I can't remember the last time we went for a walk in the park - a long time. After a couple of days of very heavy rain during the week it was pretty muddy, but Saturday morning was fresh and sunny and we went out to enjoy the weather. Not much to photograph, but we did see a shoveller in the pond. And I noticed newer identity labels on the trees - looks like they've got new identities too as the numbers don't appear to match.
Sunday 11 February 2024
Sunday 26 March 2023
Greening up
On warm sunny days (rare), you can smell Spring in the air, but most of the deciduous trees in the park are still resolutely bare. So this one, a horse chestnut I think, has been standing out for the last couple of weeks. When Wednesday morning was bright and sunny and for once this month I didn't need to leave the house kitted out in rain gear, I left home a few minutes early and stopped to take a couple of photos while it's still ahead of all the rest.
Tuesday 10 January 2023
Warm off the needles
A couple of knitting projects.
I started out by making these elbow-length hand warmers for one of my nieces. She is into photography, and I know from personal experience that in colder weather, either fingerless mitts (or better yet, flip-top ones) are the way to go. She liked them.
Monday 31 October 2022
October Favourites
Very thin on the ground. And it's not even as if I'm holding back on Christmas cards, I'll add one in here.
The first card is one of my Tyvek pieces - it was for a challenge to incorporate stitching, and I knew it would be easy enough to sew, even though I can't find my good thimble anywhere.
I think the second one will go as a Christmas card to C's friend in Maine who isn't really into Christmas. C saw a woodpecker when he was there early this month, and though he didn't come back with a photo to prove it, he did come back with a couple of the tree where he had seen it, complete with multitudes of holes.
The third one was a variation on the salt technique for a watercolour background, calling for colouring the salt first. I think I probably made both my watercolour paper and the salt too wet, because the piece wasn't ready to use the next day. It had been intended for a Christmas card but my green got totally subsumed by the colours in the salt, and it more said "sea" to me.
Assorted photos - the deer were the first morning it was cold enough for there to be a ground mist in the park. It was more visible on my side of the road, looking into the sun, but it was still worth stopping to take a shot of the deer. The rainbow is over Dublin. Thankfully there wasn't much rain that day, as I had about 22 miles to cycle each way, and really there was only a brief shower just as I was leaving my friend's house. A couple of weeks ago, on the other hand, we had amazing thunder and lightning and rain all one afternoon. I left the building in work thinking I didn't need my rain skirt, and I would just pack it so it would be accessible if I did. By the time I got to the bike sheds, the storm had started. The mass of tiny mushrooms was also in the park. At first as I cycled past I thought someone had dropped some kind of textured bag, so I stopped to look. I've never seen them clustered together so closely like that before. They turned darker brown over time - I was going to take another photo the day after C got back from Maine, but it turned out to be the day they mowed the verges, so they were all gone. The day before I'd been rushing home to get some bread made and hadn't wanted to take any time to stop. My mistake...
I will have some photos from the little seaside town up in the North where C is getting his dental implants. With no Covid restrictions this time I was able to accompany him when he went for his extractions, and I took some good photos but life is busy. And the booster shot seemed to knock me sideways, I took my first sick days from work since some time in 2019, and still feel pretty wiped out.
The header is some type of seed head, taken on a trip to Farmleigh last November.
Sunday 28 November 2021
Work Commute
I count myself blessed that half my cycle ride to work is through the Phoenix Park. I don't carry a camera, but I did absolutely have to stop on Monday morning to snap the deer on our first really frosty morning. I was an hour later than usual on Monday because I knew I'd be on-site on Tuesday too, so for once it was lightening instead of still dark.
Wednesday 7 July 2021
Mostly birds
I discovered, recently, that there was another pond in the Phoenix Park which I wasn't familiar with, so I took a detour and visited it last week. It's small, very much a pond, but set back a bit from the road and very peaceful. I watched squirrels chasing each other, a young moorhen (I think) feeding, and a thrush bathing.
Thursday 17 June 2021
Tag, you're it...
I went for a cycle and walks in the park this morning - yesterday was intermittent rain and positively cold. Today was mostly sunny and warm. I have no idea what order Blogger is going to put the photos in and I'm not going to spend a lot of time rearranging them, so I'll upload them and then add text to each one, in case they're not in chronological order.
So, definitely nothing like chronological order. This was when I had had my walk in the People's Garden, and was cycling back up the hill towards the Ordnance Survey. I could see a group of people (a bit more than twice this number, maybe) walking through the long grass and weeds, all with big nets. There was another man walking along the footpath with a camera, so I asked him what they were doing. He said that they were trying to find the young fawns, to tag them. Sure enough, the signs asking people to be careful and not to let their dogs loose in the areas of long grass have been up for a while now. I can certainly think of worse ways to spend a morning. The photographer said he thought that there were a couple of park rangers but that some of them were students from college.
Sunday 8 November 2020
Park Walk
Yesterday was quite good weather-wise, so in the morning I walked down to the local shops when they opened, and then C came on down in the car and we went to the park. It made for a different walk for him, as normally he just departs from the house on foot and walks around the immediate area these days. And it was nice for me to get away from the main road straight through it, pleasant a commute as it is. It turned cloudy as we drove there and parked, but it brightened up again and there was real warmth in the sun.
Last weekend I made a big pot of minestrone, which did three meals for the two of us and lunch for me. By the time we got to the third meal, I was on a day off and made Parker House rolls to have with it. Normally I have used the recipe from The Joy of Cooking, which requires rolling the dough out and cutting circles. This recipe, which I found on the King Arthur Flour website, was much easier, and they turned out beautifully. I'm ashamed to say I ate four of them while they were fresh from the oven. I thought the addition of potato flour was interesting - one of the recipes I use for the nearest one can get to baguettes without French flour calls for the addition of cornflour to the regular white flour.
Sunday 31 May 2020
Summer in the Park
And down by the lower lake in the woodland area, it was cool and shady and a third, different bird soundscape.