Category: Challenges
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Exuberance
Oh! The peonies are out in full floral abundance, this morning. Acquired as tightly wrapped buds from the grocery store, as one does, they sat in water along with the luscious-smelling stocks, and gradually began to unveil themselves. When I came down this morning, all I could think of was: exuberance! Behold, world, this is…
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Challenging joys
So yesterday I finished printing all of the programmes for our exciting concert presentation on Saturday. It was a labour of love throughout the day, which mostly involved wrestling with the wireless connection to the printer, orientating the paper so that the marginless printing worked as expected, and regular ink replenishment, until 167 copies of…
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Tearing Apart and Tidying
These days, as we’ve been dealing with all the ramifications of major kitchen renovation, we’ve been veering between delight and despair. Sometimes you have to catch the smallest possible unit of hope, in these times, and that’s what I’m trying to do just now as I contemplate the demolished, flattened and neatly stacked set of…
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Advice that makes sense . . .
I’ve borrowed a clipart image from the blog of fellow Canadian Mobashar Qureshi, who relates that two salient words of advice have kept him going: Keep Writing. Indeed. Through all the tribulations of searching for an agent, hunting down independent publishers, after having ventured into the murky realm of self-publishing on the big platforms (Amazon/KDP), and then…
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When a gate is not an entrance but a barrier . . .
The strong steel gate in our new-to-us driveway has served primarily as a barrier, to keep the friendly family dogs safely within the garden, over the past year. But it’s also been a barrier, or at least a huge hindrance even when fully open, to convenient entrance and egress by our ancient motorhome, Harry Hymer. And therein…
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Bright sunshiny day . . .
So Monday morning is our regular Men’s Coffee Morning at New Galloway Town Hall, and after finessing yet another file for the cheerful printer, I moseyed along down for a cup of coffee. I’d heard that the big heater in the lesser hall had been repaired (a bust fuse), and so I expected to be warmed…
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Sighs of relief . . . it’s fixable!
Our Harry Hymer, beloved classic Hymermobile of 1997 vintage, went in for its MOT last week, and failed. The issue was the accumulating rust around both front jack points, indicated on a 2020 model above. The integrity of the support structure was totally compromised, and it was not at all out of the realm of possibility that…
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Freeing the clocks . . .
Maybe it’s that time of life, the time when we all wonder how much we actually have left, or maybe it’s just a set of happy coincidences, or maybe it’s all part of my never-ending search for epiphanies, but for whatever reason, I am currently besotted with clocks. And the clocks that I’m [still] dealing…
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Cams, programs, switches and bongs . . .
For whatever reason, I’ve been identified locally as the guy who loves to fix things. Or let’s say rather, who loves to see things working correctly. I don’t mind work-arounds, not at all, but if the end result is that the thing is working and performing the function for which it was intended, I’m a happy guy.…
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Windmills in the clouds . . .
It was a misty morning, and there were icy patches on the tarmac as I hopped it down to the Men’s Coffee Morning. I thought, as I passed this scene, that it was quite remarkable, and then I realised that I’d better extract my iPhone and take a quick snap. Far across the valley of…
Roads to Joy 