Sunday 21/08/2016 Holy Trinity Church, Bosham, West Sussex
A couple of weekends ago we visited Bosham, as we frequently do we took the dogs with us. We didn’t stay long however as wherever we went there were “No Dog” signs. On the one hand this annoys me, as it bars me from certain places, but I respect landowners wishes. What also annoys me is how this situation has been reached and the fact that it’s probably due to thoughtless dog owners not respecting those around them, not clearing up after their dogs and the landowner then feeling that they have no choice but to stop all dogs. A great shame.
Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.
If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll know I love my trees. It saddens me each time I read something about a new disease that is affecting a particular species. The weekend before last we were in the car stopped at some traffic lights, and could see a horse chestnut (conker) tree in the grounds of a business park. It was a sad sight, it’s leaves all brown and wilted. As I was driving and the lights changed I didn’t really have a chance to take a proper look, but having read this article, it makes sense that it’s suffering from a leaf miner infection. It looks like a pretty bad case too.
Sadly the tree probably won’t get any attention, as the business park it’s standing in has long been vacant, and in reality the treatment is actually relatively simple.
It’s rare that I can even see the stars at night, there’s just simply too much light pollution where I live. I did manage to see some of the Perseid meteor shower earlier in the month and some of the more common constellations are visible, but I suspect that I’m missing out on a lot. This article made me wonder just how much.
Here’s a quick video for making potato salad. Details below.
Makes enough for four people.
You’ll Need:
6 to 8 small / medium sized potatoes
Fresh Chives or mint
2 small / medium red onions
Mayonnaise
Salt & Pepper
Lemon juice (2 to 3 tablespoons)
To Make:
Prepare the potatoes, peel if needed (if you’re using young new potatoes, they’ll probably just need a scrub and the skins can stay on). Chop them into bite size pieces.
Boil them until they are just soft, be careful not to over-boil, particularly if you are using a fluffy type potato.
When they’re done, drain and put them back into cool water, and allow them to cool down, until they cold enough to handle comfortably with bare hands.
Prepare the onions and chives by chopping into as finer pieces as you can manage, put these into a large mixing bowl.
Add the potatoes into the mixing bowl, with the onions and chives.
Add some mayonaisse (about 3 or 4 tablespoons), be careful not to add too much, you can always add a little more if needed.
Add a good grind of pepper and salt and the lemon juice.
Mix all together in the bowl, either with clean hands or a couple of large spoons, be careful not to mash the potatoes!
This is ready to serve or can be refrigerated in a covered container for a couple of days.
I highlight a lot on my kindle, particularly when I’m researching a particular topic or just to highlight particularly inspiring passages for future reference.
Now there’s a great “new” feature on Kindle which now allows you to directly export your highlights via email, and receive them as both .pdf and csv files. There have been ways to do this via http://kindle.amazon.com for a while now, and your highlights are still stored there, but this is a more direct service.
Firstly you need to make sure you’re running the most recent version of the kindle OS on your device (I’ve got a Kindle Paperwhite, and it’s now running ver. 5.8.2).
In a book that you have highlights, tap at the top of the screen to bring up the Menus, then tap “Go To”:
On the next screen tap “Notes”:
Then tap “Export Notes”:
And then finally tap “Send”:
As you’ll see from the image above this sends the notes to your Amazon email address, and you should end up getting an email that looks something like this:
The pdf is a nice little document in it’s own right and the CSV file, allows for easy transfer from a spreadsheet to other places e.g. the research folder in Scrivener.
This is a great feature, and one that I feel I will be using a lot, particularly for background research.
On May 21st, I broke my watch. I caught the face against the corner edge of my desk as I was hoovering, although I didn’t hit it that hard, the angle of the impact was enough to smash the face. I’ve only worn a watch on one other occasion since (and then it took me several hours to notice that it was still running on GMT and not BST). The once white band on my wrist has pretty much disappeared and I’m not sure I notice that I don’t have a watch on. When someone stops and asks me for the time, I still go to look at my wrist before checking myself and getting my phone out of my pocket to check the time on that. This has pretty much been how I’ve kept track of time when I’ve needed to since, not that I’ve really felt the need beyond the basics of making sure I’m where I need to be, when I need to be there by.
This just reminds me how much my routine has changed in the last 12 months. I no longer have a regular alarm clock, instead preferring to run my day around what work I have on and other calls on my time. I still do use an alarm if I have a morning appointment and have to be somewhere at a particular time but otherwise I rise pretty consistently at the same time most days. Walk the dogs, visit the allotment with them if I need to – either to harvest food, or water the plants – and then start work. Work varies depending on how busy I am (not very at the moment), if there is no work for clients I’ll be working on something else, mostly my writing.
Stop with lunch with Ann, and catch up on any personal things and my Words with Friends games. Then depending on workload, carry on into the afternoon. I’ll take an afternoon walk with the dogs, normally this will be a longer walk and if I remember I’ll take my camera with me (I often forget, and use the one on my phone). I’ll then come back and finish any work that’s outstanding and then prepare supper.
We might watch a little TV in the evening, depending on what’s on, although with Wimbledon, Euro2016 and the Olympics, there has been an awful lot of sport on recently, and so we’ve been catching up on DVDs or things that have been recorded long ago and not watched, as we’re not great sports fans.
Then to bed and read. I do read at other times during the day depending on what else I’m doing and often if I’m travelling by train or bus (which I have done quite a bit of in the last few months). I also keep a handwritten journal, and will update that throughout the day if there are things to record – it’s mostly a nature / allotment journal, so I don’t write in it everyday.
Just over a year ago, my day was dictated much more by others. I think it requires more self-discipline now than before, but it does feel much more like my day.
Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.
Slightly curtailed this week due to a variety of things all converging at once, and leaving little time for anything else.
Currently Reading – not much progress since last week, so still the same books. I’ve lots on my “to read” pile, but it’s just one book at a time (or two in my case).
Since I recorded the above video, the pumpkin that is next to the brassica cage has succumbed to slug damage. I think I’m going to pull out that plant this weekend, as although it has already fruited another pumpkin, there is no way that it will ripen in time.
I’ve been publishing these Quick Links on a Tuesday for a while now. I’m going to try to continue to post them each week, but am moving them to a Monday until further notice as it’s a bit easier for me.
Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.
One Of My Local BuzzardsI wrote last week about the licence to kill buzzards issued by Natural England (the supposed protector of our natural environment), although there has been a response by Natural England, which states that “Natural England will shortly be making documents associated with the assessment and granting of this licence publicly available”, I’m going to reserve judgement on this until I see the details.
In other areas however RSPB has released information about the disappearance of satellite tagged Golden Eagles. (There’s more detail on satellite tagging of birds in this blog post as well). With this and the persecution of other raptors e.g. Hen Harriers, for what seems to be the sport of a privileged few, we seem to be going back to the bad old days of gamekeeper and sporting estates (or maybe we never left). Earlier this year I read “Raptor” by James Macdonald Lockhart [GoodReads], which bought home to me just how persecuted birds of prey used to be. Although things have gotten better, it does seem that there are still a few that are intent on taking the law into their own hands, and committing wildlife crime.
My Mum has a whole herd of elephants in her house. There are African ones, Indian ones, China ones, wooden ones, glass ones, plastic ones, but they are all ornaments. Many of them run trunk to tail across her mantelpiece. For me the elephant is an iconic symbol of a wild animal, an intelligent giant. It would be a human failure of epic proportions if they became an extinct species in the wild. A bit more on the history, and prehistory of the species here.
The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures
This time of year, when the vast majority of our food is coming from the allotment, we seem to eat very little meat. The arguments for moving to a vegan diet are quite convincing from many standpoints. Could I do it full time? I’m not sure, although my meat intake is quite low anyway, and I can’t eat fish due to allergies, I do eat quite a bit of dairy, particularly cheese, eggs and milk. I know there are alternatives to some of those, so I might give them a try and see if I can reduce at least some of that. We’ll see.
I was out at a meeting for a proportion of yesterday, when I came back I was sitting at my desk catching up on some emails, when I heard the distinctive call of a buzzard outside. I grabbed my camera and stepped outside.
There were two individuals and they seem to be having a lot of fun soaring and diving in the sky. I managed to capture a few images.
Electronic Scrapbook 