Lateral

Been back on the moor today.

Started out doing the weekly vehicle checks.....  windscreen wiper falling off?  Check!

Gathered a few tools together and headed up to Pule Hill..... now, for those that don't know what a Pule Hill is.....

It's the iconic hill that looms above Marsden, West Yorkshire.... studded with chimneys that vent down to the Standedge Tunnel that runs deep below, between this side of th'ills, and that (the side of which we don't speak).

Task.... change the hinges on some gates to turn them into self-closing gates.

Sounds pretty easy.

The reality.... cart some bloody heavy gate hinges and some tools round the moors, up big hill, struggle to get the old hinges off, struggle to get the new hinges on, and realise that we didn't make much difference, other than the fact that the gates close nicely now, albeit not-self-closing.

I did amaze myself with some of my "innovative" solutions to problems we encountered today....  it's almost like i know what i am doing.....  which is weird, cos i am really not a "handy" person..... i just think i have good ideas

Ended with a rapid litter pick, up at Buckstones car park, happy days..

well..... here's Pule Hill

Have a nice day.

stolen image - sorry.... was too busy to take a photo

woah .. they say he's got to go....

 Godzilla.

The biggest, most scary rubber dinosaur i ever did meet, as a kid.

And, in terms of the Playstation game, Guitar Hero, one of the most awesome songs you could shred.....  By the mighty Blue Oyster Cult, of course.

There was a whole family spawned from that rubber pylon crunching dinosaur...... and a pretty weak cartoon with a really weak sidekick.... Godzooky, created by Hanna Barbera in 1978.  I think Godzooky was supposed to be Godzilla's nephew....

I am not gonna lie, i think Godzooky was to Godzilla what Scrappy-Doo was to Scooby-Doo.....

<makes raspberry sound>

There were some great monster movies in the Godzilla franchise, but i don't really think there was a good one made after the original series of Japanese ones.....  i'm no expert but....

I imagine Godzilla was born of the post-nuclear fears in Japan.

The first movie erupted in 1954..... and there is a connection between nuclear power and the awakening of Godzilla......

Maybe it was a sort of propaganda to suggest that something uncontrollable could be born from the ashes created by the second world war?

Anyway......  

If you never saw the pre.... i dunno.... pre 1980 films, i'd highly recommend them - i mean.... if you really want somewhere to start, try:

Destroy All Monsters - 1968 (link contains spoilers)

It's a great film.

And guess what, it features one or two of the additional characters that Godzilla occasionally had to fight.....

Like..... Rodan, King Ghidorah, Anguirus, and Minilla.....

And who could forget.... Mothra?

Happy Mothra's day everyone!! X

image stolen - please don't grass on me.

pastel

I once went to Lisbon, Portugal.

We visited the world's leading exponent in the art of custard tarts.

For those wondering, it's the Pasteis de Belem.

That is all.

Here's a pic from that trip, dated 17/3/25 - the really interesting thing about that trip - we were rented an apartment, in a run down block of apartments, where everyone had left because of some minor subsidence...... sure, there were a few cracked walls, but the apartment was ok...... the owner was a punter in the pub where i worked (John the clock as he was known).... anyways, when we got back, he handed me an envelope and fully reimbursed the entire rental fee......  very unexpected - total bonus.  Thanks John.... wherever you are up there, buddy!

rebound

 When i was a kid, there used to be a game.... probably by Hasbro or someone like that, called "rebound"..... if i 'member it rightly, it were a cross between air hockey and paintball, where you had to fire ball bearings out of two little pea-shooter guns, in order to knock this "puck" (which was also a ball bearing) into the other person's goal?  I might have that wrong, but that's how i 'member "rebound".

Goes off to Google.... realises he's got it wrong and the described game was in fact called "crossfire".....  so what WAS rebound.... a simple bagatelle type game where you had to whizz a little puck thing, up the table, off a couple of forty-five degree rubber bands, to come back down the table towards you and into a scoring zone..... like a souped-up shove ha'penny affair.

Badly described games apart......

I've bounced back from whatever malaise overcame me yesterday, and having spent two days idling, feeling much much better about life in general, and physically able to at least lift a cup of tea!

Today, i took care of a few small chores.....

washed my walking pants - well.... i say "washed".... i just squeezed them in enough water to get the peat-crusting exorcised from without.

Emptied the compost caddy, dismantled it and cleaned it.

Poked a stick in the wormery, riddled the top layer about a bit, emptied the worm tea from the sump.....

Walked the dog....

Cleaned the coffee machine - it's always a game of Russian roulette - once you clean it and put it back together, it sometimes comes up with a hard error suggesting there's no water in it, and this CAN go on like a game of cat and mouse for a number of days..... today the error took me less than half an hour to chase, catch, snap the neck of, and simply swallow it whole.

Cleaned up the kitchen area that i've used to tackle most of the tasks above......

While i was there, cleaning the sink, and the sideboard, and the pots and pans and cups and Tupperware and turkey baster and toothbrushes that i'd been using..... it occurred to me.......

Every time i wanted to use the dishcloth, it's dripping wet.... i pick it up, wring it out..... wipe something..... rinse it out..... wring it out..... put it down...... and the next time i pick it up, i have to go through the whole damn rigmarole again.

At this point, i consider that i ought to have been an inventor..... over the years i've had many good ideas, and here's another......

Dishcloth mangle.

Sits next to the sink, with a drainpipe that runs, either into the washing-up bowl, or into the sink...... obviously it can't be electric (think about it) so it'd have to be manual, or battery operated....  probably with suction cups to make it removable, but solid when situated.

wind the handle, run the dishcloth through..... hey presto...... a dry dishcloth....... it could even have a little bar on it to hang the dry dishcloth from, just so it isn't dangling in water until the next time you pick it up.

Googled it.....

Can't find it......

INVENTION!

you're welcome.

Here are the names to the faces if you're remotely interested from the day before yesterday and yesterday's confused rants. (not ashamed to say i had twelve of them, out of the sixteen)

The Grim!

Haven't felt poorly for .... since..... i don't even know when i was last poorly.

Last night i started to get a bit restless.  Spent the whole night tossing and turning and wrestling with my active mind..... Go to sleep..... No, you go to sleep..... i said it first, so you go to sleep.....  oh, this is getting us nowhere...... oh. an interview with Bryan Cranston about the returning episodes of Malcolm in the Middle......  i need a wee.....  is the heating on..... i'm hot..... i can hear the heating running....... why is the heating on...... go feel the radiator..... the heating isn't on....... my arm is cold but my leg is hot....

You, very much, get the idea.....

It was a tussle.

I finally got out of bed this morning at the usual time but pulled a sickie from volunteering.....

Felt spaced out, tired, had some aches..... a chesty cough..... generally, and genuinely, run down.

I think the whole redundancy thing is finally catching up with me.

I've possibly used copious amounts of volunteering as a distraction while i work out which way is up, but it's finally hitting home and the nine years of supreme effort at Magic Rock Brewery have taken their toll, and the disentanglement from that has, finally sunk in.

Mentally, and physically, i'm pretty exhausted..... i've been running on empty.

Called in sick, and gave myself a day of self-care.... which generally amounted to.... not very much......

I watched a little bit of a cowboy movie as i flip-flopped in and out of the edge of sleep like an opium den punter drifting to and fro on the shores of a dreamy reality.

If you've ever heard the saying... "he doesn't know if he's on this earth or fullers".... then it's a fairly good description of my state of mind today.

Enjoyed the sun on my face as i drank a cup f tea.

Simple things, and just a bit of time to let things happen.... let my head and my soul take whatever it needs, in order to reboot.

And that, as they say, is a wrap!

Hope tomorrow sees me getting back to myself..... i REALLY hope i'm not coming down with an actual illness.

By way of explaining what happened yesterday and the "pointless" and "QI" question.... here are the 16 contestants that the young people could not identify.....  see if you know any?

do you like apples?

i watched a quiz show today where some young uns were shown a board of photographs of contestants who had appeared on the TV programme QI....

If you don't know what QI is then ... let me give you a bit of background info:

It's a British comedy panel show...

the letters QI stand for Quite Interesting....

It's been on our telly boxes since 2003 (so it's been on 22 years already).

Originally hosted by Stephen Fry, and latterly hosted by Sandi Toksvig

so.....

imagine a board of.... i dunno.... sixteen well known funny people, who have appeared on the show at some point....

Think, Bill Bailey, Alan Davies, Jo Brand.... you get the idea.....

Faced with the board, the young uns didn't know a single person or had ever seen QI.....

I was surprised....

And felt old.

They both guessed wrong names but then proclaimed they knew one of them cos they'd appeared on Britain's Got Talent.....

And then i felt scared.

To mitigate my disappointment in gen zedders..... here's some oak apples.

don't do this:

my name's barry....

 My name obviously isn't Barry.....

Today, i have mostly been carting barrowloads of millstone grit rocks, up a path, deep in the heart of the Wessenden Valley.

Why?  you might well be asking yourselves, and at times i was often asking myself the same question.

Footpath repairs on the Old Pennine Way......

Basically this.....

Footpath gets wet.... turns muddy, turns to "slop" and then people pick a different route around the slop, which is either:

Dangerous to them!

Dangerous to the environment..... braided paths and more slop will doubtless ensue.

So.....

Create, mend, and improve drainage channels, keeping the water off the paths.

Shovel out the "slop" and unceremoniously dump it over the edge and off the path.

Scrape back to a nice surface, one which has a chance of drying out.

Chuck some stones in and smoosh 'em down with some gritty stuff to make a better walking surface.

Piece of cake.

Much barrowing, shovelling, matocking, dragging, pushing, pulling, slipping, slopping, and head-scratching later......

A drop in the metaphorical ocean.  (hopefully the drop runs off the path, down a drainage channel, down into a culvert, under the path and out the other side and away, into one of the many streams that feed into the reservoirs.

This little picture went to market..... no, it didn't.... this little picture shows (the highlighted bit) where we had to go, with wheelbarrows full of stone - several trips...... and the point where we were working..... you can also see, at the top (the green diamondy path) is the new Pennine Way route which has been diverted off this path that we're working on......

And this little picture had roast beef.... it most certainly did not..... but here's where we sat and ate our lunch..... nice office for the day (converted to gif, cos i know you love 'em) - gracias muchachos!

it's Monday (again)

 Not long ago...... in a galaxy very close by......

Monday held no significance.....

Sunday wasn't ruined by Monday.....

Hell, i didn't even need an alarm clock..... for a few weeks, anyway.

But now, like with everything i do, i've thrown myself in, with pretty much everything i can, into the world of volunteering.......

I volunteer three days a week, which seems weird, given the fact that, not long ago i was working five days a week and earning pretty nice money.

Today..... a blast from my past.......

STOCKTAKE!

I used to be the master of stocktaking.....

In my early days of stocktaking, I'd parade around the warehouse with a big old piece of cardboard and some sharpie pens..... I'd count everything up, tally style, and deliver the giant tally carboard sheet to the lass in the office who used to run the stock count on the brewery system.

Then, eventually, we got computers and seats and everything, and i made a bit of s spreadsheet, and we used to count up on sheets and key it into a spreadsheet and send it up to the lass in the office who .... you get the idea.

Then, i spoke to my cousin, Tom, and explained the way it works, and he coded some pretty nifty spreadsheet, which took our count spreadsheet and jiggled it around and spat out the summarised count.

Then i made some computer based input forms for the stock count.

Then i made some barcodes and bought some little barcode scanners so the lads could scan a bay..... scan the product code..... key in a quantity.... and when they'd finished counting we smashed a few spreadsheets together and it spat out the answer......  then we compared that answer to the brewery management system's answer and worked out the discrepancies.

The stocktake went from being a two or three day process to being done in like two or three hours.

Don't get me wrong, at the end of all that I wasn't the one doing the stocktake any more - i passed it on to the warehouse lads..... it was tried and tested, and it really worked well.

anyway..... today was STOCKTAKE day at the charity i volunteer at.....

PPE (that's personal protecton equipment if you didn't know)

So, back to a scrap of paper stolen off the printer, a pen that i found, broken, on the floor, and manual counting again...

gloves, hi-viz vest, wellington boots...... etc

a proper blast from my not-too-distant-past, and very much a task well within my comfort zone.

Here's an animated gif of the egg curry i made for tea...... taken just before i submerged the eggs in the simmering sauce...... the meal was delicious with a cheap pilau (microwave) rice and some lovely plain naan breads (shop bought) - it was a mild madras kinda thing..... 

thousand

If a picture paints a thousand words, then why can't I paint you?  Is that how it goes?  Bloody stupid if you ask me, which of course, you weren't.

I have compiled a set of photos from my day.... some from a walk, some not.......

they will save me some typing, and they will probably also cause me some explanation......

Here's a hawthorn, or is it a blackthorn, coming into bud..... up on the moors, so possibly slightly behind ones you might find in your garden...  ** my app tells me it's a juniper?

I do like a nice water droplet.... the reflection of the dry stone wall, inverted in the water droplet, on the harsh, barbed wire fence....  it says a lot....  i don't know what, but it says some stuff

Another water droplet on a tree bud..... probably a mountain ash, or something like that.....  i love the miniature worlds that appear in the inverted water drops.

i'm not lovin' it but i am lichen it.... this is that soldier lichen or whatever it's called.... it comes with red tips and it's something military.....  i'll clear this up as soon as i've annotated these pics, and been for a wee.... for which i am currently "busting".  ** i'm gonna say it's of type Cladonia.... pixie cup, or reindeer lichen.....

just a view down the path across a patch of lichen.... for some reason, i really do love the macro world.... i mean, it's great to be surrounded by big skies, and landscapes, and all that jazz.... and i'm a firm believer in the mantra.... "look up"..... but sometimes..... stop.... zoom in..... zoom in...... sit down on the wet grass..... zoom in......

A crusted wall, covered in lichen..... very pretty

willow in bud, in the fog, and with water droplets..... each spike of buds was like a firework exploding into the sky in micro-form.

Gorse.... it was tough, and prickly, and sharp

i can't quite believe my eyes.... i found sphagnum moss where i did not expect to find it..... i scoured a whole section of moorland that i know to be only (geologically) recently re-laid after quarrying in the area......  this was the ONLY patch of sphagnum i found.... i was thrilled.

So.Much.Frogspawn.  It was in a pool, on the grass, up the rushes....... everywhere...... some crazy frog action must have occurred here!!

And here's me dog.... Sookie.... with a special bone, waiting for us to allow her "upstairs" to her place by the window where she normally devours her treats.... this thing was pretty indestructible and absolutely wiped her out with the effort..... Norman's Nibbles provided the treat.

And that's Sunday, wrapped up.  G'night y'all.

rinse

And repeat.

Today, rising late, grabbed a coffee, ate some toasted fruit bread...... got ready to go for a walk.

Having enjoyed my walk so much, yesterday...... i decided to share the route with Dawn today, so off we set.

If you read my poem, you'll know the route.

Golf course..... woods..... stream..... reservoir..... staircase..... Scape....... Round Ings Road..... Slack Lane..... and home.

Today, i tried to better my photographic efforts (mainly because Dawn was wrangling the dog, so i had my hands free).....

So.... in the absence of wordage, here's a pictorial tour of the route.....

challenge?

It's world poetry day, they tell me.

Usually, on a Friday, I post a picture and give a challenge to write summat about it.

Today's gonna be a bit different.....

I've written a poem..... it's embarrassingly basic, as poetry goes...... I don't think I've ever been very good at doing words and stuff..... 

I went for a walk with the dog..... and i took a few pics thinking I'd chronicle the walk through the medium of photography but i got bored taking the photos and (inspired by the genius of Brian Bilston) realised i could summarise the walk in words......

Friday writing challenge #4

So, for today, for World Poetry Day, feel free to pen a haiku, a 50 word story, or a short poem that captures something about your day.... this day.... today..... any aspect of it.  Drop them in the comments.... they won't be as terrible as this effort from me:

Dog Walkin'

A chilly wind, hat pulled down tight,

Golf course behind, crossed stile, turned right.

Wild garlic, green, bluebells, asleep,

Horse in-between, the stream and sheep.

Dog swimming at a reservoir,

No time for that, we've not walked far.

Staircase goes up, to Scapegoat Hill,

We're higher up, the air falls still.

Topped out, descend, Round Ings, and Slack,

Four miles with friend, and then we're back.

Here are the few (poor) photos I took of the walk..... just to prove i was actually there and the poem is actually a thing.  From left to right, top to bottom......

• wild garlic banks along the stream at Longwood Brook.
• Opposite-leaved Golden Saxifrage (?)
• A horse crossed our path at Snow Lea.
• Frogspawn at Oaks Scar reservoir.
• Looking back down the staircase towards longwood.
• Top of the staircase towards Huddersfield.

fact

Looks like i have to join the rank and file of Statins consumers.

Apparently, somewhere between seven and eight million people in the UK are on Statins.

For them what dun't know.... Statins are tablets that you have t take for the rest of your natural born days to combat high cholesterol, in order to lower your risk(s) of heart problems.....

Also apparently, my cholesterol is deemed "high".... numbers were bandied about, and I've done a couple of blood tests...... bad cholesterol is a bigger number than it should be.... nobody can tell me with certainty what any of the numbers means......

One more blood test and i think I'll be getting "the pill"

I think this marks an important turning point in my life......

I think i am now officially old.

Anyways, that is the result of tests I've been doing since October last year, and they are still making their decisions...... so i guess the urgency is low..... i mean, i fricking hope the urgency is low......

That (above) was not my fact for today.

Today, I've been up on Marsden Moor..... somewhere on the Old Pennine Way, lifting flagstones, repacking them underneath with anything to hand, and then laying them back down in their new, slightly elevated position, hopefully above the water line of the surrounding peatlands.

But.....

I forgot to take a single photo..... so you may have to make do with an archive pic.

Oh, wait, here's a map of the area I've been working on.....

It were sunny up there, and a few birds were fluttering on the warm breeze.  Frogs peered out from peaty sinkholes, their eyes blinking in the brightness, while water boatmen flapped their flippers filtering fine sediments of algae.  Schlep schlep, as the paving slabs bed down into their new homme under my oversized wellington boots.  A grouse laughs at us, and a helicopter high overhead makes its presence known by rudely speaking over our conversation with the hillside.

Alright Nature Boy, snap out of it.....

Here's a picture of the second batch of scones I made..... they look pretty good and they didn't actually taste bad..... it was nice that i could split them in half without even using a knife, they had a sort of seam, across which they parted, and tasted good with butter and jam!!

nothing

Nothing quite so exciting as moss to write about today.

Although, what might appear mundane to me, may well be exciting to someone else..... and the pictorial collage of the day is quite interesting.....

Standard day with no structure..... 

Got up.... took my mum to the eye hospital, down Lindley...... 

Put some diesel in me motor..... 

parked the car out of town and had a walk in (free parking of course).... 

Spent half an hour in the depleted library reading the Metro (a free transport newspaper).... 

Nipped next door to sign-on for me dole money (it's JSA these days - Jobseeker's Allowance)......

Walked back to me car.....

Picked me mum up at the 'ospital......

Dropped me mum off.....

Spent an hour with a friend, discussing the virtues of scones, fermenting jar lids, greenhouses, chilli plants, conspiracy theories, politics.....

Took the dog for a drag......  not sure who took who, where.....

Made some tea (a rather pleasing pan of kedgeree made with sustainable smoked basa fillets instead of haddock).....

Had a drink.....

Wednesday ticked off.

Here's a few photos from the day......

And just cos someone liked my animation, yesterday.... here's another:

freezing

 This morning, despite the weather forecasts, it was bloody freezing.....

In the old days, we'd have called it a pea-souper, and the fog that was shrouding us was icy cold.

People were scraping the ice off their cars, and the foggy water vapours were condensing and freezing on anything metal.

I dropped the dog off with mum today.... first time she's dog-sat for a whole day, so new territory for all of us......

then i headed down into Slawit and onto the office in Marsen for our route back up onto the hills less than five miles from where i started..... could probably have worked that out better but, in my head i had the loose work plan for today, and i felt i needed to be at the office to try and convey my thoughts to the people who'd know what tools and materials it'd take to turn my idea into an actual thing.

By the time we got back out onto the moors with loaded pickup trucks..... the fog was gone.... the sky, blue, the grass, yellow and dry..... the fencing, knackered.

We had three stretches of fencing to repair.... mostly where cars had careered off the road, onto the moor and continued up the hills with their unspoken momentum......  

Twelve metres of fencing here.... another five here..... ten there......

Removing the c-shaped nails that hold the mangled fencing to broken fenceposts......

Recycling that which was fit to reuse.

knocking new posts in

Pulling wires and fencing, hither and thither to make everything taught, straight, and as tidy as it could be.

Using tools like "post knocker", a "flamingo". "fencing pliers".... all new terminology that i was unaware of, just this morning.

During lunch i attempted to identify some springy turfy mossy stuff that i was sitting on..... i deduced it was some sort of "hypnum" of which there are various iterations.....  just out of curiosity, i used an "app" on my phone to see if it could offer me a second opinion, which it gladly did.....  "springy turf-moss", apparently, who would've guessed that?

Here's a little taste of the office for today - in fact this was our lunch spot....

bund or bust

Been out on the moors looking for bunds.....

I know, right?

Bunds?  I can hear you all asking.....

So, essentially, these are crescent shaped pieces of moorland that have been scraped to create a raised structure.

On the uphill side of the crescent a pool of water will collect......

On the downhill side where most of the material was scraped from, there's a shallow hollow that also retains some moisture.

Set amongst a backdrop of 99.9% Molinia grass, which is tinder dry, monoculture, the habitats created by the bunds reinvigorate the moorland and increase habitat and wildlife diversity.

Amongst the sights today, there were mosses, cotton grass, frogspawn.... you get the idea.

The rub.....

The bunds were created by contractors under instruction and "we" as in the National Trust (who i am currently volunteering with) do not have a record of how many, or where the bunds are.... they have a quadrant drawn on a map to say where they were created, but that's just a block.

Imagine a fire on the moor, and someone needed to go up there to deal with the fire, then these structures will eventually be hidden beneath the lush undergrowth (say that in your best David Bellamy impersonation).  So, it would make sense to at least have a map of them to avoid any nasty surprises and/or pitfalls whilst traversing the area in or on whatever mode of transport is required.

Ok, so we had a GPS tracker and we went out to locate and mark the bunds..... i figured there'd be like fifteen of them and we'd be back home for lunch......

Ninety bunds and six miles later, having slipped, tripped, fallen, sunk, draped, and hobbled, and shimmied across a million tussocks of Molinia......  back to the truck and homeward bound.

I omitted to take many photos today, mainly because it actually was a lot of work.....  but here's something to look at... frogspawn mate, in a bund, surrounded by Molinia..... the gift that keeps on giving.

I know, right?  Animation, too!

church

Church or chapel?  Chapel or church?

Weird thing happened today.... as we were driving along..... Dawn was driving.... and I asked her.....

"What IS the difference between a church and a chapel?"

And we started to discuss it briefly..... we figured the words "methodist" and "presbyterian" might be involved somewhere along the line, but we both agreed that neither of us actually knew the difference.....

As we were thinking about it..... i was doing th thousand yard stare out the windscreen and i catch, out of the corner of my eye, Dawn is waving to someone driving in the opposite direction.....  All i see is a flash of blue and the moment is gone.

"I've no idea who that was" exclaimed a puzzled Dawn.

For a brief moment my mind returns to the church question, and suddenly my subconscious wakes me up and i blurt out the word "Simon".

The car in question, travelling the other way to us was a young lad who i used to work with and it was his mum who was waving at Dawn.......

How would Simon's mum know Dawn was coming in the opposite direction so readily as to be able to spot and wave to us in that split second?

Dawn's car used to belong to her.... that's how!!

Mystery solved......

When Dawn texted Simon's mum to explain why we'd both looked so gormless as she frantically waved to us..... The church/chapel question.... well, it turns out we're not the only ones who don't know the difference.....

If you're anything like me, you'll have already headed across to your favourite search engine like Bing, or Ask Jeeves, and you'll have posed that same question......

Best answer I can give......

Church seems to be about the people (the congregation)

Chapel seems to be about the building which may be more multi-purpose than a church

And that, as they say, is a wrap.......

Here's a picture i took from one of my local "haunts" you can see.... left to right........  Masts at Pole Moor..... Worts Hill (or Cornish Pasty Hill as we know it)...... M62 and Scammonden Bridge.... you may spot Stoodley Pike in the distance..... and then back to looking over Outlane.....

Had a pretty productive day.....

Knocked down a shed (intentionally).

Moved a compost bin.

Bit of shopping.

Wordle.

iDoku.

Sorted through a squillion emails.

Murdle (got stuck).

Wrote my haiku for yesterday's challenge (see below).

Soul, falling upwards.

Plunging ascent, crash into….

mercurial sky.

Here's a photo for Saturday.... i give to you.... the European Common Frog.  Thank you..... and thanks everyone that took time out to have a go at yesterday's writing challenge.... i love reading them.

fri-yay!

Dunno why i am cheering for Friday.... the days are all the blooming same when you're a lady of leisure like what i am. these days!

Laid in bed a bit this morning and played a bit of Pokemon (this is not a euphonium).

Got up.... late!

Made a coffee....

Opened the front door to realise how cold it is outside..... stepped out to check the letterbox..... trood in hen muck......  

Changed me socks.....

Got wrapped up and had a wander round the garden (which looks like a disaster zone - the dog and chickens have really taken their toll on it this winter, as they always do..... it'll survuve) using my app to decipher any number of plants that are presenting themselves in very early stages of spring renewal..... amongst the highlights (but highly dubious identification) are:

• Koromiko
• Orange Ball Tree (i know this is right cos i grew it from a cutting i took)
• Japanese Andromeda
• Fringe Cups (which I claim is a heuchera)
• Mexican Orange
• Gossamer Grass
• Boxleaf Honeysuckle
• Japanese Spindle Tree
• Dusty Miller
• Primrose (100% in agreement)

.... and this is what google says they should all look like according to their "identification".....

But, as always..... i am procrastinating again.....

And so..... let's get down to brass tacks...... as promised, here it is, without further ado, and without hesitation, repetition, or deviation, i bring to you....

Friday writing challenge #3

Here's a photo..... using this photo as a prompt, please gimme a 50 word story, or a haiku... (i'd love to have them in my comments but feel free to take this away and use it for your own blog piece)

As usual, i'll give anyone a chance to create, and i'll post my version tomorrow so as not to influence anyone.....  knock yourselves out.

'ere, Mosschops!

 There used to be a cartoon about a dinosaur called Mosschops....  I don't have much memory of it.... I know I saw it and it was pretty adorable, but that's about all I can member.

Been on the moors again up at old Snoopy's... the Old Pennine Way.... bouts of sunshine interspersed with snow pellets....

Started the day at the car park slash layby..... as we rolled up there was a council owned waste truck there..... I figured they were there to collect the litter that was strewn all around the parking spaces from fly-tippers, day trippers, cannabis farmers, shaggers, and picnickers.  They weren't.

Our leader for the day went across to talk to the council workers and they agreed to help if we helped litter pick the area and they would also take the bagged up waste with them.... which was a pretty good deal for us......

Fingers were cold.... in fact frozen....... numb..... and the black bin bag i was toting around to collect the detritus, was billowing in the wind .... we moved pretty quickly, and before you know it, we'd loaded what we could onto the council wagon and off they went.....

We did another couple of laps and went a bit deeper into the moor, away from the car park, scooping up cardboard boxes, a dressing gown, a bottle of ketchup, and an air-fryer........  people are so weird.

Litter pick finished...... more paving slabs were lifted, packed and re-laid back on their new beds to raise them above the water level of the bog pits.

Probably lifted one or two slabs that were a bit too heavy and my back is.... toast.

Saw some Northern Fir Moss (quite rare).... a couple of frogs (my app says European Common Frog) - had lunch, seated amongst the mossy hummocks, got covered in snow.... sweated, grunted, swore, and finally made it to finish time.....

I know I've done some work today.

snow joke

Snow pellets... a little bit different to hail.... I'd say hail is made up of tiny ice balls, but the weather today was much softer than that, like polystyrene balls that rolled along the ground upon landing and almost instantly dissolved like snowflakes would on your tongue..... intermittent bursts of sunshine and blue skies mingling with silver, grey clouds tipping snow pellets at forty-five degrees in the wind.

It wasn't unpleasant walking conditions.... but that was easy to say cos the weather was coming from behind me.... I wouldn't have wanted to be walking headlong into it. 

The dog thought otherwise, and regularly jumped like someone or something had nipped her arse.  On the whole she was pretty good on the walk apart from her reactivity as the same dog passed us twice in different directions, attached to a jogger.  The dog's reaction to other dogs while she is attached to a lead, is generally, embarrassing.  This was no exception to that rule.

Having recently acquired a book about mosses, i figured I'd keep my eyes open for some examples that i might be able to identify.....

I found a feather moss of some description.... a grimmia.... some sort of fancy lichen......  found that the identification book was, perhaps, not as easy to use as i first thought it might be..... persevere! **

and in other news, today, our group photo of the work we did yesterday on Marsden Moor made its way into the little weekly newsletter.... infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy!

and in other other news..... both our vehicles seem to be "buggered" at the moment.....  not great timing, but then when would it be?

** having just gone back to the book and looking at a photo, i think i identified Ceratodon Purpureus - Redshank, to give it a colloquial name.

ouch

It's a well known fact.... i've got a glass back.

All this lifting, shoving, heaving, and general humping of tools and bags and stones and swinging of mels and mattocks and spades..... it's bloody hard graft. It's harder graft than anything i've done in the last four or five years.....

Today, out on a patch of land they call "Snoopy's" - i failed to ask why - we were.... oh god, now i start to think about it, it's hard to describe.......

The scene:
The OLD Pennine Way, somewhere above Marsden.....
The path is "slabbed" or "paved" if you prefer to call it that?
The peat and the bogs have made some sections of the path become submerged in water, and when it's really wet, you completely lose the path.

The mission:
Drag, by hook or by crook, a composite, pre-built walkway, out and onto the path, to a section where the path crosses what is described as the "Cotton Famine Road". **
Once we get the walkway out there, we need to assemble a set of tools to work with.
Once we have the tools and the walkway we need to start lifting some of the slabs, packing them underneath with a range of moorland vegetation and relaying the slabs on top, thus lifting the height of the path by six to eight inches, so it's hopefully above the high water level.
Once the slabs are raised, we need to install the walkway on the worst section, so it spans the fully submerged, enormous paving slab.

Sounds like a piece of piss, dunnit?

Fking hell them slabs are heavy, and the way the moorland sucks them down towards the centre of the earth, is like no force you've ever had to counteract before.

Well, we did it.... think we probably reset four slabs either side of the worst ginormous bugger that sits in the black peat stained swamp. so dark that it was, at times, a struggle to see where to put your feet so you didn't fall off the edge and disappear into the abyss.

We lifted, crowbarred, slid, spun, tilted, slipped, slopped, whacked, dug, grunted and swore (a lot - well, that was mainly me..... i admit it) and eventually, we'd done it......

I often say, that i've never had a finished product.... nothing tangible about my work..... just magnetic stripes on a disk, or numbers on paper..... i've not built a house, or planted trees, or made a pond.....

So.... today is one of the very few bits of my existence where something has been done with immediately visible, improved results.

I give to you, a photo of the finished walkway.... I did some of that! (give you a bit of context here..... the walkway is three metres long..... so look at those slabs that we had to dig out and relay..... honestly it's enough to make you want to crawl into that bog and just lie down......



** a very knowledgeable guy called Pete informed me that the track running off to our side, joining the old Pennine Way, was a Cotton Famine Road... he explained about the American Civil War and stuff, and I was pretty amazed..... basically all these poor buggers in our parts ran out of work during the Cotton Drought, so they sent them up on the hills to make paths/roads that didn't really go anywhere...... just to give them something constructive to do.... you can read about it if you want? Any interested party can find our handywork, around point 7 on the map.

strongbow

There must be a corelation......

Litter, in the form of tin cans, predominantly falls into a couple of camps......

Booze & not-booze.

Booze: largely strongbow dark fruits, fake fruit flavoured fake cider.

Not-booze: majority is discarded energy drink cans..... Monster is a firm favourite, as is Red Bull.  (other brands are available and they all taste like shit).

So, a couple things strike me....

What is it about the countryside that makes people want to drink Strongbow Dark Fruits and then chuck the can in the grass?

If i'm drinking energy drinks, you'd think i had the energy to walk to the bin and put the empty can in it?

All these kinds of thoughts keep me awake at night......

Anyhow.... spent my first Monday doing something resembling work since..... well, since..... 24th January......  That was the day we were unceremoniously called to the boardroom to be told.... in no uncertain terms......

"get your wages from the government and give us your keys.... the place is shut".

it's almost enough to make me drive out on the moor and start drinking fruity cider......

Instead, i'm on the moor hoovering up bags full of empty cans and cannabis farms.........

here's a little patch we did today..... probably just over half a mile stretch for mebbe 20 bin liners full of crud and some pieces of cars.  Up Wessenden Head, somewhere between Meltham and Marsden (for reference purposes before we went to Jopes to chuck some grass see on the reprofiling work we'd been doing previously.

sink

 Gotta go in the office tomorrow (the one where i volunteer) to see what is on the agenda for the upcoming week.......

Scope out a few jobs, walk through some scenarios, generally get a grip?  I've no idea what to expect, and I imagine it'll be the very first step back into what would, in the old days, have felt like "work".

Mondays?  I don't do Mondays!!

It's a trap and i fell into it.... sooner or later i know i'll have to get back to the grindstone..... just hoping that i can possibly carry on my unbeaten streak of only doing jobs that i love and then getting paid to do the same thing.... seamless transition.... that's what NORMALLY happens to me.

Somehow i feel like my synchronisation is failing......

We've got vehicle issues at the moment.... with both our aged machines.  It's throwing me out.

One minute I'm volunteering Tuesday and Thursday, and the next it looks like i might be switching to Monday, Tuesday......

We've rearranged the dog walker to come Thursdays when the dog spends the day with Dawn in the office, but it's looking like i might be at home again on Thursdays......

Just feels a bit like everything's in freefall and i am waiting for it to sort of land and, like a game of pick-up-sticks, try to make sense out of the jumble once the sticks have all stopped moving..... i've never been good at plucking them out of the air while they're mobile, and besides, i am sure it's against the law/rules.

In other news....

Today i finally got round to baking the scones that i had to by "cutters" for.... and i made them vegan, and despite them looking a bit "pale", they were light, fluffy, and actually tasted alright...... i'll spare you the photos cos they'll just look boring, but if i make a more "grammable" version soon, i'll certainly show and tell.

Ordered a book about moss and stuff..... bromphydes or whatever the actual name is.... ok, i looked it up..... it's, come on, say it with me now....... bryophytes!  It's a big group of plants that includes such exciting things as moss, hornworts, and liverworts.....  David Bellamy, eat your heart out!

took some photos of some moss and stuff but have not yet tried to identify them and have not yet received the book with which to do so.

Walked the dog, made some tea, went to a shop......  tried to go to the pub but the vehicle said "no".

here's some moss..... see if you like it?

(possibly wall screw moss OR redshank.... i am not good at this game, YET)

And to round off what i started yesterday, with regards to the number of vodka bottles found in a 100 yard stretch of grass verge..... the answer was thirty two.... yes, thirty two vodka bottles..... there were some wine and beer bottles too, and there were some vodka bottle over in the field with the sheep which i didn't get around to collecting or counting...... but thirty two per one hundred yards...... over two carrier bags full.....

if you...

 Ever wondered how they get triangles from a cow, you need butter, milk, and cheese, and an equilateral chainsaw!

Thus spake half man half biscuit.

What a lazy-arse start to my day.... Dawn's busy hoovering, cleaning, generally titivating the house.... while i just catch up with a video game, have a look at my national insurance contributions (making sure i ain't left too many holes), picked a few socks up....

Oh.... yes..... i forgot this bit......

There's this woman, walks up and down Outlane every day.... Eileen, I think she's called.  Never without a litter picker in her hand....  pretty much does the main road every day.... she's very active, and very much appreciated by the community.  However, just off Eileen's round..... it's business as usual......

Marsden Gate - one of the worst roads for casual littering.

Slack (the old Roman fort) as it disappears beneath the motorway, provides a spot where people must hang out, drink energy drinks and consume their takeaway foods..... could think of better places to picnic..... but what do i know?

Anyways.... i generally keep my eye on Slack and go pick some litter up there occasionally, so off i set.......

It's mebbe 200 yards down the road to the golf course and 200 yards back again......

On the way down.... piece of cake..... now the grass and the cow parsley, nettles, and brambles are all at a low ebb, the litter is visible and accessible, and i do ok....

On the way back up it's a different story.....

Vape juice bottles, energy drink cans, lucozade bottles, and vodka bottles.... i mean..... so many vodka bottles i've made them into small piles and i'll have to go back and collect them in my own glass bin and take them down the recycling point..... less than a mile away, still in the village, by the White Swan pub.

Someone REALLY loves drinking vodka..... i'll try and remember to get a photo when i go pick them up..... for a 200 yard section of road, it's pretty terrifying..... someone is pounding their liver into submiussion.

And, if they're reading this..... leave the bottles at the roadside instead of chucking them into the undergrowth and i'll still collect them for you.... and please stop throwing them over the wall into the field with the sheep..... 

Thank you!

In more positive news..... this guy really tells a good story......  i enjoyed this video a lot..... (sent to me by my brother-in-law).....

and here's my haiku for yesterday's writing challenge....

Finders, keepers, yeah?

Assuming it's worth having.

Losers aren't weeping!

fry day

Friday... it always feels like i should be treating myself to a "chippy tea".....

New Fridays in the new world order are my day of leisure.... in fact, today is a day of admin.... I've sorted through a billion emails, shoved some money one way then the other way and invariably ended up with nowt.  Filled in a few forms.... carried some paperwork from one bit of the house to another bit of the house..... you know the sort of thing.

Well.... I DID say I was gonna try and see if i can keep the Friday theme going...... so here's a picture to inspire.....

 Friday writing challenge #2

here's a photo..... using this photo as a prompt, please gimme a 50 word story, or a haiku... (I'd love to have them in my comments but feel free to take this away and use it for your own blog piece)

my response will be in tomorrow's blog

fire

There were fires on the moors yesterday - the smoke was billowing down through the village of Outlane by about 2pm.  Fire engines screaming up the road followed shortly after.....

The land on fire wasn't owned by the National Trust (the group with who I am currently volunteering) but it was quite close.....

Rumour has it that some lads were challenged by a local landowner for riding their motorbikes across the moors, so they returned to burn his land.....  they lit three fires going across the hills between Marsden and Holmfirth way.

Don't quote me on that but it's as plausible as any other theory I've heard.

We have observed, while out there on the hills, how dry everything is at the moment, and it's definitely approaching "fire season".....

Anyways.... the fires were out pretty efficiently.....  Yorkshire Live did their usual hack-job of reporting it....

So, today, back out litter picking.....

First up the A640 a few miles from my house.  More cannabis tips, tyres, tin cans, bottles of piss, bits of cars, wet wipes.... and of course a spent, disposable barbeque.... <shudders>

Then an afternoon in a blistering hot polytunnel, planting sphagnum mosses......  i don't know mosses very well yet, but i can tell you the codes we were using then i'll endeavour to find the names and some pictures......

Squar - squarrosa?

Cap - capillifolium?

Sub - subnitens?

Pap - papillosum?

Pretty knackered today..... gonna enjoy an easy Friday, catching up on some admin and probably looking for paid work. 

Quote of the day: "I now think i've got  favourite moss!" - Declan

Not my picture today (for a change) but here's a nifty graphic that always makes me smile.... it's something called "desire paths" and i always remember this story.......  at Microsoft (back in t'day) there was a big grassy area outside Bill Gates' office windows..... he used to watch the people who followed the circuitous footpath as it wended its way around the outside, but would readily select those who followed their own desire paths and take shortcuts across the area - maybe true/untrue but i always love a desire path.  Hope this makes you chuckle as much as it makes me chuckle.

ten minutes

t's a ten minute drive into Huddersfield for me.

I've gotta go the jobcentre for half past ten, so i give myself plenty of time, and leave the house at quarter to ten..... i try to grab a free parking space round the Greenhead Park area so i can enjoy a leisurely walk into town and if i am early, maybe I'll sign up for a library card.

can't find a parking space.

drive round and round.... traffic lights and traffic everywhere......

drive round some more, find a spot, turn round, realise the spot is on yellow lines, turn round, turn round, disappear up a spout.....

eventually i get parked and it's a fair old walk into town......  it's now ten past ten and I've got twenty minutes to hot foot it across town.....

at one point i was at a pedestrian crossing waiting for it to start beeping..... just a cop car waiting at a red light and me waiting at a red light.....   i could just cross, surely, but you bloody well know the lights would turn green and the copper would tut and scowl at me......  turns out the crossing had been on green all the time and i must have looked like i was on crack.....

i need a wee now..... dashed into Wetherspoons. got stuck behind some guy walking down the very centre of the staircase, shambling from side to side clutching his bottle of ketchup.... eventually passed him and manage to get to the bathroom.....  coming out of the bathroom I have to do the dance round the same guy who is trying every chair for size at a table for four..... 

eight minutes to go.....

straight down the main street, round the corner..... get there at 10:28am just two minutes early..... ask the lady where to go and ushered to a central seating block....

made it.  It was more stressful than necessary.

signed on... had a nice meeting with the lass on the desk actually, she was very sympathetic to my plight.....

Total meeting time.... ten minutes.... of course!!

celebrated with a breakfast muffin and a coffee on the way back to the car.....

Here I am looking pitiful outside the "dole office"

road to somewhere

The road past my house, the A640, or New Hey Road as we like to call it.... it is quite a big road..... just to the west of where i live, there's number 1000 New Hey Road, so that gives you some idea of the size....

It runs from Huddersfield to Rochdale if that means anything to you.....

Between Yorkshire and Lancashire.....

Between kirklees and Greater Manchester....

It's a big old thing, and presumably (i'm too young to member) this road was a lot more important before the M62 came along and wended its way through the pennines?  You can pretty much tell this is true when anytime the M62 experiences problems, every man and his dog has to drive through here just to get to there.

Anyways..... i just want you to know it's a big road.

So today, apart from the task of filling a few potholes in a carpark at Buckstones (just up the road there)...... we set about litter picking.......  I love litter picking....

i work on the broken window principle, where, in case you're unfamiliar.....  imagine an old building.... lying empty at the corner of your street..... it's lain empty for a year or so and it's starting to look a bit overgrown, but largely it's intact....... then one night......  someone chucks a stone through a window...... well you know what happens next.... all the windows get broke, the roof tiles get stolen, the whole place gets vandalised, yadda yadda yadda..... it's an exaggeration, but you get the idea.....

So, in terms of litter, I like litter picking because I believe, firmly, that if someone visits an area that is clean and litter free, then they're less likely to think it's "ok" to wang their Costa coffee cup out the window when they've supped enough.....  and conversely if the place is a shit tip, then what difference will this old tyre make?  Not much!

I'll post a graphic to show the extent of our litter picking today but bloody hell, there's a lot of shit out on them moors.....

• Tyres (unceremoniously rolled down hills to give us something to do, in fetching them back up the hill)
• Cannabis farms
• Tin cans
• Nitrous oxide bottles and balloons
• Lots of cardboard
• Crisp bags
• plastic bottles
• Bits of cars

A whole HEAP of stuff was collected.... 

By the end of it, my arms were aching, and I have to admit I have lost a bit of faith in humankind..... and a little bit of my love of litter picking has temporarily been jaded.

Yellow strips are the litter picking areas with the annoying slopes where tyres had been rolled down..... and in red, the car park where the potholes were filled.  Big team effort to cover all that.... many hands.  Also, quite terrifying at times to be confronted by cars racing by while we're out there at the side of the road.....

We ought to be ashamed!

what goes around

You've heard me say... "I've walked the Calderdale way".

You've seen pictures of the logo of the Calderdale Way.....

Well.... just cos I walked it doesn't mean everyone walked it.... and of the whole fifty mile walk, Dawn missed three of the days..... so we're going out of our way to complete the missing sections.

The section in question today was the very first section we walked back in August....  in August it was hot, the days were long, and I had no idea about time, space, distance, or sun cream.

So, off we trotted, me, Dawn, and the dog......

Starting at Norland Moor, and walking to Cragg Vale.

Cold and windy start, along the edge of Norland Moor, and down the Old Bank into Ripponden.

Over the top and down to Mill Bank where we stopped by the river for something to eat.

Long climb up to the disused reservoir at Flints and across past the Operation Starfish remnants.

Traverse the ridge above the long drag of Cragg Vale before descending to the valley floor and collecting the car from the Hinchcliffe Arms.

Circa  eight miles across the valleys and hills of the south western section of the circular fifty mile circuit.

I found it quite easy today, but when we got back Dawn went and spent the rest of the day working in the garden.... I don't know where she gets the energy....  she did 31k steps today!

the route

the photos:

used

 used to hate Sunday evenings.....

The ticking of the clock, counting me down to bedtime, and the thought of another week with my nose to the grindstone.....

for the time being.... i'm bloody loving Sundays!

I got up and had a really lazy start to my day....  played some of my video game..... it's a weird game that keeps me "pecking" at the morphine dripper.... like one of them lab rats that eventually stops feeding and can only ingest more morphine - it's a really bad thing to play for that reason, but i play it, and that's that!  The more you peck, the bigger the rewards.... all be they virtual.  It's my one true vice just now.

Dawn was already out walking the dog, so by the time she got home and i was dressed in "playing out" clothes, she was already suspicious and i got the obligatory question... "where you going?"....

Into the garden!

bit of judicious pruning, weeding, checking the rat traps, checking on the wormery, the compost, filling up the brown bin......

Went to the tiny strip of land behind our house to trim the buddleia and pull out the annual bramble growth..... 

Went out to get some shopping for some upcoming cooking that i am promising myself..... i've got plans for a new batch of kimchi, some Indian lime pickle and of course, the scones, once the cutters arrive.

Got home with my shopping to find, despite being in the Chinese shop to buy a nice daikon (mooli if you prefer?) that Dawn's wanged my miso paste out, so i can't finish the kimchi recipe and i'll have to go score some more miso from somewhere first.

Lazy end to the day.... bit of telly and plans for a big walk tomorrow.....

have a good night y'all.... hope you don't have to clock-in tomorrow.....

here's a picture of an annoying collection of plastic detritus on an annoying barbed wire fence with the annoying M62 in the background.....