Now there’s an attention seeking headline if ever I saw one………

February is the month I least like (whilst in the northern hemisphere – have to say it wasn’t too tough when I lived in Australia), dear Blog. The ONLY good thing about it is…….pancake day and erm….that I don’t have to do another tax return for at least a year.

Some things that have occurred during Februarys:

-1952 test drive for tv detector vans (Bad, Bad, Bad)

-1953 – sweet rationing ends (now there IS something positive about February after all).

-1965 Beeching plans for bloated railways (what CAN this mean?)

-1974 Americans end outer space marathon (did they beat all the other species in this race? Who came second? Or they just ended it because the Martians were winning?).

And finally:

-14th February – my charming sister was born. HAPPY BIRTHDAY & Valentines Day! Lucky her? Not really. She doesn’t get two lots of presents on her birthday. Instead anyone who wants to buy her birthday flowers either doesn’t OR takes out 5 mortgages on their home to pay for the ‘Valentine Day’ rate. She doesn’t go out to dinner on her birthday else she is shoved between hordes of disappointed Valentiners looking over their partner’s shoulders for the next best thing to come along before next Valentine arrives.  Ah…..yes, lucky her!  Enjoy your day, sister.

What has happened since my last post:

-We had snow:

What this means is that by the time you’ve put on your three inner layers, jumper, sweatshirt, light jacket, waterproof jacket, body warmer, coat, hat, two scarves, two gloves, four pairs of socks and boots x you plus 3 buggers, you open the door and realise that it is in fact the middle of May.  We’ll have to practice and get our wrapping up faster for next year.

Snowfall here also means is that the snow covered sock-encrusted (Lidl Supermarket Dog – All eyes look toward YOU) doggy caca strewn across the garden is now hidden and readily waiting to be discovered and found within a snowball……….in some child’s eye.

-We’re on half term holiday

Yes – this is just awful. Who decided to make a February half term last two weeks?

WHO?

If I found out who this was, I would make one of the above mentioned snowballs and stick 5 down the inside of their coat and then wallop them on the back!     Not only is this holiday 2 weeks long – because we had 4 flakes of snow, the week before the schools broke up closed for two or three days JUST IN CASE…………

-The photography mania continues

Not just confined to cover my procastination with regards to putting off my tax return. Turns out, I have become slightly obsessed with all things photo. To the extent that after owning my camera for 8 years, I downloaded the instructions.

Inspirational.

But as I’m pretty thick, I cannot seem to absorb information about ISO and exposure blah blah blah and how they relate to each other.

I bought myself a tripod anyway and reckoned that I would be divinely inspired (aka if I press enough buttons on my camera and keep clicking say…….oh…..5000 times, one of my photos might be decent enough to sell for what? 5 million and then I can retire. You’ll never see a better and well thought out business plan than that and my tripod did only cost me 14 pounds (sterling…….. although my husband pointed out that this was 25 euros and then we had one of those discussions on FOREX where he becomes exasperated by my stupidity which means, in my eyes, that I’ve won).

I badly wanted to capture some stars…photographically.  I waited for a cloudless night, set up my tripod, made some random selections on my camera, opened my windows and then nearly died from cold so decided I’d better put the radiator on to warm up some of that antarctic (this window faces south after all) wind coming through.

Stars a plenty. It truly was a beautiful night.

The door opens and a shaft of light enters the room:

‘SHUT that door and don’t turn on the light!!!!’

I point the camera and click. Now, this is going to take some time to unclick as I’m on loooong exposure (yeah, that’s what I thought).

I hear shuffling, jeans coming off, jumpers coming off and then my underpant (and socks…..of course) clad husband tries to walk towards his side of the bed but he trips over my tripod leg and can’t get past.

‘what the hell are you doing?’

‘You have to wait until the photo has been taken.’

‘It’s February, I don’t have any clothes on and it’s freezing. Hang on…..is that radiator on?’

At this point, I quickly disassemble my tripod, shut the window and deny all knowledge of doing something so wasteful as to have an electric radiator on in the middle of winter, whilst the window was open and THEN……only THEN hear the click of my camera as the shot is taken.

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Ok, dearest reader(s)(?), my children think that it is not unreasonable to hang around me whilst I type, holding foodstuffs that they would quite like to eat for lunch.  As one of them can actually read, I shall stop and say, au revoir, leave me a comment, leave me a like (even …..ESPECIALLY, if you don’t like it) until next time.

p.s. Here is photo. Those blurry lights are stars. Impressed?  Well, look – it was either blurry stars of a photo of my husband falling into the tripod…..half naked….and it wouldn’t have been blurry!