A Little More Eco Friendly?

When I came to live on Lewis the township (England/Lowland Scotland/Wales = village) I lived in had a main road running through it (on which the house in which I lived was situated) and many side roads which had grown up in accordance with the shape of crofts and the need for access.

There was very little street lighting outside of Stornoway and we lived 7 miles from the town so we had nothing except the occasional light at a crossroads perhaps. Given that the midwinter hours of daylight were only about 6 or 7 that meant a lot of time outside the house was spent in the dark.  

That had the benefit of fabulous starry nights (reminiscent, more recently, of living in semi-rural New Zealand) and a highly visible Aurora borealis (in the case of the Hebrides).  

Now most of my readers will well remember that a torch with a bright light was likely to be a fairly bulky object with big expensive batteries. We all carried torches when we went out at night and, indeed, they were a very important part of life in the '70s. Then people grew hungry for street lights and if a Councillor could not get at least some street lights for his constituents he risked being replaced at the next local election. 

Houses also started having outside lights as a matter of course. Very tiny very bright torches and head lights also became the norm.

In the last 10 to 15 years it became easier to fit battery operated LED lights in difficult places outside. At the same time all my indoor lights have been replaced by LED ones and the total wattage in the house is probably less that the wattage in my living room 15 years ago.

Last Spring I started replacing the outside battery operated lights with solar lights. So now my house is  well illuminated outside by movement operated solar panel lights.  

When I was 3 and my Dad taught me how to wire 1½v  bulbs and batteries and switches in parallel and series and later how to deal with 13amp electrics I could never have believed that the outside of my house would be illuminated by solar power lights installed for little more than the cost of a year's supply of dry batteries. 

I'm Back

How's that for an inventive title?

Good afternoon, on this windy, dull, wet, 11ºC Sunday afternoon on the Isle of Lewis. Apart from to feed the birds I've not been out of the house today so the weather is irrelevant except to the extent that almost everyone feels more cheerful when the sun is shining.

It's three weeks since I opened a blog of mine or anyone else's to read, write or do anything in Blogland. I'm pretty sure that must be the longest period of 'non-attendance' since I started blogging in 2007.

During the three weeks I developed a kidney infection and then had yet another few days in hospital pre-sepsis whilst they sorted things out. Given the inevitably of that happening again and again the consultant has embarked on a regime of preventative antibiotics. Here's hoping.  

My visitors of two months have now departed and I'm back to being in the state of being single that I have become very used to over the last 20 years or so. 

You would think that with three weeks 'off' I'd have a hundred ideas about which to blog. If nothing else I could take a leaf out of YP's blog and show you more of the wonderful island on which I live.  Or I could write about National Simplicity Day. Or I could just use what little imagination I have.

Monday morning. 

As it was I didn't even manage to finish the introduction and post just to let you know that I'm back. Well I am. But I have to be in town to pick up a friend who's car is going in for repair, That's at 9am. So I'm saying 'Hello' and I'll be back later. However, with thanks to Rachel for waking me up again, I shall post some photos from the last three weeks.

The first is my son's new tent. It has no poles! It's just kept up by inflated tubes. I was amazed. He, Carol and Brodie spent a weekend in the sun at one of Lewis's many beaches.

I called in at Tesco on Saturday morning. That's how I like to see a supermarket - no people but full shelves.

Gaz and Brodie came round for an afternoon. Brodie is 3½ and has every toy on the face of the earth. At that age I think I had a wooden giraffe my Uncle had brought home from some exotic place he was stationed in The War and possibly a. Dinkey Toy. The whole afternoon Brodie played with a helter skelter I bought for him well before he was able even to crawl and he's played with it ever since. Sometimes simple is just more enjoyable.

Every night the birds come down in their dozens to bathe in the pond. The fishes seem not to care.

I hope you all have a great week. See you later.

WYSIWYG

For very many years one of the things that my brother (CJ) and I have done when having breakfast or morning coffee in each other's company is the Times 2 Crossword.  Now that my Sister-in-Law (Jo) has arrived on Lewis she has joined us. 

Today, when Jo and I were doing the crossword, one of the clues produced the acronym WYSWYG from the clue "What you see is what you get." When I said that, Jo was unimpressed. She had never heard the term. Later CJ was similarly unimpressed and had not heard the term. 

It seems to me to have been around for years and was in common usage. Am I alone? 

It poured all morning. The view through the window rather reminded me of an Impressionist painting.

Today was a day of food preparation, cooking and baking. I have a rather too many courgettes(zucchini) from my polycarb so decided to make carrot and zucchini cake. It was rather overdone despite giving it less time in the oven than the recipe said.  CJ and Jo like salads so I made a bean, pulse and many other things salad to go with the evening meal. A bowl of humous followed and a tray of cornflake crunch. Then my fail-safe desert/pudding - an Amaretto syllabub - to finish off. 

The Silent Sea

Usually the sea below my house is audible in my garden. It can be relatively gentle lapping or the thunder of heavy waves in a swell or driven by gale force winds.

On other, rare, occasions the sea feels as though there is a steely, unreal quietness in it. It's a rare occurrence and the results are shown in the pictures below:

When I see the sea like that I am always reminded of a paining by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela that I saw and liked in the National Gallery in London. It is called Lake Keitele: A Vision of Finland. 

What I do not know is what phenomenon or combination of circumstances causes it.