October News

The month ends in an ocean of worry for a friend who is missing in the Haute Savoie region of France. Carol was last seen on Sunday 27 October and no-one has been able to contact her since. She often went hiking in the mountains near where she lived  but never left indications of her plans with anyone so searching for her cannot be narrowed down very easily, especially as her car, a black Fiat Panda 4x4 licensed AZ522AP, has not been found. If anyone reading this feels they could help in the search in any way at all, either on the ground or with communications, please look at the Facebook page members of her family have set up for information.

Early in the month I heard from friends in Utah that their daughter-in-law, currently in Japan, had been taken to hospital with a threatened miscarriage. Margaret flew to Tokyo to help with the toddler. On 2 October the baby was delivered weighing 3lb. Last I heard he was doing well and Margaret flew back home in good time for her youngest son's wedding on the 26th.

Back here the inconvenience of having our car off the road for five and a half days for a major repair, the fitting of a new (well... secondhand; it's such an old rattletrap that 'new' parts no longer exist) rear axle pales into insignificance.

There was a parent's evening at Toadlet's school. I met five of her teachers. Liked them all. She's brilliant at art and chatting in class. No surprises there. She is much better at Maths and French than she thinks she is. And I was amused in particular by her PE teacher's assessment. He put it more diplomatically but he has clearly sussed her other great talents – a penchant for stubbornness (a useful trait; let's not knock it) and a certain scattiness. I seem to remember my mother rolling her eyes about my scattiness at a similar age. So, in short, she's doing fine. This month also marked the official start of her teenagerdom. One of her birthday presents was a trip to a hairdresser to get her hair purple dip dyed. It's much nicer than I thought it would be. In fact, I positively like it!

With a Rotary partner, Mary, I've been involved with setting up a Rotakids club at Luss Primary School, the same school that did the Loch Lomond Powan fish project which I spoke about here. We've had an initial chat with the kids and we'll get started properly next Tuesday.

Last night at Cubs we did a lantern walk – tea light in decorated marmalade jars (knew they'd come in handy) held on a stick with wire. About half of the time was spent re-lighting lanterns. Hey ho, ;-). We'd left Sumbdy's Dad back at the scout hut in charge of a camp-fire and cooking Bratwurst (we've had a German theme to our Global Challenge this term) which we ate dipped in tomato sauce that had had some mild curry powder mixed into it. All except one of the Cubs loved it. It was a fine night, which was a great bonus as the rain earlier in the day had been positively tropical, in its ferocity if not its temperature.

When I went out to empty the compost bucket this morning, I was surprised and delighted to see this lovely yellow dahlia, growing out of the compost heap but on the field side of the fence.

I shall call this the Hope Flower for Carol

Just near there is the old bird cherry tree with its fascinating gnarled growth. On the right of the following picture is where a large branch has been removed many years ago and where the sulphur polypore fungus grows in the summer.

Sulphur polypore fungus on 9 June

Looking up at some of the younger branches and their autumnal leaves

Autumnal peony leaves

Sunrise at the beginning of the month

And at the end

I leave you with the rain belting down again after a sunny morning and pleased to hear just now that the police in France have finally started an official search for Carol.

Sunup from my garden late October

When I'm cleaning windows

As November approaches, I decide to do my "spring" cleaning. It doesn't get done in the spring because that would be a waste of good outdoor, good weather time. Spring is often the driest time of year here and November often heralds the local Even Wetter season. I'm starting in one corner of the kitchen. This blog post is to record the beginning. I wonder if I'll have finished by next spring?

When I decide to clean a window I have to expect the job to include cleaning several other things too – job extensions. I also have to expect to have to first find the ladder – Toad is not yet programmed to Put Things Away, try as I might – before I can use it. My expectations were not disappointed today.

Today I decided to clean this window in the west corner of the kitchen. It has been needing done for a while and there was an accumulation of pieces of onion and shallot skin near it (dropped by the monkeys – see pic; the onions are now on a different hook but the monkeys used to hold them), not to mention a cobweb or two – job extension one.

First I had to clear away some of the things that had accumulated in the corner since I last had a thorough rummage there. In putting away a hob kettle that we're not using at the moment (it gets used on the sitting room stove when there's a power cut), I found Toad's sake jug and cups, still in the box they'd been packed in back in 2006 when we moved here from Oxfordshire. I took them out of the cupboard to make space for the kettle which is being stored full of water. Yes, the water supply has been cut off a number of times too! At least, it was in the first few years. Scottish Water have improved the supply pipes on the peninsula now so it shouldn't be a problem. Once (or many times) bitten though...

I would post a picture of the sake cups but Aperture is playing silly buggers and won't let me. Oh, wait! I've managed it via iPhoto:

This is what the board at top right of the window pic says

present from a friend who knows me well

Tools of the job: stool

so I can get onto the counter to reach the window, brush (for the inevitable cobwebs now that I can reach the high pan rack and the ceiling), cloths and soapy water. I love brushes, especially hand-made ones like this. In the top left of the window pic you can see the rack that needed divesting of its cobweb dress. It is not much used pans that get stored up there so it doesn't get much attention. While I was up there, I decided to get rid (via the recycling bin) of two old frying pans which I had been keeping for goodness knows what.

To clean the outside of the window I needed a ladder. Did I mention that Toad doesn't put things back where he finds them? Sigh. So getting the ladder required a tramp up the garden to beyond the archery target boss where it had been left to gather leaves last time the back net was taken down. Job extension two: clean leaves and spider webs and wetness off ladder and carry ladder back down to house.

While I was outside I decided the 'moat' outside the back door needed swept – another hand-made brush job (and job extension three) – the drainage channel gets clogged with leaves in autumn and we've had a lot of rain lately. Other people have wet room bathrooms. We have a wet room wash-house.

The bristles are split bamboo, very stiff

I rewarded myself with a pot of coffee and a giant empire biscuit. I didn't think I'd manage to eat it all but I did.

And a final brush pic, for today, just because I can. This one came back from Thailand with me. The bristles are made of dried rice grass stems so it is a soft and flexible brush. Everyone used these for sweeping floors. 

BoggyBrae streamside or Spot the Frog

Bubbles and fly agaric

I so enjoyed photographing stream bubbles that I went back to do some more. I went to a different part of the burn, a little downstream, to the place where it does a sharp turn downhill, to where we raced the plastic ducks in August, the place where some of the old bridge made of what look like wooden railway sleepers collapsed into the ravine taking a heifer with it and causing the farmer – when Toad and her pal finally told me about the dead cow and I had phoned the farmer – to have to come with a digger to hoik it out. The first digger was too heavy to get up the boggy field, so they had to get a smaller one. Then in a surreal moment, I looked out of the window and saw small digger transferring the dead heifer to big digger just outside our front gate!

But back to bubbles and, guess what!, more fungi. The place I went is the only place I've seen fly agaric around here and each autumn after the first time, I've been back to find it again. This is the only time I've seen it again. Perhaps I have not been at quite the right time or perhaps conditions have not been quite right for it to grow.

fly agaric fungus

I might go back with my macro lens later today.

But back to bubbles...

I experimented with shutter speeds. Here are some of the results.

Such shots show some of the limitations of photography or, more likely, the limitations of my photography skills, since neither of these types of image record quite what I was seeing. Fun though.

A couple more:

The following photo show how low the burn is at the moment. You can see how it washes round both sides of the rock in the middle where the little tree is growing when it is in full spate. On those occasions it has been known to burst out of the culvert at the bottom of the hill and flood the road and even, on one occasion a few years before we came to live here, one of the old cottages built right beside it before the culvert was built. The power of nature never ceases to amaze (and hopefully never will).

Lastly, a couple (couple of couples!) of leafy 'arty farties', more fungi (!), and part of my path back down our garden. I don't have to go between the tree trunks, but I do because I like the changes of the light that way affords. I think of it as the adult version of a child's wending its meandering way through a row of street bollards – impossible to go the 'ordinary' way ;-)

The trunks are of rowan (L), holly (middle), and bird cherry (R). You can see that flowering currant grows among them too.

The woodland floor and the stream

A bigoted person (not Toad or Toadlet) troubled me this morning so after some chores I went for a scrabble around on the woodland floor up the hill in search of composure and calmness. There is wreckage and tangled growth of fallen trees up there but the undergrowth quietly gets on with generating new life. Fungi, mosses and lichens eat up decay and trees and flowers settle themselves for winter so that they can grow anew come spring. Looking and marvelling at details I forgot my annoyance.

Photos should be clickable to enlarge

Light through azalea leaves on the way up the garden

A new fungus at the base of the cypress
at the top of the garden

in situ

close up

And a patch of sunlight on fallen
birch and cypress leaves

Then I climbed over our fence, across to the forest fence, over that, and into the wood. Colourful and varied fungi and lichens were everywhere.

Here's one with a sterile frond of hard fern
and some wood sorrel leaves

There was a dead tree trunk covered in these
– many broken like this

Some of the same but less broken

Note the dried bluebell stalks here too

A lovely example of a Cladonia lichen
(I think! not sure what kind)

Colourful fungus on a dead spruce trunk

I tried to move the grass off it and then realised
the grass was embedded in the fungus

A young version of the same?

Another wee fungal garden on a fallen tree

Closer in

This picture made me smile

I moved on to look at other things and nearly trod on this

Probably trod on some of these; they littered the forest floor

The forest floor is fascinating. In a small space, say half a square metre, many small things appear. Here are a small spruce tree (top left), an oak (bottom left) and a holly (bottom right) surrounding a young hard fern (Blechnum spicant). Almost half way down the left edge is a liverwort.

Spruce needles give some scale

 The liverwort closer in

And closer 1

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I found a nice simple example of the upright fertile fronds of Hard Fern

Hard Fern fertile fronds. These die in winter

And the evergreen sterile fronds of Hard Fern
on the ground

Baby bilberry plants among the moss

By now I was back to the stream and thoroughly enjoyed myself watching bubbles and looking at leaf dams upstream of the tiny waterfalls.

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Over the forest fence again, down the field to check out the hips and haws

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And so back up our drive, where there are still a few blue flowers of alkanet, a quick scramble between rhododendrons and mad fuchsias down by the pond to look at yet more fungi and an upsidedown fuchsia flower sitting on duckweed.

A scrumply fungus

And a floating flower

And so home to a good lunch. Nothing like rooting around in the wood for forgetting about the stupidness of bigotry, and getting an appetite for bacon. And my hat wasn't nearly as well-decorated with bits of twig and leaf as I expected.