主播大秀

It's been a while, sorry. It seems two out of every three bloggers come from Lewis, so time to redress the balance.
Outside our kitchen window (which I don't look out of that often, as I have delegated most of the washing up) are some blackberry bushes. We have been anticipating the fruit for some time, and were a bit worried when we headed south for a week (last year I made a chair, this year I managed a spatula (no pic)) that they would have gone by the time we returned, but no, they were still there in their redness. Because I was washing up for a week (he was detained by his mother, she had 'one or two wee jobs needing doing') I spotted some black fruit and once all the dishes were clean, I took one outside and made it dirty again, though not very, as there weren't really that many fruit. In fact, when I went out every day I only got a small handful of fruit each time. But never any from less than one foot up or any in view of the sky. I am sharing my blackberries with the hens and the starlings! Having spent a long time planning blackberry dishes I headed off on my (his) bike to get some extra unhenpecked fruit. I headed for the village and used the uphills as an excuse to stop and pick berries. This bike was cheap from the Argos returns place and has suspension. Our roads aren't bad enough to need it now, but it doesn't have an off button. So when I'm not sitting on the seat it looms high up above the pedals and is nearly impossible to get my leg over, I almost need a mobile mounting block! As soon as I lower my slim lithe figure (very little truth in that description) the seat drops so much my knees take turns being level with my ears. It has 21 gears, except the top 7 aren't available, something needs tweaked (hit with a hammer) so I can pedal in top very easily but can't build any speed up downhill yet. I'm scared to tweak (hit with hammer) it because a) it isn't my bike b) so far the chain hasn't come off and I've done nearly ten miles, which must be some kind of a record.
So the blackberrying still wasn't that successful. I went the other way up the road, without the bike but with the dogs. Now if there is a blackberry 'hedge' it will have two sides, so having picked all I could reach from the roadside I climbed the gate to get at the other side. In this field are some miniature shetlands, it is an enormous field, but they are curious and they had walked along with me when I was on the roadside. In the field they got interested in the dogs. The white one likes running, so as they chased after him he ran up the rocks and kept his distance, but the black one didn't like that game. She dashed back out of the field and followed me along the road. Trouble was, the field is a lot lower so I couldn't see her. Every time a car came along (twice) I had to re-assure the driver the dog wasn't abandoned. Drivers feel silly talking to blackberry hedges. With no dogs to chase the ponies had to settle for following me and observing, or trying to help. It was a bit like an obscure dance where everybody weaves in and out in a very complicated pattern as every good bit with lots of berries had a pony in front of it. I got a lot of blackberries, but I think I may have taught the ponies to eat blackberries so there may be none left when I go back.

Or something similar. I recently had a birthday. I like birthdays; cards and cake and presents, and when it is my birthday I don't have to remember about the cards and cake and presents because that is everybody elses job! Actually this birthday was marked by a distinct absence of cake. Which was a pity because it was a significant birthday, mathematically speaking, being a perfect square, which makes arranging a large number of candles easier. (Next year there will be a zero at the end and I'm going to get some Roman numeral candles (well, just one) as a hint about the cake.)
My Gran's birthday is next weekend and it is very significant, being a perfect square, and having two zeros at the end, so major celebrations are planned. (I have to go away again, so there will be a blog-break I'm afraid) I started to wonder when she would be twice as old as me. Once I would have done this in my head in an instant but I'm slowing down now, and if it doesn't fit in a sudoku grid it takes a while. It slowly dawned on me that she would be twice as old as me not once but twice (fingers crossed and God willing). This is only slowly becoming intuitive, as, armed with a piece of scrap paper and a pen that works, I drew a schematic and worked out the twice-as-young bit happens between my next birthday and hers (all 18 days) and again in 2010 after her birthday and through 2011 until mine. Since then I've been practising on the rest of my family; I was half as old as my mother before and after my wedding, but not actually for it. I was twice as old as my sister on her first birthday and again after my fourth (her birthday is the day before mine, I always thought of it as a practise run, and there was always lots of cake when we were kids). And now I'm going to send my CV to CERN and get a job as a number-cruncher because I'm back up to speed with figures again!