Ipernity Nos 2001-4000

When the heap is over nine feet high and tinder dry, with two years of accumulated garden rubbish, including two Christmas trees, don't assume it will last for hours. From lighting the match to a smouldering heap of log remnants was about half an hour, maximum. Initially the flames shot about twenty-thirty feet into the air - thank goodness it was a calm day! By the time I went for my camera, it had died down to this...

Any group of humans is worth investigating, as our lunch guests discovered when we took them for a walk down to the pond garden.

It does what it says on the box. Newly unwrapped there are slight creases in all surfaces, but nothing that either photoshop or a cool steam iron couldn't take care of. It folds up ingeniously into a very small package, rather like those four-in-one light reflectors - probably made by the same company.

Working my way through a series of Jo Nesbo's books at the moment...

Testing out the Lightbox!

Using continuous daylight LED photo spots.

The box manufacture I covered a few weeks ago. The lighting, which arrived today, is by Expro, their mini L200 15 LED Continuous Daylight Lighting Kit for photographic Cubes (aka Lightboxes). The pair of lights cost £34 in total, which I found on Amazon, and seems to do the business as required.

Tarts of the orchid world, these repeat flower with relative ease. But I have seven Cymbidium orchids which are a far more difficult proposition. If anyone has the secret of having them flower again, please share. Cold nights, warm sunny days, starve in winter, feed in summer - tried them all!

WHAT an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from Heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep!.. What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial ! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost every where vanished ? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset. Charles Lamb. Essays of Elia Hear! Hear!

Who needs a watch when you live somewhere so sunny?! Made from a spare floor tile, and an old slate from the dairy roof, obligingly cut to the size of the template I gave him, by Mark Kemp, an excellent local Tiler, and Plasterer - he is NOT responsible for the wavy line at the right edge of the tile!

Who needs a watch when you live somewhere so sunny?! Made from a spare floor tile, and an old slate from the dairy roof, obligingly cut to the size of the template I gave him for the gnomon, by Mark Kemp, an excellent local Tiler, and Plasterer - he is NOT responsible for the wavy line at the top edge of the tile!

The Orion Group is one of the most easily recognizable groups in the night sky. It lies SSW at an elevation of about 20 degrees at 8:15 p.m. at this time in March. Look for the three bright stars in a row, climibg to the right at an angle of about 30 degrees - his "belt" and below them the "dagger" a group of what look like three stars to the naked eye, but are more than that in fact. They hang almost vertically in the sky. The group also has two prominent stars above and below it, not in this image, but in some others I have taken previously, with the stars marked clearly.

eterna eternas eternatura per horas secula morales inter dum querimus umbras eternos vitam tunc mensuramus ad annos. It was a long time ago that I studied Latin, but I think it translates as Eternity for the common man is measured in hours, whilst those concerned with moral philosophy can argue that the darkness of eternal life is measured in years...?

Having always had a shadowy(!) interest in sundials, when looking into commissioning one for the dairy, it occurred to me there was no reason, with some research, I couldn't make one myself. An hour or so's googling found a program that told me what angle my gnomon had to be set to (equal to your latitude), and a further program which provided the timelines for your longitude and latitude. The cows are courtesy of Caroline Bury, the artist - this tile was for her draft doodles for a large kitchen tile in the dairy.