Sauntering Vaguely Downwards
The UK heatwave has fizzled out (for now, with the current climate who knows what will actually happen), it’s under 20°C, grey and windy. I am a very happy bunny as far as that goes, just feeling generally tired. Being able to sleep without wanting to climb out of my own skin to cool off will probably help. Creatively speaking I got a few photos taken before it rained again, so I’m sharing a few here, the rest are up on Flickr. Photos below, along with crafty bits.
Ugh. Heat. Reds are not built for anything much over 20°C, so you can imagine that with the current heatwave in the UK, my productivity levels are low. I’m managing to work, feed myself and shower. Sleep isn’t fantastic. Creative thinking is high, energy and motivation to turn that into action is low. In fact, it’s too hot right now for me to even want to play a video game.
Currently there’s a lot of thunder about, and we had a brief downpour earlier. More forecast for later, but right now it’s unpleasantly hot and humid and I exist only in a puddle of sweat.
Basically, I’m not dead. I’m counting that as a win and going to flail hotly until normal service resumes.
Not as many butterflies around as I’d like there to be, hopefully they’ll make more of an appearance as Summer wears on. Yesterday an area around some Marjoram/Oregano was being visited by a bunch of Gatekeepers (female and male, some flirting going on), a few Small Coppers, a Ringlet and a Small Tortoiseshell. There were also quite a few bees, but they weren’t hanging around on a particular flower long enough to get many useful shots. The flowers are small, so I suppose it makes sense. There are some photos of flowers mixed in, along with Jake. He took up residence on the old bench yesterday, haven’t worked out where he’s been today. Enjoy, and find the rest up on Flickr!
All caught up on photos (for now), I’ve got some new pens to play with and swatch, so that’ll keep me occupied for a bit.
Final batch from the backlog all sorted and up on Flickr! This lot are all from the garden in the past week, most of them an evening shoot so the sun did nice things with the flower petals. I took a lot of photos today (mostly some butterflies and bees, if they turn out okay), but will sort and post those tomorrow. I hope you enjoy them.
Second batch of photos! Almost done, last batch tomorrow. A few of ‘name the daisy’ titles because there are so many varieties that they’re easy to mix up, and I’m an idiot who failed to take a photo of the plant label. I took the melon pics yesterday on a whim. Definitely prefer them to the watermelon pics. The rest of this lot are up on Flickr for your perusal.
I’ve been quiet, but I have been taking photos over the past week (the furthest they go back is the 7th), I just haven’t started to sort through them until this weekend. It’s actually been a bit of a chore, because I had over 200 to winnow down, and I’ve still got 60 to do a final sort through and upload (it’ll be less than that, but not much less, just removing pics that have a glaring fault I only notice as I go in to crop). The heat is making me very sluggish, and my lethargy is not helped by the fact I took my meds last night and discovered I’d somehow missed two days of pills. I could have sworn I’d taken them, but evidently not. I decided the sanest thing to do would be batches over a couple of days, so this is batch one, and there will probably be two more.
To add to the meh, I did the watermelon shots and I’m not entirely happy. Most of them got ditched, the lighting was generally crappy, and I basically had way more fun eating the thing than taking photos. I may or may not try again at a later date. As always, there are more up on Flickr.
For anyone not aware, the London Pride parade on Saturday, 7th July 2018 was hijacked by a group of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs1) who were protesting the existence of Transgender people. They claimed they were protesting the erasure of lesbian identity, but the fact of the matter is that these claims are (for the most part) complete and utter tripe. Aside from the fact that they plain don’t like us, they’re getting up in arms about the Gender Recognition Act and don’t seem to grasp that everything they want to prevent trans women from doing… they can already do2. All the GRA essentially is is a way to make getting a Gender Recognition Certificate3 a much less painful process for those of us who would find the thing useful to have to live our daily lives like the rest of society.
The propaganda leaflets the TERFs were distributing were full of misinformation and twisted words, and the behaviour of these women was deplorable and frankly criminal, and potentially could have been dangerous. They won’t get prosecuted. They’ll just get a slap on the wrist, because crimes like this against trans people are rarely taken seriously. On the positive side, it did spark outrage in the lesbian community, with so many cis4 women coming out in support of their trans sisters and decrying the actions of the TERFs. Genuinely heart warming to see, and I have so much love for these women right now.
I’m pretty angry about the stunt in general. Trans issues aside, these women crashed a major event to push their issues, heedless of the disruption. They also displaced the NHS staff who were supposed to be leading the parade, and screwing over the NHS is a reason all by itself for condemning these actions. Respect our NHS, people. But I’m mostly irked by the lying contents of that leaflet. I’m going to take a few points from it and go through them.
My holiday ends today (boo!), so here’s the follow-on from the previous holiday crafting update. It’s been a really good week off, with good weather that didn’t get too hot for me until yesterday. Today I’m pretty sluggish and feel like sleeping all day. I may well do that anyway, I’m still on holiday and there’s nothing pressing to do. I achieved most of what I wanted to along with some things I hadn’t planned on. I ‘lost’ a day to that epic photography session, but that’s fine as I was still creating and I had fun (I’ve also got a whole bunch more photographs from yesterday, but don’t feel like sorting them today). In turn the watermelon hasn’t been photographed (though maybe later, the eating it part is tempting, so the photography will happen at the same time) and I didn’t get some planned drawing done. Again, that’s fine, I can do that in the evenings after work.
I went into town to do shopping yesterday, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I stopped off on a verge along the main road into town near the GP surgery to take a load of photographs of the poppies, daisies, thistles and teasels, I would have been very annoyed and regretted that decision. As is was, I got a new favourite photo out of that batch, the teasel with purple flower buds that’s set as the featured image.
Some of the images are from the garden, but the majority are from beside a main road and not, shockingly, on a verge next to a bridle path. As always, more up on Flickr, and by more I mean a lot more. It took hours to sort through these yesterday, which is why the blog post is today. Now I’m off to do things with glue and string.
I’m halfway through my holiday, and I have been eating ice cream, and lounging in the hammock. I’m planning on going to the beach at some point, possibly tomorrow if the nice weather holds. I have also been arting and crafting as planned and generally having some fun. There are some photos on the camera, but I’ve not sorted them yet, and probably won’t get them posted today.