Oldies Club email that involved a teleconference with Google, and the Shop on the Borderlands had 28 orders to pack today, including a huge one to Australia. Still, we got it done, despite the minor niggle that the Royal Mail parcel-picking-up service is terribly glitchy and you never know when you'll have to just haul everything off to the sorting office. At least the sorting office has given us permission to ignore the 'no parking' signs when we come in with a car-load of post to send. We are allowed to park in one of the official van slots, as long as the vans are out delivering at the time.

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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Then yesterday I mowed the lawns! In March! And I pruned a couple of the apple trees, which is probably a bit late really, but although the grass is very much awake, the apple trees still seem to be very snoozy, so with a bit of luck I will get away with it.

And today I walked to Luckett and back, which is about five and a half miles, which I consider to be a very healthy walk.
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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 the slogan 'Still Got All Me Own Teeth You Know!' on the front. :-D

We took a day off and went to the beach - and for a change, it was brilliant sunshine all day. I would have taken photos, only having remembered camera, spare batteries, and a whole bag of lenses, I forgot the camera card. So you will just have to imagine Chloe paddling joyfully in rockpools, Az stealing an unguarded chip at the beach cafe, Amber being a *very* good dog and Brythen bouncing pretty much non-stop, and making friends with every person and dog on the beach. Also my seafood salad at the beach cafe, which came with THREE sorts of prawns, and crab, and was delicious. Az, at 14, finally seems to have got over his terror of cafes! Another fear conquered, well done Az!

We didn't make a cake, but Pp bought me some cake pops (made by his hairdresser as a charity fundraiser, I think). Cake pops seem to be a strange phenomenon. They are like tiny cakes on sticks. They are quite pretty, but what an odd idea!

Speaking of cake, I am determined at some point to have a go at this rainbow cake flavoured with natural ingredients. I love the look of rainbow cake but the idea that all the colours are just dyes is a bit offputting, I think. Though I'm a little dubious about whether beetroot will really work as a dye. Every time I've tried making cake with beetroot it's gone either brown or orange. :-/

*to be fair, it is a very pretty bracelet, all anglo-saxon swirly birds. I am wearing it right now. You never know when arthritis might be lurking! If it leaps on me (I imagine it as a sort of long-legged shaggy sloth thing), I shall parry it dramatically with the Power of Magnets.

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 )

Current Mood: accomplished

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 )

Current Mood: cheerful

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 a habit.
( 2, 3, 4 : The Unsuccessful Preserves )
5) It was Mollydog's twelfth birthday on Friday. Everydog had Birthday Bones to celebrate. She celebrated by haring about like a mad loon, but it was pouring with rain so I did not manage to photograph her. Here she is today instead, practicing her levitating.
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6) Although I am still very in love with my ancient manual focus lenses, I put the autofocus lens back on the Nex3, and experimented with using different types of autofocus now that I am generally more used to the camera. The spot focus mode seems to deliver the best results for the kind of photos I want to take. Here is Flash Whuppet running like a little deer:

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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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I had a very exciting birthday. Mark had bought me a Very Exciting item in the recent Greyhound Gap auction - a sculpture of Mollydog by Pauline, who is a hugely talented artist who mostly makes models and props for films. We had to go and have Molls photographed and measured at their workshop, which is in Shepperton, so a bit of a trek. We stopped over at the Old Manor House B&B - a strange place - a Tudor mansion around which suburbs and reservoirs had crept.

Molls was very good indeed and did lots of Mollydog Posing (and ate a lot of fig and oat biscuits). Az was a bit stressed to begin with but settled down after a bit: I was very pleased with him as he really is not a Town Dog at all.

Then she had to stay still and be measured,and she did that very well too, she is now officially 'Less Wiggly than Helena Bonham Carter'. We got to see loads of gruesome things such as detached legs and stomachs, and the original head of Kryten from Red Dwarf, and tried to play 'guess the star' very unsuccessfully from all the plaster heads. It's very hard to recognise people when they have no hair or colour in their faces... We also meet Pauline's rescue Afghan Jim and his little dachsy cross friend. Apart from being a rescue sighthound person, she turned out to be a gamer too, and a Neil Gaiman fan. We were interested to find out that a while ago they had been commissioned to make a huge number of whales and fish, then the film they were making them for went bust just before they were paid for. Apparently they still have 40 full size rubber whales in a warehouse somewhere.

I am really looking forward to seeing what Pauline comes up with in terms of Mollydog sculpture: it's going to be a bust of her head, but it will be interesting to see how she does her. Pauline was most amused by the fact that in practically every photo the tip of her nose was pulling sideways sniffing away, and christened her 'banana nose'...

Then Pauline got a call from Jules, who had arranged the Greyhound Gap auction listing and happens to work on Silent Witness: they were filming not far away and would we like to come and have a poke round? Obviously this was far too good a chance to be nosy to ignore, so we went, and saw exactly how much milling about gets done for every second of filming. Pauline gave us some bullet holes to deliver to the set, so we had a Quest.

They were doing a huge mass killing scene with loads of policecars and things at Kingston university, which was all dressed up with fake names and labels so it wasn't recognisable. Apparently universities don't like to be associated with mass student killings. It seems things have changed since 'Morse'...

Mollydog met lots of people, poked her nose in everywhere and generally behaved like a star, Az behaved as though he'd really rather not have been there, but was OK on the whole. I was hopeless and unable to recognise various vaguely famous people, but fortunately Mark did so all I had to do was nod.

Then we went to Virginia Water and had icecream and let the dogs mooch about and do doggy stuff, which was a nice end to the day (well, apart from the drive back to Cornwall: the hounds were flat out for that after all the excitement)