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The weather has been dire , Jim’s been off with man flu…by god has he….whinge whinge whinge. Its just a wee cold, bloody hell. I was quite pleased when he went back to work today.
The snow came back yesterday but went away again. It is still bloody cold. Hopefully this will mean a good summer. It doesn’t look like an El Nino year so we may get a fine summer. I need sunshine.

I have discovered why the many people in Britain are thin. Today I decided to get a lazy tea and bought chorizo and meatball stew with spicy potatoes from M&S. And it was so boring that I left a lot of it. Generally the rare occasions I have bought M&S ready meals I have found them wanting. And you look at people in the checkout queue and it is apparent that some people eat entirely M&S ready meal food. If you look at the newspapers with the comparison of different foods it is obvious that the reporters eat mostly M&S. as the majority of the times M&S comes out on top. It seems to have become a benchmark for Britain’s bad tastebuds. Now the quality of there fresh food is a different thing altogether. Generally it is expensive but good quality. Perhaps it is another way of combatting childhood obesity.

I pay £30 a month and £10 ish for insurance and get a great toy. I have bought a few apps and got more free ones,. It is a great new toy and good fun. I keep an eye on the weather. Earthquakes from 2.5 onwards take about 20 minutes to come up on screen. Trivial pursuit, lux ( like risk). I am so happy with my new iphone. Great stuff. The nokias had a great camera with zeiss lenses which I do miss but the I phone has quite a lot more.

Last weekend was an odd one because Jim had an appointment at the passport office at 9am. We decided to stay in Glasgow on Sunday night as we hoped to go to a gig but we never managed to get through in time for anything so we went for Tapas instead. We then went for a pint in Oran Mhor which was quite enjoyable.
Jim went to the passport office at 8.45 was out by 9.05 and had to waste 3 hours waiting for the passport. We did a wee bit shopping in the town had a cup of tea then he went to Edinburgh airport via Makro (as he had discovered that his case had burst and luckily we had time). He caught his plane then I came home shattered.
I was probably shattered because I have a sinus infection and seem to be a wee bit low but today got antibiotics for it. I went to bed just after 10 last night. It doesn’t really help because although I go to sleep then I waken up really early.

I love Kat’s new ploy. Duncan has a habit of running his trains along Kat’s laptop causing havoc as there is a magnet on the end. This , from experience , shuts down skype and I don’t know what else it does. Well the wee man was running Mollie” along the laptop so Kat eventually lost the heid and put “Mollie” on the naughty cushion. Young D was none too pleased saying “sorry, accident, sorry.” I think he was a trifle upset. It seemed to be more effective than putting him on the naughty cushion. I LIKE IT!

At the weekend we went to the whisky blending workshop which was most enjoyable but we didn’t have time to eat before it so I got a bit merry. We went on to the festival club which was good then stayed in a hotel in town. Sunday saw us visiting Jim’s sister in Blantyre then going back to Rachael’s and then heading off home.
Anna was doing the visuals for the Balkan night club, Balkanarama,for Celtic Connections which was in the Old Fruitmarket. Unfortunately the venue treated it as a concert and not a nightclub so when a band went off the lights went up even though there was a dj. They also closed the box office at 11pm but it was a club venue so should have been open until 1 or 2 am. So they had 800 people there instead of 2000. The crit was good in the Scotsman and they mentioned the “mind boggling visuals”. So Jim said.

The weather was a bit better today as I saw sunshine. There was no way I could yesterday bar getting on a plane. I phoned my friend who had just lost her mum and she said she was having a bad day so I took her out to lunch and had a very pleasant lunch at the Grouse and Claret at Heatheryford fishery just outside Kinross. The owners are having a tough time with the weather because many of their clients are ancient and they do not go over the doorstep. We had a beautiful lunch I had chicken livers followed by cheese souffles and my friend had souffle followed by daub of beef. What is a daub. It appeared to be a stew. We both had mango sorbet to finish. Delicious.

The place is an old quarry just off the M90 which has been filled with water and seeded with trout.There is an old farmhouse and a more modern house there. In the farmhouse there is rooms and a restaurant in the conservatory. Today the fishery was frozen. 2 large lakes of ice. With all the snow around it still white. It was really beautiful. The have bird feeders around and a woodpecker was visiting it, a bonnie bird. Greater spotted.

Last week I bought an app for my iphone telling me where the earthquakes are in the world. It is amazing some people live with them constantly. As for Haiti, the aftershocks are incredibly strong above 5 on the R scale. The main one was 7.0 last night. They have had 15 above 5.0 and 23 above 4.0 and below 5.0. since then. That’s a lot of scary earth movement.

When I woke this morning around 8am it was almost dark and I thought that maybe it was dawn but then at 9am it was not much better. Now after midday I know it is daylight but it is a deeply grey and miserable day. There has been a hard thaw and the roads are black and mushy, that horrible way that snow is like in towns. Today is the day we should get sunshine in the garden for a few minutes but I would not reckon on seeing any for a good while.

On Saturday we are going to a Celtic Connections workshop on whisky blending. The kids bought it for our Christmas. We will stay in an Hotel nearby so after the workshop we will go to the festival club at the art college. It should be fun.