Weekly Chat (Non-Osprey), 26 April 2020

HAPPY NEW WEEK!

I hope everyone has a wonderful week and stays healthy and safe!

  • Just saying we are okay, don't want to worry anyone. Can't stay to chat as I have spent too long on my computer chair today and my hip is complaining.
  • Had to sign in yet again:-(
    Dull damp day and the weekend is forecast for being being very damp. So I will spring kitchen and himself will assemble-new piece of garden furniture. Luckily it will be done so I won’t hear sweary words .
    I escaped for the first time in 6 weeks and drove to Elgin. Lovely scenery of gorse in flower lambs and a bridge be renovated forever fully open.
    Filled up with fuel (£29 in 6 weeks) used self service gloves and gel for my card.
    Came straight home as don’t feel the need to go into a shop. Have OCD and as I can’t control others I would rather not be around them. It seems that a lot of people feel this way especially as deaths are not declining. It does mean I won’t be doing my usual troughs around the cottage but I bought some colourful lily bulbs online.
    We seem to have a new resident in the area a Red Kite. Seen them 3 miles down river but never here. Hope he/she or they stay.
  • Wendy - I do like red kites. I'm not sure exactly where you are, but I have seen them around Strathpeffer - quite a few years ago now. We also have one which flies over my home very occasionally - and I'm about as far south of England as you can get! Must have got blown across from The Chilterns! Beautiful birds.
  • Pat O just north of the Cairngorms and I often see them up the A9 driving to Inverness.
    I do get Osprey and Golden Eagles so very blessed .
  • You've got some special birds, there, Wendy. Lovely.

    Had fun speaking to my granddaughter Amber on Zoom: its our Eldests birthday so we were chatting, but she kept on popping in and out, as if she were a cuckoo in a clock gone wrong! Too excited about the prospect of his asking for pizza for their dinner, plus something called ""zebra cake" to follow. (No, I don't know, either....)

    The moth problem at night was because I felt something land on my bare arm just as I was dropping off to sleep: it went, but then returned a minute later. Now, if I get disturbed just as I slide off into dreamland, I begin to wake up and then find it impossible to get off to sleep again for at least an hour or two. This creature had decided to try sitting in my hair, too, so I spent the time until 2.00am planning the next two years of my life (not easy during a lockdown!). By then, I heard my OH groaning, and I asked him if it had visited him, also. So neither of us slept until 3.00am.

  • Annette, we watched a cookery programme with Rick Stein tonight, and he was in California. He enjoyed the coastal highway south to LA but first went to Santa Barbara, where he had a steak meal in "The Hitching Post" and spoke to a wine grower/producer who said that their wines were special because of the soil.

    The scenery was beautiful.
  • Lindybird:  Well, I guess you were lucky it wasn't a mosquito that kept landing on you.    I know The Hitching Post.  It was the restaurant featured in the movie Sideways and got a huge boost from that...   We've eaten there a few times over the years, but it's not our 1st, 2nd or even 3rd choice (apart from being 30 minutes up the freeway). They do have really good steaks for those who like red meat and a large wine selection, but otherwise the menu is limited and it's pretty noisy (also the decor could do with an update).   My daughter used to live just up the road from it and it was so funny to see the characters in the movie walking along the highway by the supermarket, gas station, etc. that we all know so well.  Not sure about the soil (that's probably every winemaker's claim), but California has lots of good wineries up and down the state.   I see Stein also went to the tangerine orchards in Ojai (a very pretty town in the hills 50 minutes south of us) and to Musso & Franks in LA, which is a truly fabulous old Hollywood hangout, dripping with movie memorabilia and memories - everybody who was anybody in the business used to go there.  I took some visiting UK cousins there decades back and they weren't impressed at all, telling me how much they'd enjoyed the previous night at the restaurant on the (revolving) top floor of their hotel!  

    Wendyb:  We have white kites here; I saw one the other week at the place where I watch whales and also saw the osprey.

  • Still cold and blustery. After a week of silence, work has resumed on the Grand Design.
  • I want to sleep but my brain won’t stop talking to itself.

    Three out of the four voices in my head want to sleep. The other one wants to know if penguins have knees.

    My daily routine.
    Morning: Feeling tired, cranky and lazy.
    Afternoon: I could go for a nap.
    Night: I can’t sleep.

    My bed is a magical place where I remember everything I was supposed to do.

  • AQ: Those are good. My bed is the place where I remember every bad decision, every wrong life choice, every ill-advised undertaking, every mistake, every failure, and every downright bad thing I've ever done in my entire life. LOL