A Thunderstorm

The story of a thunderstorm...

A pleasant sunny morning down on the shore - thunder in the distance. Half an hour to go...



Fifteen minutes to go - it's definitely time to head for home.



Back on home turf and about ten minutes before it hits...



Eight minutes to go...



Time to bring the washing in off the line - five minutes to go...



One minute to go - time to retreat indoors...





The storm arrives...



with giant raindrops , loud booms and flashes of lightning.



 

Friday 'My Town' Shoot-out - Celebrate Life

I normally live on Merseyside, England, UK, but as I am presently staying at Eagleton near Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, this is my 'home town' for the moment. This week's theme is 'celebrate life'.

On the Isle of Lewis there is plenty of:-



Plantlife


Insect life



Human life



Birdlife (I love this bandy legged Meadow Pipit).



Sea life.



Farm life


And a few people.


A still life!


Even the sea itself is alive

To learn more about the Friday 'My Town' Shoot-out please visit -
http://mytownshootout.blogspot.com/


 

Odds, Definite Sods and Strange Bods

I have another new follower (and vice versa). She is Sink, a fellow contributor to Mad Manic Mamas - a place to let off steam about teenagers. OK, so I don't have a teenager any more. I do, however, have Son-who-watches-films. He is at university but still living at home. It's like having a teenager with a bigger appetite and a greater right to do as he pleases. So you think teenagers can be a problem! Some of you ain't seen nothing yet. Tomorrow my first posting on MMM is scheduled to appear.

And that brings me to today's real moan. Bl***y scheduling. With gratitude to Granny I went over to the BlogDoctor to see if there was a solution to this problem of the scheduling not working. No such luck. So I looked at the blogger forums (or should that be fora) and hey presto there was one "I have problem that nowadays when I schedule any post they dont get automatically submitted at that time and date. And scheduled still comes displayed near the posts. i have checked the time and date and they are perfect. But why such problems? Before I didnt have any such problems? THen i have to click on Publish post manually later on and that gets published."
Aha! I thought, there are 44 replies so here is bound to be the solution. No. Just another 44 people saying they had the same problem. So I commented and made it 45 and the next person who goes to the forum is going to have their hopes raised even more.... Cruel aren't I?


GB skyped me from the mainland yesterday and asked me to search through the bureau for something. In the process I came across a family photo album that I hadn't seen for years. It is larger than A4 size and has a cover of shell and mother of pearl. Inside there is an annotated sheet of the various subjects in my handwriting - obviously done for posterity becaquse it is legible which my handwriting isn't normally! The photos go back to family members born in the 1790s.


This is Bryony, Helen and Richard's great, great, great, great grandfather - Robert Spencer, born in 1796 and died in 1867. He would have been 16 when Napoleon retreated from Moscow and 21, Richard's age, when the Battle of Waterloo took place.


This is his wife Sarah Griffiths Catherina Spencer (nee Griffiths) who was born in 1800 and died in 1889.


This happy soul is Sarah Lane, Nana's mother's mother who was born in 1813 and died in 1879.


A couple of more recent photos - our Uncle Eric (on the left) and Mum (on the right) in the 1910s. As you can see, the inside pages of the album are all painted.

The sun is shining. There's a nutloaf cooling on the kitchen worktop. Grieg is performing on the piano in the lounge. Well, to be pedantic it's not Grieg himself - just his music on a CD. He died 102 years ago so it would be a bit musty in there if he were playing. The washing up from last night's dinner party has all been extracted from the dishwasher. (Yes, GB, I agree that a dishwasher is a blessing after a dinner party.) So thanks to GB for allowing me to use his home to host last night's dinner - he was missed! (And where do you keep the serviettes???)

All in all it promises to be another good day. I hope yours is...


 

The sounds of life

I wish I could post the sounds that greet one when one pops a bleary-eyed head outside the door at GB's at 6 in the morning. The only thing I can record sounds with is my camera and the microphone is not sensitive enough to give a decent recording.

Firstly, and of greatest comparison with home on Merseyside is the absence of traffic noise. Nor is there any other sign of human activity at this time of the morning . Some folk, like Iain up the road have already gone to work but GB is at the end of the road so the only vehicles that are ever heard are the immediate neighbours and, a couple of times a day, the bus reversing to head back out of the township again.

Secondly, there is the sound of the sea. This morning it is a gentle lapping sound,

There are sheep bleating and 'merr'ing across the valley. Meehhh


The skylarks are up in the sky parachuting and singing their incomparable and distinctive song.

Oystercatchers are calling as they criss-cross down on the shoreline.

Much less usual this morning is the addition of the bubbling call of a Curlew.

An occasional sqwauky gull goes past and the House Sparrows are lined up on the fence cheeping to tell me to fill the feeders.


On the roof a couple of pigeons are cooing and clomping around in their hobnail boots as they drop bits of discarded food onto the study roof with a little clattering sound.

A Snipe just drummed somewhere in the valley. This sound, made by its feathers, as it flies is remarkably loud and when one buzzed me a couple of years ago it gave me quite a shock. Every time I hear a snipe I look to see if I can see it but they must be so far away and so well camouflaged that I haven't succeeded apart from that one instance.

A noisy place the countryside - but oh, what wonderful noises!

P.S. Just went outside to listen if I'd missed anything obvious. I had. 'Slap'! The sound of another midge biting the dust as it attemted to bite my arm.


 

A Gneiss (pronounced nice) experiment

This rock is native Lewisian Gneiss (pronounced nice), one of the oldest known rocks on the earth's surface. It was formed in the pre-Cambrian geological era. The Western Isles share this geology with Greenland and part of Canada which lay together before the Atlantic came between. This two-ton specimen€, exhibited in Stornoway Library, was quarried at Marybank, Stornoway, and shows typical banding of green horneblende, black biotite mica and pink and white feldspars and quartz - the record of its ancient formation.


So why is this an experiment? The answer is I have scheduled this posting to see if the scheduling is working again on this blog. One lives in hope...

Later - experiment failed - posted manually. Bummer!