Winter bud

I couldn't have asked for a more inviting, manageable Tiny Tuesday challenge: go outside, and find something! It's what I do all the time - I'm not much of an indoor photographer and rarely have the time or patience to set things up, I just like going for walks or wandering round the garden and looking at things. It proved a bit more challenging than I hoped, as wind and low light made it difficult to achieve sharp focus, particularly on the old camera with its maximum ISO of 1600 (the only setting on which I could take anything by three o'clock this afternoon). However, as soon as I stepped out of the house I was surrounded by lichen encrusted hawthorn twigs and tiny buds on almost every hedgerow tree, so there was plenty to look at even if most of the photos are already deleted. I kept this one, although I should have liked more of it to be in focus, because I like the soft wintery colours. 

J and I had a leisurely start this morning, a luxury we can enjoy when her PAs are not here, so we had brunch. P cooked little fried potatoes for us, some of our tasty but small crop, and we enjoyed them with the fresh eggs from our neighbours, which are always wonderfully tasty. Then, once J was settled at her computer writing her Christmas thank you messages with her switch and Grid 3 software then pasting them into Facebook messenger, I enjoyed coffee and a bit more of my new book. J gave me George Orwell's Coming up for Air, which had been on my wish list since I heard bits of it serialised on Radio 4 a couple of years ago. I read a lot of Orwell in my late teens, but not this one, and in the early chapters I'm enjoying the perceptive portrait of shabby middle class life in late thirties Britain. After my walk, we returned to the animation and re-shot the first sequence, this time with stable light and colour. It's better than before, but I didn't do well at making hedgerow twigs blow in the wind - they were too prone to tangling with each other, so that a tiny movement of one led to a big jerk in another and lots of unwanted jiggling. I think the next sequence will be a little easier; I'm not sure if we'll embark on it tomorrow. Now, I'm back beside the fire. It's been pleasant, slow-moving day and I've enjoyed it.