Where have I been and what have I been doing?

Always assuming you are at all interested of course!  Well since the weather improved Mrs E and i have been , gulp, gardening.  We have a reasonably big garden by modern house standards and it has a lot of shrubs all around the edges.  Since last years heart attack I had not really felt like doing much garden maintenance until this last month or so.  That was when I realised that if it was left much longer catching back up before the weather turns again was going to be a huge task.  So the last six weeks has seen us cutting back shrubs, grubbing out brambles and nettles and generally tidying up.  we have done about 30% of what really needs doing and to be honest I don't really enjoy it and I am reaching the stage of contemplating looking at the price of garden maintenance services.

It's been a funny old month as for the first time in the 35 years I have been a member of the Sealed Knot I didn't attend the August Bank Holiday event.  There were two other years where there were no ABH event to attend, during the Covid and Foot and Mouth restrictions but I don't count those.  I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I probably won't be a battlefield participant again as age creeps up on me (creeps, who am I kidding, some days it feels like its galloping towards me whooping and hollering!).  Instead I think I shall give SK event photography a go, and so I have dug out my digital camera and started to get to grips with all it's extra bells and whistles which my previous film SLR didn't have.  It's interesting to see how the world of film photography now seems rather restrictive, but it's restrictions have actually given me a good grasp on composition and the balance between exposure time, aperture and shutter speed.  Well when you only had 36 shots on a roll of film you couldn't waste them so you thought about that stuff before clicking the shutter release!  What is all new to me is the additional abilities digital cameras bring to the party and mine is a fairly basic bridge camera, Lord only knows what the expensive professional level kit can do!

In other news I have regained some of my missing painting mojo which went AWOL last October while I was recovering from my unscheduled cardiac event (TM pending).  Over the last couple of evenings I have completed 96 of Irregular Miniatures' 6mm Pictish Spearmen who had been gathering dust on the painting table since this time last year.  I don't know of anyone else who has these in 6mm so even though the spears are much to short, and I'm not going to cut out the spears and replace them anytime soon, they have now been based and stand ready to repel any passing Romans, Dal Raitian Scots, Saxons, Vikings, Strathclyde Welsh and even other Picts!

96 Picts, possibly in search of a cave and some small furry animals to groove with *.

* Its a Pink Floyd reference