Category: Uncategorized

While walking the dog yesterday, I saw and heard an unusual bird. My mind had to make mental leaps and jumps to get there, given the anomalous nature of it. I’m pretty sure it was a ring-necked parakeet. I’ve seen them in the south east where they are well established in large numbers, but to see one here was, well, unexpected.

I told a neighbour who got on the internet and told me they are in Bristol, so they have spread further afield.

From an ecological impact point of view, I’m not sure I want them setting up shop around here. I don’t know what effect they have on our native species. But then when does a naturalised species become native? Little owls are a good example as an introduced species. We have them around here and I like to see and hear them and think of them as native. Although, they are not a flocking species so aren’t as obvious as the parakeets are by a long shot.

As a post script, I’ve just had a look on BirdTrack, and a sighting of a ring-necked parakeet was recorded yesterday ten minutes up the road. So that pretty much accounts for the 5% of uncertainty for my sighting.

Looks like our cold snap is ending this weekend. The temperature this morning is above freezing although the ground is still hard. When we set off for our Saturday walk the air still felt rather ‘arctic’, but an hour later it’s noticeably less sharp, as Atlantic air becomes dominant.

It’s been nice to have the ground firmer under foot for walking but I think by the end of the weekend and the latest storm we’ll be back to muddy conditions. Discovered one wellie had a leak a fortnight ago, so have appreciated the new pair.

My morning walk with the dog, before I leave for work, still starts in the dark, or half-light, but now ends in daylight. This is an appreciated change in the length of day and starts to chip away at winter and what can often feel like a slog.

Looking back, it was late February last year that I wrote my second and last post about following the exercises in Live Like a Stoic. That’s because shortly after that the process fell flat.

I can’t recall the details precisely, but I know I couldn’t find the energy to maintain the habit. I say in that post that I was not going to be doing the exercises every day. Clearly I didn’t even manage a more relaxed regimen. I mention this because I want to have another go. And also I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ritual and my relationship to it.

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As an aside, knowing that this topic will require multiple posts, it occurs to me that I could insert forward/back links into each related post so that a reader could directly follow the thread. Not thought of this before.

OneDrive has been proving not reliable enough with Obsidian. I started noticing the odd discrepancy between notes on my phone and those on my Chromebook. Not good enough.

Yesterday I installed Syncthing on the Chromebook Linux container and that seems to be working much better. I’ve already got it set up on my phone and Raspberry Pi so it was easy to add another device.

Don’t know why I’d not done this in the first place. 😄

For the time being, I am going to use Obsidian for keeping notes about the photography. I like the cleaner look of it over TiddlyWiki. And running it via Linux on my Chromebook is a bit easier than using Tiddly Desktop. I have had some minor syncing issues but I don’t think that’s a significant problem, I think I’ve ironed those out.

The major issue for me will be NOT to get sidetracked into fiddling with the information system instead of dealing with the information itself.

If I’m going to progress and learn with my film photography it’s pretty obvious I need to keep good records. I am prone to getting carried away with the novelty of something only to discover, what with my memory being like a sieve, that I have trouble recalling the whens and hows of it all.

The nature of what I’m doing means there is no Exif data to hold records of individual shots. I make a note at the time through Google forms which goes into a spreadsheet.

For film processing (more on that another time) I need to keep notes so that I can repeat what I’ve done. Or tweak it or whatever. And I need to keep notes and reflections on what I’m doing so that I can learn. To these ends I have been keeping records in a Tiddlywiki.

I’ve used Tiddlywiki before and while it works well, I’ve been reluctant to use it more because notes are ‘locked’ inside the html file. I have an aversion to any system where the basic building blocks are locked behind a proprietary system or similar. This is why I have been using Obsidian for my notes and journaling, because everything is saved in text files.

Having said that, I presume you’d need Obsidian in order to make sense of the connections between notes even if they are readable as individual text files. That’s a question I need to answer. On the other hand, the benefit of the Tiddlywiki system is that it can be accessed from a browser. Which makes it pretty universal.

So I’m not sure…..

During my lifetime we have gone from reliably getting snow most winters to, around 1990, the occurrence dropping off very noticeably.

I ought to start recording when we get disrupted in our area by wet weather and flooding. Monday was pretty disruptive and tomorrow looks to be so again. It would be interesting to see if it increases in frequency over the years.

With significant flooding already on the Somerset Levels another load of rain tomorrow will no doubt make things worse.

Waiting outside last night for our dog to perform her final duties for the day, my torch beam caught a movement overhead. A barn owl flying slowly over the garden. Beautiful.

Our trusty bread maker died this week. I’m not sure how long we’ve had it for, but I’m sure it’s the best part of a decade. And at 2-3 loaves a week that’s a lot of bread. Plus bun loaf and pizza dough.