Refreshment break

It was an unexpectedly bright day today, though still cold. At intervals through the day I thought about going up to the owl field, but I really wanted to get  Lightroom working on the new Mac, and all my files transferred - and also, to be honest, I didn't fancy braving the muddy verges and the crowd of photographers I was sure would be up on the scarp this afternoon. So as soon as I'd set the backup running on my old Mac that I was intending to use for the file transfer, I took the macro out into the garden on a bug hunt.

I was relieved to discover that the early plumpies had survived the recent spell of vile weather, though not especially surprised because I know they like to shelter in crevices in our old walls, which must be quite protective. One year they even came through a fall of snow. However, after being stuck in their roosts for days the boys were desperate to check every square metre of the garden for females, which made them pretty hard to photograph, and in the end I had to stake out the sweet violets in the secret garden and simply wait for them to run out of energy. Their need to refuel eventually got me a few shots.

When I showed the Boy Wonder my first plumpie of the season - which now I look at it again is probably better than this image, despite being taken with a long lens rather than a macro - we had a really nice chat about our yellow-faced bees. He commented on the fact that the one in the photo was putting its long tongue into the flower to drink the nectar, and then queried, "Tongue...?" "Yes," I replied. "It has got another, complicated name, but you're right: that is its tongue." "Could we do that?" he asked. "Do we like drinking nectar?" I said I'd never tasted any, and I thought it would be difficult for me to get my tongue into a tiny flower - indicating the size of a violet with finger and thumb, and sticking out my tongue so he could see the problem. Besides, I said, I thought nectar was best left for the insects that need it - after all, we have lots of things we can eat, but they only have nectar and pollen. He laughed and said, "We don't like pollen, do we? No!" - but he still seemed quite taken with the idea of drinking nectar, until it occurred to him that he might put his tongue into a flower only to discover that there was a bee already in there, and that this might make the bee cross. Which we agreed would perhaps be a bad idea. 

(I may wait until the Boy's older before I tell him the story about the wasp that landed on me one summer day when I was maybe seven or eight, and having been told that the important thing to do with wasps is to stay completely still until they get bored with you and go away, I sat stock still while it walked all round my face and up inside my nose.)

After I'd completed my safari I went back to my desk in some trepidation, wired up my Time Machine disk to the new Mac, and told it to copy over all my files. This took several hours, but at about 7pm the machine rebooted, and when it started up again everything was exactly where I expected it to be. Flushed with success, I risked uploading today's photo files, and Lightroom zipped through them so fast I could barely believe what I was seeing. The only thing I mourn from the old system is the 27" screen - working on 24" will take a bit of getting used to - but otherwise I'm very happy (and truthfully, very relieved).