When I married my lovely hubby I knew that out of all the men I had dated, he was like a mighty oak, compared to a bramble patch, that he would never let me down and he would always look after me, and he has. I didn’t really know anything at 22, who does! but I knew that.  We have weathered storms and enjoyed the sunshine and now we are reaping the benefits of a long life together, with deeper understandings of the other and a love that goes to the bottom of my soul.

Happy Anniversary darling xxx

It was time to stretch my legs today after a couple of days of being cooped up.  Oh how I love to breath the fresh Warwickshire air as I  trundle towards what in my opinion is the best spot in the world, new camera lens in hand, ready for the testing. I love that ancient wall so much, it is a wonderful place to rest against, deep in its shadow on the hottest of summer days.

Truliest the happiest of Happy Fields.

I’m a firm believer in share and share alike, so in that spirit may I give to you all, (if you haven’t heard of it before) Google Nik Collection. One thing I have learnt from the photography groups I belong to is that yes, you do have to get the image, that is the main thing above anything else, but then invariably a little tweaking goes on. There are a myriad of tools available to do this, Lightroom and Photoshop to name just two. I use a little bit of Lightroom to tweak, but not that much and well, Photoshop is just so complicated I’m not sure if I’ll ever master it.

So as I was bleating in a Woe is Me fashion at a meeting about my skill set, one of my fellow photographers suggested using Google Nik Collection which is now free and was apparently about £150.00  Okay I thought I’ll give it a go, what is there to lose.  Not much apparently. Teasel photograph, straight from the camera, black line at the top makes it quite unusable, unless your a photoshop guru, which I am not.  Disappointing. Until….A little play with the Google Nik Collection.  It is still not judge acceptable for competitions, but more than does the job for the blog.

Try it, it is a lovely tool.

While I was admiring the ducks waddling on the ice in their bright orange boots, I heard a splash behind me in the brook, as I whirled around I made eye contact with a lovely big Heron which by the time it took me to raise my camera was lifting off.

I make no apologies for the ropeyness of these shots, preferring to revel in the fact that I got them at all. Just such a beautiful fraction of time. Later, at dusk, in the distance, I saw a pair flying regally over Joe’s Overflow, so exciting, I don’t think we have had a breeding pair before.

I love wildlife, I do.  I love to get out into the country or even just a park bench with a pond and sit and immerse myself in the sights, sounds and smells of what ever is going on.  Sometimes its just the smell of autumn and rotting leaves that brings me back to my childhood as memories of the woodsmoke from the bonfires in the allotments opposite our home drift over, depending on the time of day sending Mum into a panic over her washing on the line.  Sometimes its the screech of seagulls soaring overhead.

It must be wonderful to be anything other than a human being, to live in the moment and not have to plan for the future, but plan we must, or perhaps should.

New Year resolutions are about planning, to strive to become something more than we were last year, to better ourselves in some way, to not be quite so human with all of our foibles we try so gallantly to hide.  Last night I trotted off to my nearest slimming group, its okay, its going to be fine, I know myself better now more than any other time in my life and I have the time.  Oh how I would love to be a seagull, soaring high, swallowing fish, not a care in the world, but I’m not and age is creeping, did I tell you I was 50 last year!  So today I will plan and do a little bit of weighing and measuring and plan for my future tomorrows, of which I hope there will be many and that they will be glorious.

Playing with double exposure inside the camera, not photoshopped.  This is an area I want to explore more fully for the next few months.  In the interest of transparency, I set up the camera, used hubby as my test model until I found what I roughly wanted in a very cold park,  hubby shot the shots and I developed them in Lightroom.

We visited Brandon Marsh a couple of days after the last visit as we had enjoyed it so much.  Even though this was a much duller day with very little light, we had a great day and stayed quite happily from ten until nearly four, they have a well priced cafe that cooks fresh food to order, I had the mushroom stroganoff with rice, salad and garlic bread,  it was lovely and perfect for a little carb loading in between long stints in the cold.  The wildlife was wonderful to see and I wish I could show you photographs of the crows paddling around the edge of the lake, it was most amusing, sadly my lenses are just not that powerful to pick this up.  There were ducks landing on ice and waddling off and we saw a kingfisher fishing which was beautiful to behold.  Hooper swans flew over head and well, I just don’t know all the names of the tiny birds I saw.

Just a few more snaps of a lovely moment in time.

I have been wanting to head out to Brandon Marsh for a couple of years now, but never quite getting the chance, but with a UK wildlife photography competition looming that would only take recent work it seemed like a good time to pop along. Brandon Marsh is the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust’s headquarters and it really is very nice indeed. There are some flat pleasant walks  around the lakes that are mostly not too muddy and an abundance of wildlife, 230 species of birds have been recorded as well as Muntjack deer hiding in the largest reed bed in Warwickshire and otters, badgers and bats to name but a few. The light was beautifulas we wandered around, and in parts there were still signs of a hard frost overnight.  The grasses just so beautiful towering above me.  We were lucky enough to meet this friendly robin and carried on with out walk, When we met the friendliest robin I ever did meet. He was very keen, so I said to hubby, put your finger out, see what he does. And this lovely robin would have landed in the palm of his hand had hubby had a mealworm about his person. We had such a good time chatting away to him. And he seemed to enjoy it too.

Unfortunately we were booked up for the afternoon so made plans to come back very soon.

This year I have been thinking rather a lot about planning. When hubby retired I think I was a bit lost as I hadn’t needed to share my ideas or plans on any great scale for quite a while and being a person that can memorise the next months appointments and even carry a rough idea when dentist and optician appointments are due during the year,  I very rarely referred to a diary.  But that wasn’t going to work as a couple as it left hubby floundering and me wondering why on earth he was doing something different to what I had planned – which of course I hadn’t communicated to him.

So we started to plan together on Sunday evenings, Mandy with her Erin Condren and all the stickers, colourful gel pens, stamps with chalk ink and gorgeous washi tapes, accompanied by hubby with a book of 1001 things to do in London, the Londonist and various other whats on in London and Warwickshire websites and a map of the underground. That concerted effort that lasted maybe an hour really set the tone for the following week.  It didn’t always work, sometimes we would get rained out or just not feel like doing a long slog that day, but the ideas were still there and ready to pick up and pop into the diary at a moments notice.

Various ways of planning have been experimented with, and I find as my diary gets busier and busier that I actually do need a diary, maybe thats an age thing, but I am wondering how I managed without one. Bullet journaling comes and goes, mainly when I am in clean all the things and sort it all out mode. My Erin Condren  was brilliant for organising and planning and as the week went on it turned into a scrapbook of postcards and leaflets of events and cute sticker photographs printed by my zip printer, becoming a perfect memory of our 1st year of retirement, it is totally rammed I can barely close it.  So I am changing that around too, this year I will be solely using my Erin Condren as a scrapbook of our lives together, to record all the joyful things that we see and do and have bought a Mambi Happy Planner in the new Big size to plan the week with. It will be big enough to include all excursions, exercise, meal plans, photography and other hobbies ideas and time slots, domesticity and anything else that may appear. Along with that I have been playing with a Cocoa Daisy, Daisy Dori mainly because they are just so pretty, but this allows me to concentrate on the month in hand and slots very nicely into my travelers notebook, along with my diary (a Hobonichi Weeks, the paper is just gorgeous and fountain pen friendly!) and with that a journal that I write up daily. Have I found my herd of Unicorns?  I’m not sure, but I think I am getting close.

This year I aim to experiment with Power Sheets, well I will when they come, they arrived in Paris and then went to Germany for a wander around, they are in London now, so I should see them soon. I’ve also picked up a couple of books about living well and How to Live a Good Life by Jonathan Fields is certainly hitting the spot.  And although we are still in the embryonic stage of exploring my deeper thinking, needs and wants it has already become abundantly clear that photography has become a driving force behind my creativity this year. I also know that spending too much time on social media, addictive as it is, has exhausted me, sometimes I feel like a rat caught in a run, running up and down, up and down and therefore it needs to be reigned in and controlled.

But there is good stuff within the digital world, notably the world and its wife do videos these days, so exploring the use of Photoshop and Lightroom has never been easier and to that end I aim to use Lynda.com a couple of times a week, as well as using Youtube as a tool not just entertainment.

This year our plant based diet is going to be ramped up to five days a week, we have been hovering at three days for a while, so we are ready to take the next step. I think we will always enjoy eating meat, but as we both enjoy all the vegetables and noticeably feel better when we are more attentive to our diet, it just makes sense. Obviously the usual murmurings about exercise and alcohol intake apply.

Apart from photography, diet and exercise as the main components of my year ahead, I really want to live as presently as possible.  I know that these have been the buzz words of the last few years, but I have pondered with them for a quite a while and at last see how it all works, together, for me, at a deeper level and it is getting easier.  And I know that when I make that effort, and actually it does require quite a bit, hubby and I’s life together just gets that little bit more colourful and much more memorable and if I know anything, it is that I want to enjoy and remember every single second, which of course is impossible, but as much as I possibly can.  I want to remember these crazy, fun filled days forever, even if I might need an aid memoir in my later stages.

Happy New Year everyone, safe journey.