Dad

Today would have been my dad’s 92nd birthday.

This picture was taken in 1947 in Malta.

He had some lovely tattoos including a rosette with my name in it. He was a work of art, my dad.

Perigee moon

Did you see it last night? What a beautiful sight. I love the moon and January’s full moon is otherwise known as the wolf moon.

The native Americans named it for the hungry wolves that would howl outside their villages on the bitterly cold January nights.

Perigee means that the moon is closer to the Earth than at any other time in the year.

And as an added bonus we got to see Mars. I got far too excited about it, but it isn’t often we get to see our next door neighbour so clearly in the sky is it?

While I’m here can I direct you to this excellent post “The ten most annoying things authors do."

http://toldyouiwasill.blogspot.com/2010/01/ten-most-annoying-things-authors-do.html

Well worth a read.

100 Stories for Haiti

I haven’t been in Blogland much recently. It’s been a couple of weeks of colds, coughs, poorly children and not-so-great-me. But you don't want to hear about that.

I’ve been reading a lot and watching a lot of news programmes until I couldn’t bear to watch any more. I’m talking about Haiti of course.

Then yesterday I stumbled across this http://www.100storiesforhaiti.org/

Greg McQueen had the brilliant idea of gathering 100 stories to be published as an e-book, all proceeds to the Red Cross.

It’s a book I’ll definitely be buying.

Deadline for submissions has been extended to midnight Wednesday 27th January - wherever in the world you are.

Carnage

Have you noticed how often on news programmes they refer to “carnage on the roads” when talking about roads filled with abandoned vehicles or a couple of dented cars?

Drives me nuts. Carnage to me conjures up pictures of bloody battlefields, piles of corpses, mass slaughter and the like.

Is it part of our living language that the use of the word is changing or just sloppy use of English? Why not chaos on the roads?

We walked to Iceland this morning – the shop not the country – and stocked up a bit. It’s about a four mile round trip.

We went via the seafront which was bitingly cold as you would expect.

I only took a couple of photos. The two lighthouses are known as the Leading Lights. In days of old mariners would line up the two lights one above the other and know they were on the safe passage into the harbour.

You can see the black sky in the east. It’s brought more snow. Thank you sky, that’s just what we needed, more flipping snow.

And snow on the beach, you don’t see that very often.

It was nice watching people sledging down the slopes on everything from carrier bags to inflatable mattresses. Teenage girls wrapped in bin bags, bald men with red heads and no hats and kids having so much fun, but no I wasn’t tempted to join them.

Snow Point Worrying

I was going to declare this blog a snow-free zone, but what else is there to talk about right now?

Certain newspapers are full of doom and gloom, but since there’s nothing we can do about it let’s just enjoy it as best we can.

The dogs certainly are. Indy buried his head in the snow and dug holes while Tilly ran through it.

And just in case you aren’t sick enough of it, here are some pictures. It was -5 degrees and the camera didn’t like it.

Keep warm!

Snow!

I knew this was coming. By looking at the weather forecast? No the herons told me. I knew when I saw their dark shapes huddled in the fields like an undertaker’s convention (not that undertaker’s have conventions in fields as far as I know) that bad weather was coming.

I knew also because Tilly kept sitting on my head in bed and wrapping herself cat-like round my legs out of bed. She normally only does that in the case of fireworks/thunderstorms.

So as if you haven’t already seen enough of the stuff, here’s some more.

I am so glad I bought those coats for the dogs.

So here’s Tilly proving that she doesn’t really mind the snow, Indy showing that he never minded it anyway and a picture of the eastern sky.