Easy now to find a breeze

What a miserable day it is today: cold and grey. The only slight redeeming feature was a few moments sun when I was out with Jez this morning. I took her over Upton Heath again, and took my camera. I am looking for subjects for this month’s Guardian Photo Competition. I don’t suppose I’ll enter, but I’m at least joining in in spirit. Anyway, the theme is Macro Photography. I’d normally prefer to use Chris DLSR, but I have a 2 foot minimum distance on the lens with that, so it only works with medium to large flowers & cones etc. Instead I took my new Canon Ixus with me. There was too much breeze for macro photography really, but I did get a couple of photos out of it (well, 3 to be precise).

The first two are of tree bark





And the third is of gorse.



As for the weather, well you can see what I mean by this shot of the little copse.



As for Jez, she was well behaved and I managed to get her back on the lead ok. But I’d walked her a different way round and it took her by surprise. That trick won’t work again for a while.

Meanwhile Max’s leg still looks very raw. I checked with one of the veterinary nurses this morning and I am doing the right thing by way of treatment, which is good to know. Unfortunately I took his buster collar off last night as he sleeps on my bed, and this morning I was woken by him licking it, which isn’t good. I did get Chris to take a photo of him having his leg soaked in salt water for you though.



After I bought Jez back I went shopping to Waitrose. Of course they didn’t have everything I wanted, so I needed to go back out to Tesco later.

Chris took Jez up to Delph Woods this afternoon. I’m not sure why – I thought he was planning to avoid it for a couple of day. And once again she did not want to come back at the end of the walk. At least this time he didn’t lose her though.

Whilst they were out I did a bit of exercise. I’ve been trying to get back into Pilates on the hospital’s recommendation (I have a prolapsed (or slipped) disc that won’t heal). As I need to strengthen the Core muscles I bought a new Gym Ball last week (my old one is a bit small). I’ve been getting on well combining my normal Pilates with the Gym Ball. But I did not think it was a good idea to attempt Pilates today with Max around. As soon as I lie on the floor he’s there trying to snuffle round me. So I just did the Gym Ball stuff. That was bad enough. Max thought it was a game and was either trying to jump up, or push his head in between my legs or under the gym ball to see what was underneath it. He seemed convinced there was something underneath it. But as he is wearing his buster collar all it meant was that he kept crashing into me.

After that I took Max out. We went to the chemist to get some gauze dressings for his leg (to keep it clean on walks) and then walked around the estate a bit, keeping to the footpaths wherever possible. We must have been out about 40 minutes in total.

Tonight I’m cooking an Oriental Noodle soup with pork balls for dinner. Fortunately I made the pork balls previously so have just had to take them out of the freezer. The soup is based on this recipe but I add chopped chilli, shitake mushrooms and beansprouts and make it with noodles. It’s really tasty.

There were things I was planning to talk about as I haven’t written for ages, but I don’t want these entries to get too long – people can’t be bothered to read them if they’re too long. I think I’d better make a list and try and catch up gradually. Oh well, time to try and get this lot posted, then get dinner, then look at the Radio Times in order to confirm that there’s sweet FA on TV tonight. Oh, no – I think I’m wrong. I have a feeling Monday’s are now the one night where everything is on at once. We’ve got The Hustle on BBC1 and Hell’s Kitchen USA on ITV2 (and it was left where Gordon was about to get bopped!). Not sure I can stand all the excitement.