The end of an era

As of the end of this week, our local dairy will no longer be delivering milk to our door. After all these years it's apparently no longer economic to do so. Instead of the convenience of milk on our doorstep each morning in reusable and recycleable glass bottles, we'll be forced to buy our milk from the supermarket in plastic cartons. A sad day, I think.

Welney

Up to Welney today to watch some wildfowl and take a look at the new visitors centre.

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts

And the Queen of Hearts just managed to snap a photo before the scavengers sick child descended wolfishly upon them :-)

Oriental lilies

These have been delighting me with their colour and their scent for over a week now :-)

Friday on Saturday

Friday waiting to be tacked up.

Buying snow chains

Finally tracked down what I needed at Discount Autoparts.

As I was going to St Ives...

As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives,
Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits: kits, cats, sacks and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?

I don't know how many wives the dentist has, but the good news is that I get to keep the tooth for another 6 months.

Snow!

Finally, some winter weather. Enough snow to please the kids but not enough to cause traffic chaos. Perfect, really :-)

At the Country Park

Our local Country Park used to be a gravel quarry. It is bounded on one side by a small industrial estate, on another by a motorway and sewage works, and on a third by the railway line to Kings Lynn. The roar of the traffic is always audible, and when the wind is in the wrong direction the close proximity of the sewage works is all too apparent.

But...

In the summer nightingales sing in the woods, and the air is full of glorious dragonflies. In the winter flocks of wildfowl and gulls cover the lakes and the trees are alive with foraging tits and finches. Go early and you might see a Muntjac deer, go any time that is half-quiet and you'll almost certainly see rabbits, go anytime and you'll certainly see Grey squirrels. It's a lovely place, a true oasis for humans and wildlife.

The Council want to close it down because it's not economic to run. It doesn't pay its way. We're fighting to keep it, to hold on to our bit of wild beauty. I just hope we succeed.

The grass needs cutting

If you go down to the woods today

Catkins - more signs of Spring in our local woods today.

A sunny Saturday

It feels dangerously like Spring...

It feels dangerously like Spring out there today... it's lulling us into a false sense of hope and security after yesterday's gales and before the cold weather that's forecast for next week.

Trying something new

Scented glory

Stormy weather

Here' s looking at you, kid...

The Christmas present

Raindrops keep falling on my head

Back to the books

Finally getting down to some studying.

A trip to the park

Why do small children like mud so much?

An evening in

A book and a beer - what more could a girl want?

Domestic chores

I hate doing the supermarket shop - if I was working I'd definitely do it online. And even more I hate having to unpack it all and put it away when I get home :-(

A cat where no cat should be

The cat is on the table. The cat should not be on the table. The cat knows that she should not be on the table (hence the ready-to-flee pose). But the cat cannot resist the table - it is the place to be, in feline terms.

Oh well, at least it horrifies my mother...

New toy!

My new lens (bought with birthday money) arrived this morning - a Lensbaby 2.0. I can see that using it is going to take some getting used to, but I love the unpredictability of the pictures I've taken with it so far. I also love the simplicity of it - tilt and shift by hand, and change aperture by changing discs in front of the lens. And I like the combination of such simplicity with the hi-tech EOS body I'm using the lens on ;-)

Expanding our repertoire

Now that the children are older and will eat a wider range of foods (OK, under protest much of the time in DD's case, but we're making progress) we've decided to try and go back to eating a lot more vegetarian food, like we did when it was just the two of us. My mum bought me a fantastic vegetarian cookbook for Christmas (Leiths Vegetarian Bible) and we're picking out likely recipes and giving them a try. Tonight's is Butternut Squash Toad in the Hole with Baked Tomato Relish. I predict that DH and I will love it, DS will eat it and pronounce it 'not too bad', and DD will push it around her plate for three quarters of an hour before finally consuming it. We'll see how it goes...

Packing up

We're putting Christmas back in its box today. The tree is newly naked, ready to go to the local recycling centre, all the baubles are packed away ready to be stored until next December, and the Christmas cards have been taken down to be checked against the Christmas card list then recycled also.

I'm never sure whether I regard this process with sadness or with a certain frisson of relief that the madness is all over for another year...