iMac by Candlelight

No, I'm not having a romantic dinner with my Mac, though I do love it so...

This morning's fog brought some gratifyingly cool weather for my first go on a horse in 11 years. The instructor was a hard taskmaster and kept me endlessly trotting around in the hope that I would eventually find 'la cadence'. There were a few brief moments of it almost feeling right, but mostly I was just bouncing around like a sack of potatoes.

Now of course everything hurts: calves, thighs, back, arms. To say nothing of the chafing. I might have to buy jodhpurs like Katherine's. At one point the instructor shouted out that I needed to ride bravely like my daughter. She was delighted when I told her that!

After a well deserved rest and a not insubstantial number of chocolate biscuits, I got out into the sunshine and potted up the rest of the plug plants I bought yesterday. The kids had another fun day at school, working on a not very secret present for parents - not very secret in that we're the ones who have to find the soap, cheese grater and silicon mould to put in the school bag (can you tell what it is yet?) and Katherine has her first proper homework, which we will have to struggle through tomorrow.

This evening brought a thunderstorm of such ferocity and sudden onset that even I was a bit freaked out. Inevitably the elecricity went out, and has been going off and on all night at annoying intervals. Conor was pretty frightened by the whole thing - and not just because it meant he couldn't watch the end of Spiderman. Now he's safely in bed with the shutters closed he says he'll be fine "so long as it's only thunder and no lightning Mammy". I guess that homeschool science lesson on weather didn't sink in quite as well as I'd hoped.

Of course I know I should have been out there to get some great shots - it was the dramatic kind of lightning- but ... well I was a bit scared.

Anyway, all that means you're not getting one of the fine shots trapped in my camera, but this rubbish shot of my safely unplugged Mac.