Autumn colours

This morning was a bit foggy but then it lifted to become another mild and sunny day. It has been unusually warm for this time of year for the past three days, but that is about to change.

The autumn colours are now peaking, today the woodlands looked really beautiful with all the colour on the trees. Apologies for yet another image of the autumn trees, but this PV is a bit different. I am sure I will take more photos of the colours this week as they won't last much longer now.

Last night Gavin spent hours - literally hours - booking flights for our holiday to South Africa next August. I have spent so much time over the past few weeks researching and planning the trip and so he did the flights for me, and today I was able to confirm everything. There will be ten of us on safari so it took much planning to get dates that agreed with everyone, and to make sure that the dog sitter was available then. But it is all done now so we can forget about it until next August.

I am slowly buying Christmas presents, another two have been bought but I still have a few more to get. Today when I was doing my grocery shopping I suddenly decided that I should make a Christmas cake this year - I had the list of ingredients on my phone as I was thinking of making one last week, but today when I saw that all the ingredients were in stock (which was not the case last week) I bought them. It's a Mary Berry recipe and requires you to soak the dried fruits in sherry for three days before you bake the cake, so the fruit has been chopped up where required and is now soaking, ready to bake on Thursday. I always used to bake a Christmas cake every year then stopped doing it as no one ate it, but this year I thought I will take it with us to Switzerland when we go for New Year and I am sure the boys will be keen to eat some after a day of skiing. I can't eat it as it contains gluten but it is not my favourite thing so won't bother with a GF version. Waitrose sell very good GF slices of Christmas cake so I can always get that if I want.

Tonight is another print competition at our camera club, its the annual Three of a Kind competition. I printed mine as triptychs rather than having three separate prints and they look rather small in the  mount!