Where's Schrödinger’s Cat?

In the 5 months up to the beginning of August I had used the car for a handful of miles - principally for medical visits in Stornoway. In the last three weeks I have driven around 1500 miles including two round trips to Glasgow. In the next three weeks I will make another two trips to Glasgow and Ayr to have my two pre-op appointments and my kidney stent replaced. In between I will have to isolate for 14 days at home on Lewis. I've gone from the peace and quiet of lockdown with no deadlines to meet or appointments to keep to a hectic 'up at 4am to catch the morning ferry' lifestyle again. I know which I prefer....and it isn't the latter.

So my recent visits to Blogland have been few and far between and my life is the poorer for that.

However I did visit Bob's post "I wish they would tackle world peace instead." which, as the title might not readily suggest, was partly about the Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox. 

I have, on several occasions, with Wendy (of my New Zealand Family) sat up into the wee smae hours with a bottle or two of New Zealand's finest red discussing the topic. So the post made me sit up and take notice. The first thing I did was go to a particular place on my bookshelves for the book entitled "Schrödinger’s Cat" or something containing those two words anyway.

To my puzzlement it wasn't there. A search of the rest of the bookshelves and the shelves in the loft all drew a blank. I'm not going to pretend that the loss of the book about Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox is going to change my life.  However the fact that a book, any book, is missing from its proper place is disturbing. What next?

Escape?

It wasn't easy. Saturday morning at 6am and the ferry was very busy with people and their cars leaving the Island. I sat in my usual part of the ferry by the now-closed-for-the-time-being Coffee Cabin. There were half a dozen other small family groups in the area all very well socially distanced and, initially until they started having breakfast and coffee, fully masked as is required by law on public transport in Scotland. It was a beautiful morning for a sail and I spent some time on deck enjoying the fresh air and the views.

It was my first time off the Island since early January. It was the first time I had been amongst people since early March. Because everyone was well spaced apart I didn't feel particularly apprehensive. The journey itself is 2½ hours and I was on my way down the road to Bishopbriggs by 0930.

I'm down for my drugs trial review. I can't think of anything else that would have got me off the Island at the moment.

A loo-stop in Kingussie and soup and another coffee from my flasks and I was in Bishopbriggs by mid afternoon. I was heartily glad I was not going North. The traffic around Perth must have seen delays measured in hours rather than minutes. Traffic in both directions was very heavy.  Presumably it was largely due to staycationers.

What had not been anticipated was family turning up at Anna's unaware that I was coming and that was a bit traumatic and I left to make a delivery I'd brought from the Island for another friend. Once I returned and had settled down with a sizeable g'n't in the garden the 6 months of isolation started to become a memory rather than a problem for me.

On Sunday we decided on a walk around Hogganfield Loch in Glasgow. It was a beautiful morning and with my recently re-awakened desire to know the name of every flower we passed was a very pleasant way to spend a morning. We had arrived fairly early ie around 9am but it was quite clear that that was late for many of the walkers, cyclists, runners and the rest. 

There are many types of waterbirds on the loch

I didn't envisage ice being a problem

I don't think it was personal

Too enthusiastic for me

It's quite sizeable

Housekeeping

This is just a brief post partly to apologise for some missed comments and partly to simply get it off my chest.

This morning I went to comment moderation in settings to do some housekeeping. I thought I did it most days but I've obviously slipped up in the last week or so. 

In moderation there were 166 spam comments to be deleted and 3 comments for allowing through that I had missed. I apologise to those whose comments I'd not moderated. The trouble with so much is that the good gets lost amongst the bad,

I have to say that some of the spam I've had recently has been of a nature that even I found offensive. 

Given that I presume we all mark these as spam I cannot fathom why Google's algorithms don't pick them up and automatically send them to junk. Particularly as some of my incoming ordinary mail gets occasionally sent to junk for no apparent reason.

Some Garden Thoughts

It's been a bit of a battle in the garden the last few weeks. The weather has been distinctly unfriendly and today although the sun has now come out the wind is very strong so the plants are suffering a bit if they are in full bloom. Midsummer weather it ain't, even in the Outer Hebrides.

The yellow pansies have been putting up a good show for many weeks from my kitchen window even though some of the plants were actually blown out of the ground in one gale and the heavy rain has given them a real battering. They are hardier than I could have imagined.

I have said before that one of the thing that has helped me to enjoy isolation has been the garden. It's not only working in it that is a pleasure though. Just looking out of my kitchen window as I type this I often just sit and gaze at the view and admire the plants, the birds and the sea and mountains of the Mainland in the distance - hidden by haze in the pictures on this post taken today during a sunny few hours in between the rain.

One of the joys of a garden, though, is getting to know the individual plants.

My little wild strawberries would take over the garden given a chance, creeping around under all the taller plants and popping up wherever there is a chink of light. 

It's always a good idea to look at both the whole plant and then marvel at the the flower heads. This Persicaria campanulata or Lesser Knotweed is not much to look at in the garden because it's straggly. However if you look at the individual flowers they are pure works of art.

I am hopeless at remembering names off the top of my head even if I know the names somewhere in my memory banks. So I have started keeping photographs of those in my garden with names on them in the hope that they will eventually be recalled more easily. Two tiny flowers of great great beauty are:

When we look closely there are all sorts of creatures living off and on the flowers. In this case these were all on the Leucanthemum: 

The first is, I think, a Myrid bug of some sort, perhaps a Common Green Capsid.

And these two are a fly (and don't ask me what sort) and a bug (a Myrid Bug again perhaps):

 

Hopefully Adrian or CJ or someone else who knows about bugs and flies can identify them although I know from my brother (CJ) that flies can be extraordinarily hard to identify without a very powerful microscope to look at parts no self respecting reader of this blog would look at.