Christmas Tree

Many years ago my then next door neighbour planted her Christmas Tree in her garden. As she said - it had two choices, grow or die. It decided to grow. Even though it was cut down by half a year ago it is still a good twenty feet tall and produces a magnificent array of cones:

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Oh dear, and there was me thinking last week's puzzle picture was too easy. How wrong can I be? Once again I get to keep all the gold stars for myself. To put you out of your misery it was various parts of a measuring tape - easy when you know the answer.

   

I wonder how you will get on with the new puzzle picture
Guess What:


For this one I got round to using the 350D with bellows and Asahi  Super Takumar 55mm lens. First time for quite a while. For some time I have puzzled over what to use to light macro subjects. In the past I have used a couple of home brew LED lamps but they were really too dim. A while ago I bought a 12V LED ring lamp (designed for car headlamp / side light use).

   

Yesterday I finally took it off the Round Tuit pile and tried it out, just holding it in place in front of the lens. The results were surprisingly good. I could see to focus easily, stop down the lens for the first time, and shutter speed was reasonable. That made my mind up to invest in an LED ring flash which I have just ordered. Not as powerful as a traditional ring flash, but one tenth of the price! Coupled with what I already have it should work reasonably well.

Back to today's Guess What. No prizes. Just for fun.

No Peanuts? Try Some Bread!

First Friday without any new flicks for a long time. Too dull and very little activity in the garden. This Grey Squirrel was too fast to capture on video but I did manage a few stills as it kept changing its mind as to the best place to eat the piece of bread it had found.

Little Miss Muffet's Companion?

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey,
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away

When I was late putting out some food for the Hedgehog a few nights ago I spotted a garden orb spider in its web. Even though the night was dark I decided to attempt to take a few photographs. Amazingly the Lumix TZ7 did a splendid job using its red LED to give just enough light to auto focus before firing the flash. (The Lumix does not have manual focus)

As the web was strung up in the open I was able to photograph from both sides.



I was more than a bit pleased that the web, which can be very difficult to capture in daylight, showed up well under flash photography, especially with the dark background. To give an idea of scale; the spider is, at the most, about 20mm long with legs outstretched.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Oh dear. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the suggestions that last week's Guess What was a morphed version of me. Either way it has saved me a few gold stars as nobody sussed out the real identity.

    

In fact it was one of the carvings on the village church, not a gargoyle as it is not a water spout and not really fanciful enough to be a grotesque.

Back down to earth with the new puzzle picture.
Guess What


Just for fun. No prizes for a correct identification.

Where Have all the Birds Gone? + Hedgehog Visitor

It has become a rare event to see a bird in the garden recently. The only regulars are a couple of Dunnocks. Even the Wood Pigeons and House Sparrows have deserted the garden. Part of the reason will be an outbreak of the dreaded Finch Disease (Trichomonosis). About ten days ago I saw two Greenfinches and one Goldfinch showing typical symptoms of the disease. That meant I had to take down the feeders from the Birdy Bistro to discourage the birds from gathering in large numbers. I did put one small seed feeder in a different part of the garden and a couple of peanut feeders with a mix of peanuts and fat pellets but there have been hardly any takers.

The only other regular is a Hedgehog. I rarely see it as it is normally a late visitor but last night it was feeding on dried mealworms about 7.30 p.m. so I managed a bit of video:


I wouldn't normally expect to see one visiting regularly at this time of year but until very recently night temperatures have been in double figures so it has probably been too warm to think about hibernating.

Occupying Time When Retired

Another brilliant e-mail received this morning:

Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days interesting. Well, for example, the other day, Bev, my wife, and I went into town and visited a shop.

When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket.

We went up to him and I said, 'Come on, man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?' He ignored us and continued writing the ticket.

I called him an “a--hole” . He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn-out tyres.

So Bev called him a “s--t head”. He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first. Then he started writing more tickets. This went on for about 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote.

Just then our bus arrived, and we got on it and went home.

We try to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important at our age.