Marwell Zoological Park

We had a fantastic couple of days away and now I have the big job of going through all the photographs I took.

We began by visiting Marwell Zoological Park. The enclosures for the animals were enormous and there were relatively few animals in them, which made them feel much more natural even if it limited the photo opportunities:

My favourite animals were the snow leopard, which I didn't get a decent photo of, the ocelot:

and the kookaburra:

The giraffes were particularly friendly:

and I don't think I've seen this species of lemur (alaotran gentle) before:

Baking time

I'm afraid I haven't time to blog about all the things we've been up to recently, but it has been on my mind and I promise I shall return to blogging very soon.

We're off to Hampshire for a couple of days to celebrate my birthday, so thank you in advance to all those who sent cards and presents.

We've just finished making a birthday cake - something I haven't done in years. Since we don't have a piping bag for icing we made the dragonfly out of little jellied orange and lemon slices (I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were vegetarian). If the cake tastes good I'll post the recipe on Frog End Food when we get back.

On our walks

Ian I take daily or sometimes twice daily walks, usually within the city of Exeter and mostly from our door, though we have driven to the city centre and walked from there a few times.

Recently the walks have been getting longer and longer and we've made several up to St Michaels Church at the top of Pinhoe village:


The land by the church has a wonderful confusion of guinea fowl (yes I did have to look up the collective noun) and a few alpaca (or are they lamas - I couldn't get close enough to measure their height) as well:



The walk takes us up and around a disused quarry, but the view of the quarry is mostly obscured. Part of the lane is covered with lesser celandine at the moment.


Last Monday Ian had a meeting in the morning and we had a busy afternoon, followed by a film so we didn't get out for our walk until 11:30pm. We were really pleased to see a hedgehog crossing the main road and followed it to watch it for a minute. The following night we couldn't resist going out to look for another and surprisingly were rewarded by a hedgehog on a bank leading from a garden down to the pavement of the same road. The third night we decided that there was no chance of seeing a hedgehog, especially as we went out a little earlier so that we could pop in to the supermarket on the way home. We were wrong and a third hedgehog was found snuffling around the lane between the main road and our road laughing at us for not bringing the camera. This time we trotted off home to pick up the camera and came back. The hedgehog had moved towards a hedge and although I took a couple of photos they were completely blurred. Upon entering the hedge the hedgehog disturbed a huge frog which jumped out and into the grass. It was very dark and we were convinced it was a vole until I spotted the frog looking at us.

Of course the fourth night when we took the camera with us on our walk we didn't see a hedgehog. Maybe we'll be lucky again in the future, but if not we had a wonderful hedgehog week.

Ruby slippers

As I mentioned in a previous post, Ian and I are doing a memory course at the moment. The lessons are very long and I'm only on lesson 6 out of 80, but I've already learned so much.

The idea of the lessons is to teach different methods of memorising information, whether it be numbers, words or even random combinations of letters (useful for learning new languages). Until now all the information learned has been random and not worth reinforcing into my long term memory, but the lesson I began today aims for you to memorise the US States in alphabetical order. Not particularly useful when I think about it, but this is one I intend to commit to my long-term memory - it'll be good practice if nothing else.

The lesson describes a number of different ways that you could use to learn the names of the states, the simplest being to associate each of the states with a single image - these are then superimposed on a list of preprepared support images which I already know in order.

So I have 50 states and I need 50 images. Some require little imagination, especially when it comes to states I've visited. Some require a little googling and then I find mention of the Museum of Oz in Kansas and the image of ruby slippers instantly pops into my head. Some states seem downright impossible. Why is it I don't associate a single piece of information with Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin...?

If anyone has any good image ideas for the above states I'd really appreciate you posting a comment. I'd rather not use people (Bill Clinton being an obvious choice for Arkansas) because I'm not very good at visualising faces, but other than that there's no limit to how random they can be. For instance I have Jack Daniels for Tennessee and a 'surrey with a fringe on top' for Oklahoma.

Thanks!

January - and it's not even over

As we were leaving the supermarket today I noticed that they had a board in the entrance saying Happy New Year. 'New Year' I said in exclamation - was it really not long ago? To me it feels as though it's been several months since Christmas. Apart from a couple of days each week I've not worked much for the company so far in January so I've had a chance to do a number of other things.

Already this month we've completely rearranged the loft (if you'd seen the state of it before we started you'd realise this was not a small task) - every box up there now has a contents list in excel so if I want to find something I have only to search the file instead of sending Ian up to the cold and dark with instructions like 'it's probably in a medium-sized plastic box near the hatch that you'll see also has a little toy badger in, but on the other hand it might be in a small cardboard box that looks like a dozen other boxes at the back of the loft somewhere...'. As well as the sorting out in the loft I've been going through my paperwork in the study and spare room. We have a deep filing cabinet and I've reached the back of my drawers for the first time in at least a year.

The spare room is now full of all sorts of things that I want to get rid of - old cd cases, the cds having been stored in albums to save space, books, clothes, videos and all sorts of nicknacks. When I'm able to find the study floor again from all the things I'm sorting through then I'll bring some larger items down from the loft to photograph them for freecycle.

Much of my time has been spent scanning - often simply photographs (those of the Mason, Elliott and Edwards families), but I've also been scanning important documents and various other sentimental things. In a few weeks there'll be nothing left in the house to scan, apart from several hundred slides (I started that sentence so confidently, but then remembered the boxes sitting on top of the wardrobe in the spare room - aaah well!)

Our company accounts are due in March and after finally deciding that this was not something I was ever going to be interested in understanding we hired an accountant this week. It turns out that hiring an accountant to do all the work for you requires you to do a lot of work first (even if your financial transactions have been relatively simple) - there's all sorts of information and documents that they need that only I have access to. Luckily I managed to anticipate everything our accountant could possibly want on our first meeting and we even took our passports after seeing on someone else's website that they can't do anything until they can confirm your identity.

The wedding plans haven't got as far as I would have liked (I know, I know - 'where's my invitation' you're asking), but I did choose and order a wedding dress, order the bridesmaid dress and I think we've found a photographer. We chickened out of going to a wedding fair in Torquay due to some very blustery weather last weekend (the fair was right on the seafront), but there's another one in Exeter in a couple of weeks so hopefully that will help with the suits if nothing else. By the end of the month I'm hoping to have discussed the menu with Otterton Mill and sent out the invitations. We've also decided that we'll probably be honeymooning around February of 2012 because the wet monsoon season (as opposed to the dry monsoon season - the monsoons last all year) in the Maldives will have already begun before we get married and will last until December.

This year I've been determined to remember to plant my seeds at the right time (even with our warm Devon weather we've left it too late with our peppers, aubergines, squashes and pumpkins every year so far). The chillis were planted on New Years Eve and now they've been joined by cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and cape gooseberries. We have propagators on both kitchen windowsills now and they really are wonderful.

In a couple of weeks we'll be planting the pumpkin, melon and marrow seeds. I've always wanted to grow a marrow!

It's only been three weeks since New Year and yet I'm pretty sure that if I'd been working for the University it would have taken me around 8 months to do all the sorting and scanning I've done so far this year. I expect to be starting a new contract full-time in February, but in the next break between contracts we'll begin sorting Ian's parents paperwork. I have no doubt that we will both be experts on hovercraft by the time we're finished (Martin Elliott worked in hovercraft design).

The Mason family photo album

On Christmas Day John Mason (Ian's grandad) showed us one of the old family photo albums. All the photographs had long since lost whatever was sticking them to the pages so we offered to bring the album back to Exeter and stick them all back in again. Before sticking them in I scanned them. 99% of them are not dated and most will be impossible to date, but at least John was able to identify most of the people. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

Seaton Hall, where John and his siblings grew up:

Five of the Mason siblings at Richard's wedding. From left to right: Tom Tyson (the bride's brother), Mary Mason, William Mason, Annie Mason, Richard Mason, Dorothy Mason (nee Tyson), unknown Tyson, John Mason:


Wrestling was a big thing in the Mason family and recently the family were asked if the local Wrestling club could present a Mason cup to the winner of an annual event (I'm not sure of the details). Another of John's brothers - Thomas (Tucker) Mason holding the cups he won:

John Mason, aged about 18 "tossing the sheaf". The ladder (used to tell how high the sheaf had gone in the air) was 30 foot long. The sheaf was dropped in the river before each toss to make it heavier:

Boxing Day 2010

Boxing Day morning was the first time we'd seen Formby in the light so I took some photos before we left for the Wirral:




About to set off again:

Upon arrival at the Willows we all opened our Christmas presents:


We then had a lovely lunch and catch up on news before starting our final journey back to Devon in the afternoon.

A big thank you to everyone we visited over the Christmas period for their wonderful company and of course for our presents.